In summary
The recent spate of LA fires has led many different parties to re-examine state and local approaches to building approval.
The speedy processing of building permit applications is not typically considered a popular political cause.
The recent Los Angeles firestorm may have changed that.
Thousands of Angelenos are now desperate to rebuild their homes as quickly as possible. They have the sympathy and focus of elected leaders at every level of state government. And many of them — particularly in well-heeled Pacific Palisades — have pull at city hall.
That’s helped bump the or else dull-as-drying-paint politics of permitting policy to the top of many lawmakers’ agendas.
Exhibit A: The L.A. city council voted unanimously last week to consider a building permit “self-certification” program.
Rather than require architects and engineers working on small residential construction projects to submit their plans to the city’s building department and wait — frequently enough months, if not years — for the green light, self-certification would allow them to sign off on their own handiwork and start construction immediately. The city would still inspect the projects during and after construction.
Councilmember Nithya Raman, who introduced the motion, said she began looking into the idea well before fires torched thousands of homes around the city. But the politics of permitting has changed in ways that could have effects far beyond the footprints of the fires.
“There is a constituency of people that have been asking for thes changes, but now there is an urgency around it that has helped speed this process forward,” she said. “we should definitely be focusing on rebuilding the Palisades, but we should also make sure that rebuilding the Palisades doesn’t slow down construction in the rest of the city, which is already much lower than it needs to be.”
Over the last four years,the median length of time required to get a permit approved to construct a single family home in Los Angeles was nearly eight months,according to real estate data firm ATC Research. For apartment projects,the typical wait was more than 10 months.
The motion the council passed instructed city staff to look into the idea and report back by early March. The council would then have to vote on a specific proposal before anything about the current process changes.
The general concept seems to have at least the interest of Mayor Karen Bass, who asked city staff to look into the idea shortly after the fires started in early January.
The cause of self-certification is the latest, and likely the most radical, example of lawmakers pushing to cut red-tape in the wake of the blazes.
In early January, wiht the flames still uncontained, Gov. Gavin Newsom directed his own housing department to look into state permitting requirements,building codes and local bureaucratic processes that could be suspended,expedited or removed to speed up reconstruction. Based on those reports, Newsom on Thursday issued an executive order which,among other things,loosened building permit rules to allow homeowners of recently constructed homes to recycle their own plans. The governor’s office refused to release a copy of the report itself when CalMatters asked for it.
San Diego Assemblymember Chris Ward introduced a state bill that would give small building project developers the ability to hire a third-party licensed architect or engineer to sign off on a project’s plans if a city’s planning department is too slow.
Like Raman in Los Angeles, Ward came up with the idea before the fires. But the drive to bring down construction costs and speed up approval times is a goal that “really needs to apply everywhere all the time,” he said in an interview with calmatters last month. “I don’t want you waiting six months to build a home.”
From outside the halls of government, developers and pro-housing advocates are hoping that, in the wake of disaster, fast-tracked building approval is an idea whose time has come.
“I do think this is starting to light a fire under folks around bureaucratic streamlining reforms,” said scott Epstein, policy director at the advocacy group Abundant Housing LA.
“Proceed at your own risk”
Los Angeles already allows contractors to go ahead with limited maintenance,heating and air conditioning systems work and roofing without a city-issued go-ahead. Inspections, and any necesary fixes, occur after the fact.
raman’s current proposal would go much further, allowing builders to start work on entire single family homes without having their plans reviewed.It’s an unusual idea, but not unprecedented even in Los Angeles County.
The City of Bellflower, packed into just six square miles in southeast L.A. county, has been allowing virtually all construction projects to go ahead self-certified for a decade.
If a project architect or engineer is “willing to put their license and their stamp on a set of plans and say,‘this meets the building code and we’re ready to build it,’ then let’s get out of their way and give them the ability to go start at their own risk,” said Ryan Smoot,city manager.
That risk is considerable. If problems emerge after construction begins, the owner is on the hook to fix them. In practice, that has meant that most projects that go the self-certification route are relatively straightforward.
Developers are told to “proceed at your own risk, effectively,” said Smoot. Those without the stomach to do so are invited to go through the standard permitting process and then “don’t complain about it when it takes a little longer to do those reviews than you like.”
in the wake of the fires, Smoot said he welcomes the new attention on Bellflower’s permitting process.
“You got 10,000 homes that are going to need to be rebuilt and 10,000 families that just want to get back to normal life and we have an obligation as local governments to get out of the way as much as possible,” he said. “It is indeed actually, from our outlook, really exciting to see other local and state agencies starting to think the same way.”
“I hate to see it in the context we’re in,” he added. “But the silver lining is maybe we’re rethinking how we do government.”
Building departments from Chicago to New York to Dallas allow a degree of self-permitting in construction projects.
But few in California are willing to put quite so much faith in a project’s architect or engineer, no matter their license or experience. Even in development-kind San Diego, which has a self-certification option for solar installations and office remodels, letting a developer start construction on an entire new house without the city’s once-over is a bridge too far.
“From my experience, we’ve never seen a brand new building — from ground up — that is a perfect submittal that did not have any health or safety issues,” said Kelly Charles, the city’s chief building official.
Imagine an architect messes up and makes the foundation a little too wide, she said. That doesn’t just hurt the licensed experts and the developer. “I’m a homeowner. I’m waiting for my house. My whole yard is torn up.And now you have to saw-cut concrete,” said Charles. “Taking two feet out of the house is not easy!”
Many builders and architects scoff at the idea that city staff know their trade better than they do.
“Why shouldn’t we be able to self-certify if all the liability rests on us and we’re only using licensed professionals?” said Tom Grable, former chair of the California Building industry association. “When something happens in the field we fix it.”
He called the entire pre-construction plan check process “redundant and unnecessary.”
Smoot, in Bellflower, said costly re-dos are exceedingly rare, if only because most developers don’t actually opt for self-certification. In Phoenix, Arizona — which has a similarly permissive self-certification program — uptake is also on the low-end. Evidently builders frequently enough prefer to have someone double-check their work.
Both cities also have an audit system in place to give a sampling of project plans an official review.
“Just as a program goes to self-certification it doesn’t necessarily mean that city staff aren’t going to be looking at it,” Jason Blakely, Phoenix’s assistant development director.
How to best speed up permitting?
What might work in a sprawling valley like the phoenix area or a flat suburb like Bellflower may not work so easily across Los Angeles, with it’s hillside developments facing seismic and wildfire risk, said Steven Somers, the CEO of Crest Real estate, which consults with developers to navigate the city’s lengthy building approval process.
“The solution is maybe simplifying the code or outsourcing more reviews to increase bandwidth and staffing,” he said. That’s a better solution than handing regulatory oversight to someone working on the project itself and who may have “a financial motivation to make the process go quicker than it should.”
Councilmember Raman acknowledges the city of Los angeles still has plenty of questions to answer about how this program would work. she said beefed up oversight and accountability measures would likely be necessary. But whatever the end result, she said, the city should make the approval process faster — both in and outside the still-smoldering burn scars.
With the fire still raging in January, Bass ordered city staff to blitz through post-fire permit applications within 30 days. This week,the city’s Department of Building and Safety turned its West Los Angeles office into a one-stop regulatory shop for rebuilds. What all that extra bureaucratic attention on reconstruction will mean for new proposed housing in other parts of the city is so far unclear.
“What I want to think about as we move forward in Los Angeles,” said Raman, “is not just ways to rearrange the queue, but to actually shorten the queue entirely.”
