In Los Angeles, it takes an average of 18 months to permit a new housing unit — three to four times the national average. Months for a kitchen remodel. Weeks for an electrical panel upgrade. Other cities have solved this. Phoenix, New York, San Diego, and Denver have all cut permitting timelines dramatically through technology, self-certification, and basic operational discipline.
I have experienced this failure firsthand — at Better Angels, five completed affordable housing buildings sat idle for six months waiting for a DWP connection while 44,000 people slept outside.
On day one of my administration, that changes.
Following NYC's model where 50%+ of permits are self-certified with a 20% audit rate.
An executive action that removes over 20,000 low-risk permits annually from LADBS's queue, freeing department capacity for real construction review while letting 4M+ homeowners improve their own property without asking the city's permission, already done in Phoenix and NYC.
Proven softwares include Archistar eCheck (10 business days vs. 4–12 weeks, already live in LA for fire rebuilds) and CivCheck (has reduced 6-month backlog to 7 days in Honolulu).
Ending the sequential bottleneck where planning, building, fire, and public works reviews happen one at a time instead of simultaneously.
Scaling the fire-rebuild model already proven to work in Los Angeles.
Collapsing the current 6–14 day timeline to remove the single biggest infrastructure barrier to EV charging and home electrification.
Replacing the broken patchwork of PermitLA, ePlanLA, and BuildLA where mismatched logins lock applicants out, minor formatting errors trigger rejections, and correction notices take days to appear, all while no one can tell you how long a permit actually takes.
