San Francisco leaders are plotting separate bills to streamline the city’s notoriously slow housing development process, hopefully meaning homes, like these seen Potrero Hill in 2022, can be constructed in much less time.
Brontë Wittpenn/The ChronicleTwo of San Francisco’s top officials are working on separate bills with similar goals of speeding up the city’s complex and lengthy approval process forbwin sports .
Supervisor Ahsha Safaí asked the City Attorney on Tuesday to draft amendments that would hasten the approval of project site permits, which he said currently take around four to 18 months to be issued.
Separately, Mayor London Breed plans to introduce legislation in about a month that would also change the site permit process by shifting some oversight from the Department of Building Inspection to the Planning Department and allow for faster reviews.
The proposals come as the cityseeks to approve 82,000 housing unitsover eight years, developers struggle to build in the face ofsoaring construction costsand residents continue to grapple with some of the most expensive home prices in the country. Lengthy permit times can add hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional costs to projects, or even kill them.
Site permits, an optional review that enables projects to secure some design, environmental and zoning approvals, are currently reviewed sequentially by as many as 10 different city stations, according to Safaí.
Safaí and co-sponsor Supervisor Myrna Melgar are seeking simultaneous review of site permits by city staff and want to limit what details are reviewed. The changes would mandate site permits for both residential and commercial projects, excluding high-rises.
“If government can’t get out of the way, if we can’t remove some of our bureaucracy, we’re going to be the impediment to … achieving the goal of building more housing,” Safaí told The Chronicle.
Safaí said he has been working on the proposal for nearly a year and consulted with small businesses, city staff and the Residential Builders Association, which represents the construction and real estate industry.
Under Breed’s proposal, the Planning Department would handle design, environmental review and zoning approvals for site permits rather than the Department of Building Inspection. That change would cut down on redundancies and the number of revisions required by developers, her office said. Residential and commercial projects would be affected.
“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,” Breed said in a statement.
Breed and Safaí’s efforts were announced a few days after Bilal Mahmood, an entrepreneur and former candidate for State Assembly,wrote an opinion piecein The Chronicle that found San Francisco housing projects typically take over 1,000 days to process and review, with at least 87 permits required.
Breed’s changes would have cut review times by 65% on some past projects, her office said. For example, a large apartment project on Market Street would have taken 2.3 years to approve rather than 4.25 years. A condo project on Tennessee Street would have taken 10 months to approve rather than 2.5 years.
“该网站允许流程现在放缓项目down instead of helping them move along at a reasonable pace,” said Judson True, Breed’s director of housing delivery. “These kinds of changes never happen soon enough or fast enough, but we have to push forward. The existing Site Permit process is intended to help move permitting along at the pace of construction, but over time it’s become part of the problem. That reality has become clearer to us as we’ve worked with departments to implement the Mayor’s Housing for All plan. We are moving as fast as we can while working to avoid unintended consequences such as adding more opportunities for appeals and delays.”
A public hearing on Breed’s proposal is planned on April 19, followed by May hearings at the Planning Commission and Building Inspection Commission.
Safaí said he was unaware of Breed’s proposal and had not communicated with her about it or his proposal. That’s despite Safaí and Breed previously teaming up in late 2021 on a failed effort tospeed up housing reviewsif a project added more affordable housing. That effort divided the Board of Supervisors, ultimately resulting in two competing ballot measures last Novemberthat both failed.
Safaí and Breed’s proposals would both require the Board of Supervisors' approval to pass.
“We always welcome pro-housing proposals,” True said when asked whether the mayor would potentially collaborate with Safaí and support his measure. “There’s no way we can get housing built unless we’re all working together toward the same goals.”
Reach Roland Li: roland.li@sfchronicle.com; Twitter: @rolandlisf
