Safai, Breed launch separate bills to speed up SF project approvals

It may take at least two proposals by politicians to kickstart housing approvals in San Francisco, the slowest city in the state.

Supervisor Ahsha Safai and Mayor London Breed are launching separate bills to speed up the city’s complex and lengthy housing approval process, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

The legislation was announced days after Bilal Mahmood, an entrepreneur and former candidate for State Assembly, wrote an opinion piece in The Chronicle that found San Francisco housing projects typically take more than 1,000 days to process and review, while requiring at least 87 permits. 

The city has the longest combined average for entitlement and permitting in the state, according to state housing regulators, who have launched a probe into the city’s entitlement process. Housing project approvals can take years.

Safai plans to ask the City Attorney this week to draft amendments to hasten the approval of project site permits, which he said now take from four to 18 months.

Breed plans to launch a bill next month to shift some site permit oversight from the Department of Building Inspection to the Planning Department for faster reviews. 

The proposals come as the city aims to approve 82,000 housing units over the next eight years, while developers struggle with soaring construction costs and residents grapple with some of the nation’s highest housing costs.

Lengthy permit times can add hundreds of thousands of dollars to projects, or kill them.

Site permits, an optional review that enables projects to secure some design, environmental and zoning approvals, are now reviewed by as many as 10 different city stations – in sequence, according to Safai.

Safai and co-sponsor Supervisor Myrna Melgar now seek simultaneous review of site permits by city staff and a limit on what details are reviewed. The changes would mandate site permits for both residential and commercial projects, excluding highrises.

Safai has worked 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.

“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,” Safai told The Chronicle.

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. The change for both residential and commercial projects would cut down on redundancies and the number of revisions required by developers, her office said.

Breed’s changes would have cut review times by 65 percent 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.

“The site permit process is now slowing projects down instead of helping them move along at a reasonable pace,” Judson True, Breed’s director of housing delivery, told the newspaper.

— Dana Bartholomew