One of the Slowest US Cities to Build, San Francisco Is Accelerating Housing Permits

San Francisco’s infamously slow building permitting process may be getting faster.

A city study published Thursday found that between January 2024 and August 2025, the timeline on permit approvals for new housing in San Francisco was cut by half — from an average of 605 days down to around 280 days.

And permit applications that were filed within that 19-month window had even shorter turnaround times, at 114 days on average.

San Francisco has addressed much of the “low-hanging fruit” to speed up its operation over the last two years, said San Francisco Bilal Mahmood, who commissioned the report.

But, he said the city still has a backlog of years-old permit applications, and tens of thousands of entitled units without approval to build — issues he said could require a ballot measure to fix.

“We’re also now getting to this point where, despite all of those changes, we’re still the slowest city to build,” he said. “We have to now take a stab at the harder problems, including Charter reform, to enable us to be able to make those changes.”

For years, city leaders have lambasted San Francisco’s permitting process as disjointed and archaic. And a state-commissioned report published in 2022 found that San Francisco was the slowest California jurisdiction to approve permit applications for housing projects.

In 2024, Mahmood campaigned on cutting red tape that made development in the city challenging — including a still-vacant former car wash lot in his district.

Mayor Daniel Lurie has also focused on improving the city’s buildability, launching his landmark ‘PermitSF’ initiative to centralize the application process last year. In February, his office introduced an online portal that allows people to apply for certain types of permits. The state also passed new laws in 2023 aimed at expediting the application review process.

While a marked improvement, Mahmood said the process still takes significantly longer than other cities analyzed in the report — including San Diego, where permitting approvals took an average of 134 days, and Austin, Texas, where the same process spanned just 91 days.

“Yes, we’re getting faster at the ones we’re approving, but there’s still a lot that aren’t even approved,” he said. Mahmood said that the report’s timeline is based on about 740 permits approved in that time, but there’s a backlog of more than 1,300 applications that haven’t yet been issued.

Some of those pending applications have been in the pipeline since 2017 — as of Oct. 29, the average number of days that those permits had been awaiting approval was 1,489 days, or more than four years.

The city also needs to allow for more than 80,000 new housing units by 2031, in line with the state’s mandate.

According to the report, five city departments are involved in approving a permit application, with no single point of contact that oversees applications all the way from filing to permit issuance.

In some cases, one or more departments start their review process later than others, the report said, causing delays.

Mahmood said it can also be complicated for developers to communicate with the many departments and fulfill requests of each of their reviews.

One of the ways he’s proposed to ease these problems is by consolidating the number of departments involved in the process. In January, Lurie announced plans to merge the Planning Department, the Department of Building Inspection and Permit Center, an effort he said would “mean better coordination, time and cost savings.”

But to achieve that goal, Mahmood said, voters would need to approve reforms to the city’s charter.

Right now, the charter outlines each department’s responsibilities. Mahmood said the ballot measure he’s considering would move those department responsibilities into the city’s administrative code, giving the Mayor and Board of Supervisors flexibility to restructure the departments.

“That will help to fully realize that vision that the Mayor’s already announced,” he told KQED. Lurie and Board of Supervisors President Rafael Mandelman also launched plans in December to reform the city’s charter.

If he chooses to do so, Mahmood will have until June to submit a proposed ordinance, with the support of at least four members of the Board of Supervisors or the Mayor’s office, in time for the November election.