Accelerating Approvals for Attainable Housing

Developers incur costs long before construction begins. Land must be held, architects and consultants paid, financing maintained, and project teams kept in place while approvals are pending. Longer timelines also expose projects to changing interest rates, material prices, and other market conditions. According to The Pew Charitable Trusts, highly regulated cities can take substantially longer to approve housing projects, and one Washington study estimated that every additional month of permitting delay increased building costs by roughly 1 percent. In some cases, delays can make projects financially infeasible altogether.

Importantly, there is no single approval process. Different projects may encounter delays for very different reasons. A project might require a discretionary rezoning even though its proposed use is consistent with a community’s broader housing goals. A building department may have an extensive backlog. Multiple agencies might review the same plans independently. Applicants may receive conflicting guidance, submit the same information multiple times, or wait weeks between rounds of comments. As a result, making housing approvals faster is not simply a matter of telling government agencies to work more quickly. It requires identifying where and why delays occur and redesigning the process accordingly.

Communities across the country are already experimenting with different approaches. Some jurisdictions make qualifying housing developments by right, replacing discretionary approvals with administrative review when a project meets objective standards. Others establish guaranteed review timelines or “shot clocks,” allow architects and engineers to self-certify certain plans, consolidate agency reviews, digitize permitting, or prioritize particular kinds of housing. Urban Institute identifies standardization, professional self-certification, and expedited review among the strategies governments can use to reduce permitting and entitlement delays.

Another emerging model is the use of preapproved building plans. Instead of reviewing essentially the same building design from scratch each time it is proposed, a local government can approve a reusable set of plans in advance. Pew has documented growing adoption of these programs, which can reduce both review time and design costs for builders.

These approaches demonstrate what is possible, but they are only starting points.

Start by choosing a specific bottleneck to focus on. Local Housing Solutions recommends that communities examine the entire development process to identify delays, duplicative requirements, inconsistent guidance, and coordination problems before determining which reforms will have the greatest impact. Then design a policy that addresses the problem you identify.

Research from the Terner Center emphasizes that delays and uncertainty in permitting and entitlement can significantly increase development costs. A strong solution should therefore do more than make government processes easier to navigate: it should show how a more predictable approval system could ultimately make housing easier and less expensive to produce.

Your idea does not need to apply everywhere immediately. Housing regulation varies dramatically across jurisdictions, and many of the most promising reforms begin in a specific city or state. If you focus on one place, explain why your solution fits that context and how the model might eventually be replicated elsewhere.

The goal is to develop a reform that makes housing approvals faster and more predictable without sacrificing the legitimate public purposes those approvals are intended to serve.