San Francisco’s Planning Gridlock

Since these figures include small 2-3 unit projects, the larger for- profit and nonprofit projects can take two years just to receive the basic environmental review. Mayor Newsom vowed to bring efficiency to the Planning Department when he ran for mayor in 2003, but his own statistics show the problem has worsened despite the overall construction slowdown. It’s no wonder San Francisco is reaching the point where only luxury housing developers can afford to build, and where nonprofit groups get less bang for the housing dollar due to costly procedural delays.

As activists fight against market-rate condos in the Mission and for more affordable housing money, there is an 800-pound gorilla in the room that is ignored: Inefficiency at San Francisco’s Planning Department increases the cost of all housing projects, preventing developers from providing more inclusionary units and reducing the number of nonprofit units that are built due to costly project processing delays.

Consider how much advance work---architectural, engineering, financial--- goes into a housing project before it is even submitted to Planning, the fact that the project application then sits in a file for over nine months without even being looked at by a planner is quite astounding. And while the project application gathers dust in a file cabinet, builders must still pay interest payments on the land, and cope with the rising cost of materials.

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