States have been trying to rein in local governments that have let permitting timelines grow longer and longer, bending risk barriers to new housing development to a break point.
A new academic paper shows why that intervention is needed, especially in some of the country’s priciest markets.
Economists at the University of Chicago and Princeton didn’t evaluate any single state’s reform package, but their work focused on the time-to-permit durations and their effects. They show that slow permitting is a measurable, worsening drag on housing supply, not just an anecdotal developer complaint.
The paper adds compelling empirical weight to a policy push already underway across the country.
San Francisco and Miami top the list of the slowest cities in the country for both permitting and total project duration, for single-family and multifamily development alike. San Francisco’s permitting timeline of just over a year is shorter than Miami’s 1.5 years.
But its permitting and approval process is strung out so long that it takes nearly four years to build a single-family home. A standardized 20-unit Apartment building’s timeline is nearly 5 years, according to the paper by Princeton’s Evan Soltas and Leonardo D’Amico at the University of Chicago.
“We show cities like Raleigh typically ‘finish’ construction before cities like San Francisco even approve it,” Soltas wrote in a social media post.
Both cities happen to sit in states that have passed laws specifically intended to accelerate the time-to-permit process.
Florida, California, Washington, Georgia and Texas are among the 18 states that have passed statutes forcing cities and counties to act within fixed windows or risk automatic approval. Georgia lawmakers recently took this step, enacting a law that sets a 45-day deadline for initial permit reviews. Supporters of that legislation plan to push an effort next year that shortens permitting for final plat review.
Texas built the strictest version: miss a 30-day plat-review deadline, and the application is automatically deemed approved.
What the research shows
The research paper quantifies what’s at stake. Analyzing 1.1 million permits across 60 U.S. cities from 2000 to 2025, the authors found that a standardized 20-unit apartment building takes 4.6 years on average to complete in San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles. That amounts to more than double the two years typical in Raleigh, Orlando and Phoenix. Permitting delays, not construction time, account for 30% to 43% of that gap.
The findings build on a study earlier this year Soltas produced with MIT’s Jonathan Gruber that examined Los Angeles specifically. They used an unusual data source: a submarket where landowners pre-permit vacant lots before selling them.
That paper found that developers pay a 50% premium, or $48 per square foot, for land with pre-approved permits. The premium separates permitting costs from zoning and construction, factors that are usually tangled together in prior estimates.
Los Angeles’s permitting timelines run roughly twice as long as Fort Worth’s. Reducing approval speeds to Texas-level standards could cut development costs significantly, researchers concluded. They estimated the savings at 21% of construction costs.
Florida developers test the gap
Milhaus, an Indianapolis-based apartment developer, is building a 231-unit project in Manatee County, Florida, under the state’s Live Local Act, which bypasses local zoning hearings.
A standard Florida entitlement process without Live Local typically runs 18 to 24 months, Brad Vogelsmeier, Milhaus’s vice president of development, told HousingWire TBD. His project took about 14 months from start to finish, including initial building permits, once Live Local stripped out public votes and council approval.
Even with Florida’s fastest available shortcut, he said, Manatee’s approval timeline was still “relatively long” compared to what his company handles in the Midwest. He added that Indianapolis, particularly the suburbs around the city, along with Cincinnati, Columbus and Kansas City, run entitlement processes of four to six months.
“Time is money for us, and most other developers,” Vogelsmeier said.
Delays don’t end once a permit is issued. Florida has allowed third-party building code inspections since 2002 to relieve the burden on local inspectors. Lawmakers strengthened that law last year, and the update took effect July 1.
Inspection slowdowns persist in some places despite amending the law. In Collier County, which includes Naples, private inspectors say officials have piled on extra inspections and fees rather than easing permitting. A Florida Attorney General’s office analysis sided with inspection companies.
“Collier County wholly agrees with the opinion provided by the attorney general,” a county spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “The building official has worked directly with the Collier County Attorney’s Office to implement the changes to the private provider statute as they took effect on July 1, 2026.”
Miami presents a far bigger version of the same problem.
“We tried to do a couple projects there over the years, and got absolutely nowhere,” Josh Barry, founder of Freedom Code Compliance, said in an interview with HousingWire TBD. “We’ve just chosen not to operate in Miami. So, Collier County is our No. 1 worst offender, but Miami is probably more egregious than Collier over the years.”
California’s own reckoning
California has followed a similar playbook. San Francisco is one place to watch how it’s playing out.
State lawmakers have passed their own laws forcing faster housing approvals. One, passed in 2024, requires cities that miss state housing targets to approve qualifying affordable projects without discretionary hearings.
Another law enacted last year set a 60-day clock on ministerial housing approvals statewide. State housing regulators also reviewed San Francisco’s permitting practices directly, issuing the city a list of required fixes.
Mayor Daniel Lurie’s answer was PermitSF, launched in 2025 with new software from the vendor OpenGov. The city started small, rolling the system out first for permit types like fire alarms and sprinklers.
City officials said it was doing great. A Board of Supervisors committee heard this year that the system was beating its own two-day turnaround target. A San Francisco Standard report found the opposite.
The bigger test is still ahead. The entitlement and building permits that govern new housing construction haven’t moved onto the new system yet. That phase is still being figured out, with no implementation timeline on the horizon.
Whether PermitSF speeds up the process that matters most for housing supply remains an open question.