Permitting in San Francisco

New homes permitted in San Francisco (top) vs. Austin (bottom)

San Francisco stubbornly clung to 19th-century technology. That crippled it during a 21st-century pandemic. Joe Eskenazi, Mission Local, February 2021.

A couple eye-opening anecdotes:

Several years ago, a San Francisco architect was on a job in the far north of the state. He matter-of-factly told a Truckee-based colleague that, in the big city, they’re still doing permit applications in person and on paper. On big jobs, boxes of material might have to be rolled through the building on a dolly. It might even take a few trips. And these materials are often marked up by hand — and the only way to get things done concurrently is to provide multiple paper copies to multiple individuals or groups.

The engineer from Truckee was dumbfounded. In Truckee, they’d been requesting and receiving permits digitally for well more than a decade. Compared to San Francisco, Truckee is Wakanda.

“The ability to submit paperless is a humongous difference between San Francisco and other jurisdictions,” says an architect who works throughout the Bay Area. “You have to physically shlep giant rolls of drawings to the department to have them circulate around. And the amount of times that drawings have just been lost sitting on someone’s desk or in transit — you would be shocked.”

And:

On the first-floor lobby of the city’s one-stop permitting center, at 49 South Van Ness Ave., a man reached the end of his patience. He yelled to anyone who would listen that he could not handle the Department of Building Inspection permitting system, that he could not obtain the necessary in-person meetings to obtain his permits, and that his projects could not move forward.

Frustration with the Department of Building Inspection’s archaic and arcane systems was common even before the pandemic. But, of note, this man is a permit expediter; negotiating these systems is his job.

He went on to shout that he could not earn a living or even feed himself if he could not obtain these permits — and he could not obtain these permits without an in-person meeting, even in the midst of a pandemic. He lamented that he should not have to cheat the system like everyone else.

He then said he would make his case to the mayor herself. But, as he left to walk to City Hall, he horrified the onlookers with what he said next: “I will kill myself in front of her.”

We won’t keep you in suspense: This man was saved. Sources tell us that he was intercepted by sheriff’s deputies at or near City Hall and placed on a 5150 involuntary hold. He has, by all appearances, stabilized and improved. He’s even back on the job. He’s working.

The system that drove him to the brink, however, isn’t.

Apparently the new mayor of San Francisco, Daniel Lurie, has launched a permitting reform initiative called PermitSF. Mayor Lurie’s permitting reform will take longer than promised. It’s still a good idea.

More

• Permit Nightmares. A series by the San Francisco Chronicle.

Joseph Heath, A Defense of Administrative Discretion:

Administrative rules seldom have independent deontic significance; they are instead aimed at achieving some objective. This is usually articulated in terms of the rules having a “point.” And yet there will often be ways of applying the rules that defeats their point (e.g. by being overly literal, or insensitive to circumstances, or by ignoring the interaction with other rules). In some cases, applying the rules too literally can actually work to defeat the point. This sort of formalism – an insistence on following the rules even when doing so does not serve their objective – is the quality of bureaucracy that is most often described as “Kafkaesque.”