SACRAMENTO, Calif. — It takes a disaster to get California officials to approve even exceedingly modest reforms to its regulatory system. For instance, a recent news report from CalMatters focused on the Los Angeles City Council’s unanimous decision to consider allowing architects and engineers to self-certify their building projects as a means to speed up rebuilding after the area’s devastating wildfires. The vote gave the building department 30 days to report back on options for such a program. Good for the city, but it’s bizarre that this was even big news.
Per the city’s motion, “The state of California and the city of Los Angeles continue to face an ongoing housing production challenge and housing affordability crisis.” Other jurisdictions have “made great advancements in permit streamlining and project approval processes through the use of programs like self-certification.” These programs “expedite the issuance of building permits without reducing a building’s integrity and still adhering to life and safety requirements.”
It’s not as if the affordability crisis only emerged after the wildfires. State and Los Angeles officials have struggled with the housing problem for years now. I don’t mean to pick on officials for doing the right thing, but how come there’s no impetus for considering sensible reforms as a matter of course? Why do we need to consider them only after large portions of the city burn to the ground?
As the city explains, these programs don’t reduce building integrity or safety for obvious reasons. “Why shouldn’t we be able to self-certify if all the liability rests on us and we’re only using licensed professionals?” a former California Building Industry Association chairman told the publication. “When something happens in the field we fix it.” In fact, architects and engineers put their license on the line every time they sign off on a project – which is more than one would get from a city inspector.
By the way, the city still can inspect a project once it gets moving. Although the Los Angeles Building Department provides fairly reasonable permit timeframes on its website, the reality is quite different. CalMatters explains that small residential projects often take “months, if not years.”
A 2023 report from the UCLA Anderson School of Management provided data that reinforced the dire situation: “Over the 2010-2022 sample timeframe, approval times comprised roughly 45 percent on average of the nearly four years required to complete a multi-family project in the city of Los Angeles.” It noted that if the city sped up the process by only 25 percent, it could boost the amount of housing production from 11 percent to 26 percent.
Not surprisingly, the situation is even worse in San Francisco. Per a San Francisco Chronicle column in 2023: “[T]he median time for securing approval to build in San Francisco is 627 days — which puts 50 percent of projects at risk of losing funding due to delays. The outcomes speak for themselves. In 2021, San Francisco issued permits for just 2,000 homes, and in 2022 there was similarly anemic building activity. By contrast, Seattle — a city of comparable size — issued more than 10,000 permits.” The city is so bureaucratic the governor signed a law (Senate Bill 423) that provides special oversight of the city’s building-approval process. It’s too early to know if that will speed up approvals, but I’m guessing it will just result on a few reports.
San Francisco might be the worst offender, but bureaucratic hurdles delay construction across the state. “In April, the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area permitted more housing than all of California, meaning that on a per-capita basis DFW permitted five times as much housing as the Golden State,” reported Kenneth Schrupp, which might explain why “the median house in Dallas goes for $459,000, compared to over $900,000 in California.”
In fairness, laws such as SB 423 and others have streamlined the building process by creating a “by right” approval system that lets builders bypass subjective planning commission and city council reviews. But all such bills are narrowly targeted at the types of high-density, multi-family projects that progressives prefer. Those new laws, while worthwhile, have not led to significant new building starts mainly because of their limited nature.
The state needs widespread approval reform — as well as reform of the fee structure that lets localities force builders to pay for costs that aren’t directly related to the new projects. Gov. Gavin Newsom was right to exempt Los Angeles wildfire rebuilding projects from the onerous California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) and the Coastal Act, but the state needs more than an executive order and needs to apply such exemptions everywhere.
The Legislature is considering many wildfire-related bills in the current session, which mostly just nibble around the edges. It needs to set its sights on permanent, widespread relief for all Californians. It needs to do so now rather than wait for another disaster.
Steven Greenhut is Western region director for the R Street Institute. Write to him at sgreenhut@rstreet.org.
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