SF Mayor Breed proposes permitting improvements to speed housing construction

Housing for All effort would streamline the site permit process to significantly reduce permitting times for new developments and major renovations

SAN FRANCISCO — Mayor London Breed, City Administrator Carmen Chu, the Department of Building Inspection, and the Planning Department on Tuesday, March 14 announced an effort to improve San Francisco’s Site Permit approval process that is expected to dramatically reduce development timelines by months and even years. The change will require legislation which is currently being drafted and will be introduced in the coming weeks after an April public forum and outreach to further inform the policy. This reform is part of the Mayor’s Housing for All initiative, which sets the goals and policies to allow for 82,000 new homes to be built over the next 8 years.

This proposal would streamline the city’s process for issuing a key project approval known as a “Site Permit,” which will reduce permitting times for new developments and major renovations. Analysis of past projects show this change could have saved up to 65% on some projects. The time savings comes from moving intake, administration and approval of the design, environmental review, and zoning entitlements from the Department of Building Inspection to the Planning Department. This shift will allow for concurrent review by multiple City departments, help resolve high-level design issues earlier in the process, and clarify a project’s post-entitlement process. “To build the housing we need for our residents and for the future of San Francisco, we must produce faster, more transparent and less costly housing construction,” said Mayor Breed. “A centerpiece of my Housing for All plan is shedding barriers and burdens that are counter-productive to meeting our housing goals. Streamlining this approval process is a good start in our work to untangle the complicated bureaucracy that has unnecessarily slowed housing development for decades.”

On February 7, Mayor Breed issued her Housing for All Executive Directive to fundamentally change how the City approves and builds housing. As part of the executive directive, the Department of Building Inspection and Planning Department are required to assess permitting timelines, identify opportunities to reduce review times, and implement process improvements to speed housing delivery in San Francisco. How the site permit process