Whether you’re swapping windows or putting up new homes, SF’s red tape is notorious. Those in charge say relief is finally coming.
by Adam Brinklow May 26, 2023 May 13, 2024
I t’s a simple project,” says John McDowell, a permit expediter who helps would-be builders untangle San Francisco’s legendary red tape. His current clients, who own an early 20th-century, mixed-use building on Market Street, want to replace wood windows with more durable materials that he swears will look “exactly the same.”
McDowell says SF’s planning commissioners, who must approve the swap, won’t be able to tell the difference, let alone someone walking by on the street. The windows “are on the second floor, even,” he adds. He wouldn’t disclose the specific address.
Neither can McDowell say when the project will get on the Planning Commission’s agenda. So far, it’s been an eight-month wait. “They only have meetings once [a week], and you have to get into a queue, and then sometimes they won’t review certain things and sometimes they review other things,” McDowell says.
It’s not an uncommon predicament, even for seasoned expediters. Getting building permits in San Francisco, even for straightforward changes, can be a trial of months or even years, during which time, developers and property owners may end up feeling like the refugees in Casablanca, forced to “wait and wait and wait” with no end in sight.
Plenty of people with experience developing in San Francisco — be they architects, engineers, developers, permitting experts, and property owners large and small — have a horror story to share, perhaps more than one.
In a March opinion piece in the SF Chronicle, SF YIMBY board member Bilal Mahmood estimated that the median time to get approval to build is 627 days.
In 2021 and 2022 the city issued only 2,000 permits a year for new home projects. With a new state mandate to produce more than 10,000 new homes a year this decade, that kind of delay has the potential for disaster.
Mayor London Breed, some supervisors, and the Planning Commission are pushing for reform — and surprise, so are the very city bodies whose practices are under the microscope. In interviews and recent public meetings, staffers at both the Planning Department and Department of Building Inspection say they’re eager to speed up the way things work.
So what’s taking so long?
“We love permit processes in San Francisco,” Michael Christensen, one of the city’s principal planners, said at a joint Planning-DBI hearing earlier this month.
He was being sarcastic. Most San Franciscans who’ve had a taste of the permit bureaucracy hate it like bedbugs. Nevertheless it is true that SF is a very permit-happy city, which demands papers for virtually any change to a property, and sometimes dozens of permits for new construction.
Even worse, Christensen pointed out that every single permit in SF can potentially be appealed. Not every appeal prevails, but each one eats up precious time, and the city’s rules grant anyone with a few hundred bucks and a beef the right to file an appeal.
Let’s put new development in SF, broadly speaking, into two buckets. Start with entitlements, during which a developer must convince city planners that their idea is sound.
This is where most of the nastiness happens, including high-stakes meetings, contentious neighborhood outreach, long and indefinite waits like McDowell’s, challenges based on state environmental regulations, and sometimes dirty San Francisco politicking.
San Francisco engineer Daniel Barringer is fed up with what he calls the Planning Department’s “idiotic system”: “They make everything up, they have rules about maximum height and sidewalk setbacks and how wide your garage door can be, but they can change all that based on ‘Does this conform to the style of living unit in the city?’ or whatever. You submit drawings to the city and they sit there for months, could be a year, and then they get back to you with comments they just made up.”
Planning chief of staff Dan Sider admits the process can be bewildering. But his staff is beholden to the process, he says, and can end up as scapegoats when things go sideways.
Over 50 years, additions to the planning code have created “a package of controls so large that we no longer publish a paper version,” Sider writes The Frisc in an email. He notes that in recent years, the permit center has overhauled many processes. “We see roughly 60 people in person at the permit center every day, and fewer than one in five wait more than 25 minutes to speak with a planner,” he adds.
So that’s the front end of the process. But what about those hundreds of days to get various construction permits after city planners approve a project? That’s where the Department of Building Inspection bucket comes in.
“Shovel ready” in this city doesn’t mean anyone will pick up a shovel anytime soon. Yet Patrick Hannan, spokesperson for DBI, denies that it really takes the 600 days or more for the department to get builders their permits. In fact, he accuses Mahmood of misreading the data and not correcting his op-ed. What’s more, Hannan says that sometimes city agencies spend days or weeks waiting for applicants to get back to them, during which a project’s timer is running. (The Frisc repeatedly tried to reach Mahmood for clarification but was unsuccessful.)
However, Hannan and everyone else we spoke with at DBI acknowledge the process can indeed take hundreds of days. This is because in some regards, putting up a new structure in San Francisco is a lot like preparing for major surgery.
“You’ve got to talk to your doctor, yes, but there’s also nurses, administrators, specialists,” says permit expediter Dennis Lowery. To an outsider, SF’s permit bureaucracy has parallels to the American health-care system. “If you went to someone in the Amazon and said when you get sick, you’ve got to see 50 people, they’d ask why. And it’s because they all do different things.”
At his presentation earlier this month, SF planner Christensen outlined a cavalcade of departments that can get involved in a major permit — Planning and the DBI, as well as the Fire Department, Department of Public Works, the Public Utilities Commission, the Historical Preservation Commission, and the Bureau of Urban Forestry, to name a few.
The new Permit Center, touted by the mayor in March, is supposed to change all that. During a recent visit, staff eagerly highlighted new solutions, such as a single intake desk that checks a permit seeker’s paperwork up front to make sure nothing is missing, rather than discovering an error or omission halfway through.
At this stage, permit seekers now receive an estimate of the duration of the review process. Although it’s a ballpark figure, it still gives both planners and permit seekers a better sense of a project’s timeline.
Also new: Incoming projects are assigned to the next available staff member. Previously it was a strict rotation, which meant a project application assigned to someone on vacation, on leave, or just too busy would collect dust.
These are all great changes, but they’ve been in place for less than a year.
A shocking amount of this work is still done in old-fashioned, analog form. At the Permit Center, you’ll see rolled-up plans piled every which way, like lost scrolls in the Vatican archives. During the pandemic, this analog “system” got so backed up that one permit expediter reportedly threatened to kill himself in protest, in front of the mayor. (The unidentified man ultimately did not harm himself.)
A new digital system has been in the works for years; planners tell us they’re finally getting ready to make the big switch.
At DBI, it’s Neville Pereira’s job to cut permit times. The deputy director for permit services has been on the job for two years, part of a wave of hires and appointments meant to clean up the place after an FBI sting exposed corruption at the department’s highest levels. These dirty dealings also further fouled up the permitting process, where those who were favored got to the front of the line faster, while everyone else fell behind.
Even with the old guard gone, the department is still wading through a backlog of potentially crooked work. (The investigation ensnared popular permit expediter Walter Wong, exposing how, though many expediters are honest consultants, the need for them creates the opportunity for exploitation. Notably, of the dozen or so expediters we spoke to for this story, not one was worried that the proposed reforms would put them out of work.)
Pereira says now that we’re fully beyond the pandemic’s restrictions, he’s pushing to cut permitting time for new housing projects in half. Asked how that’s going over politically, Pereira chooses his words carefully: “I’ve never worked in a city quite like San Francisco before.” he says — meaning “a city where every project is political. Some people are convinced that things are working just fine the way they are,” but he declines to name names.
A major goal of reform is getting both of the big process buckets — entitlement and permitting — to happen simultaneously in a “bifurcated system” to chop months off the lead time for up to 97 percent of projects.
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