Approving a US apartment building now takes 1.5 years, up from 0.6 in 2000, economists find

Permitting, as the paper counts it, runs from the day an application is filed to the day a builder may break ground ^[10]. In that window, plans are checked against building safety and energy codes, plumbing rules, zoning and, in some places, design standards ^[10]. Soltas, an assistant professor of economics at Princeton, told Vox that first submissions are often found noncompliant and sent back for revisions ^[11].

That review window has grown longer across the 60 cities the authors studied ^[4]. For a standardized apartment building, it grew by about 0.9 years between 2000 and 2023, two and a half times its starting length ^[1]. Single-family approval roughly tripled, rising 3.3 months to 4.9 months ^[7][2]. In a recent interview, Soltas joked about "the barbarians of 2006", who approved apartment buildings nearly a year faster ^[12].

The board-deck version of the paper is that local approval rules explain why a modest apartment building takes nearly five years in San Francisco. The city figures reported so far support a narrower claim. San Francisco's permit wait is described as more than a year ^[2]. Unless that wait runs past two and a half years, more of the city's total falls after groundbreaking than before it ^[4]. The Vox account does not say what fills those later years.

San Francisco houses are also slow from start to finish. Compared with Indianapolis's six months, a San Francisco single-family home takes more than four years from proposal to completion ^[3].

The permit finding stands without the five-year figure. The sample-wide approval time rose over 23 years ^[6], and that time goes on compliance review and revisions ^[10][11]. The paper has not been peer reviewed and may be revised before final publication ^[9]. Vox describes the dataset as the first comprehensive comparison of homebuilding timelines across the US ^[17]. Soltas said the gap became apparent to him while he was teaching an urban economics class ^[14]. "I realized if I needed that information to teach my students, that it might be useful for other people," he said ^[15].

In my view, the order of decisions matters for a city council. A council that cuts review stages this year is acting on the part of the clock the paper tracks from 2000 to 2023 ^[6]. If the full paper confirms San Francisco's post-approval years, the construction phase becomes the following year's question ^[4].