After fires, CA lawmaker proposes bill to substantially reduce permitting times

(The Center Square) – California Assemblymember Chris Ward, D-San Diego, has proposed a new bill that could substantially reduce permitting times — which occurs after entitlement but before construction — by allowing for building plans to be approved by third parties if the government takes too long.

Under the new bill, governments would have to notify applicants how long they expect permit processing to take, and that if the estimate is longer than 30 days, that the applicants could use a third party to have the plans checked. Governments would have 14 days after receiving third-party reports — submitted as affidavits under penalty of perjury — to either approve the plans or outline what specifically must be corrected to get approval. Applicants could then have a third-party check the corrected plans again, before sending them to the government for approval or specified issues to correct within 14 days.

“We need to accelerate the permitting process,” Ward said in a statement. “Streamlining post-entitlement permitting is crucial to addressing key bottlenecks at the local level and turning approved projects into much-needed homes.”

According to Nolan Gray, senior director of legislation and research at bill sponsor California YIMBY, Los Angeles was already unable to keep up with pre-fire applications, and that rebuilding the city quickly will not be possible without this bill.

“At the start of January, Los Angeles had a huge housing shortage, and our building reviewers were struggling to keep up with the surge in applications even at a level that was well below what we needed to build to get back on track to affordability,” Gray told The Center Square. “Now we’re in a situation where we have ten thousand homes that have been destroyed and that need to be immediately rebuilt.”

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“There’s just no way that we’re going to get those homes rebuilt in a timely manner as long as we have the current permitting processes that we have today,” Gray continued. “We have to have some kind of third-party resource, and ultimately this will be safer and provide a higher level of scrutiny for the folks rebuilding.”

The California Department of Housing and Community Development’s database on the entitlement (getting permission to use a land for a certain use, such as homes), permitting (getting approval for specific plans), and construction phases demonstrate significant variance in duration of each phase between housing types, but do show that post-entitlement permitting does take an inordinate amount of time.

For a single family home, entitlement takes an average of 105 days, permitting 82 days, and construction 246 days. For a multifamily building with five or more homes, entitlement takes an average of 228 days, permitting 276 days, and construction 415 days.

This means from starting entitlement — and not including the time to buy the land and put together financing — it takes an average of 433 days to complete a single-family home, and 919 days to complete an apartment building, during which time builders are still paying interest on their construction loans.

In Los Angeles, where the devastating Palisades Fire took place, entitlements, permitting and construction take even longer than the state average. For single family homes in Los Angeles, which make up the bulk of the homes lost in the Palisades, entitlement takes 337 days, permitting 129 days, and construction 407 days, or 873 days in total — or nearly double the state average. With a rush of post-fire rebuilding applications, permitting could take even longer if existing staff are overwhelmed.

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