Before the first nail can be hammered for a new house, a different kind of labor is required: dealing with paperwork. Ensuring that a project is safe and legal is important, of course, but the amount of time required to obtain permits varies wildly across the United States. Navigating the bureaucracy in one city can take longer than the time needed to complete the entire project in another.
That’s the finding of a report last month by Leonardo D’Amico of the University of Chicago and Evan Soltas and Audrey Wang of Princeton. And the speed of permitting affects housing prices and supply.
From start to finish, about one year is needed to build a new single-family home in cities such as Orlando, Phoenix or Raleigh, North Carolina. That includes all the permitting and all the construction. For multifamily dwellings such a apartment buildings, about two years are needed. By contrast, in cities such as New York, Los Angeles or San Francisco, about twice as much time is needed: 2.5 years for single-family homes and four years for multifamily buildings.
If submitting a housing permit application on the same day, the average aspiring homeowner who wants to build in Miami, San Francisco or Boston — the cities with the longest permitting times — will still be stuck in paperwork when the average aspiring homeowner in Indianapolis, El Paso, Colorado Springs, Phoenix or Fort Worth is moving into a completed home.
Between one-third and nearly half of the total delay in America’s slowest-permitting cities is spent waiting for a green light from city officials, the researchers found. And the delays compound. Cities that drag their feet on permits tend to see slower construction by builders once approval is granted.
Slow permitting is also associated with high rents and less construction across cities. Every month a project sits in bureaucratic limbo is a month of carrying costs, higher loan interest and legal fees. These expenses get baked into the monthly rent paid by tenants.
Permitting duration explains 51 percent of the variance in rents, and an extra year in permitting duration is associated with 39 percent higher rents. The researchers found that those results hold even when controlling for population density, the share of college graduates and median income.
One might think that advances in technology over the past quarter-century would make permitting faster, but cities have gotten much slower on average. Between 2000 and 2023, multifamily permitting went from 0.6 to 1.5 years. Single-family went from 1.6 to 4.9 months. The chance that a multifamily project will be approved within six months fell from 71 percent to 44 percent. The chance that a single-family home will be approved within two months fell from 88 percent to 70 percent.
Defenders of city planning departments often cite heavy workloads. But what happened when workloads were lighter? Following the Great Recession of 2007-09, permit applications plunged nationwide. The research found that despite the lightened workloads, approval times shortened only slightly. The problem isn’t staffing shortages or application volumes. It is a broken, process-bound system that prioritizes risk aversion and bureaucracy over getting people into homes.
Across 384 metropolitan areas in the United States, the pace of home building in most areas has slowed. Use the map below to see how many housing permits your metro area authorized this year and how that pace compares with previous years.
Permitting delays distort housing markets. High prices send a signal for developers to build more. But in the cities where housing is most expensive, delays prevent supply from meeting demand.
Cities have plenty of ways to speed up the process. Allow permits to be filed digitally. Let artificial intelligence conduct initial reviews. Set deadlines for agencies to act and automatically approve applications when officials miss them. Allow third-party professionals to certify compliance with building codes. Eliminate reviews that serve no legitimate safety purpose.
Governments don’t need to create costly new programs to subsidize housing. They need to stop spending years deciding whether Americans are allowed to build.
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