CUT THE TIME TAX ON HOUSING
How to Cut Approval and Utility Timelines Without Sacrificing Safety
Across the country, housing affordability rarely fails because communities lack concern or commitment. It fails because time and uncertainty quietly overwhelm intent.
I’ve seen this from multiple angles—early in my career on city-funded construction sites, and later while managing portfolios that included permitting and review functions. Even when policy goals are strong, delay can quietly consume feasibility.
Whether the project is an infill single-family home, a small mixed-income subdivision, a preservation rehab, or a large multifamily building, the most damaging barriers are rarely ideological. They appear in plan check cycles, inspection queues, utility coordination, and approval processes that stretch from months into years. Each delay increases cost long before a family ever gets keys.
Housing affordability is shaped as much by time and predictability as by dollars. Both are too often underestimated.
Time and uncertainty are real cost drivers
Delay is expensive. Uncertainty is often worse.
When entitlement requirements are unclear or shift mid-process, projects incur real costs. Architects redraw plans. Engineers recalculate. Materials are reordered. Construction sequencing must adjust. These disruptions appear as change orders, re-bids, and higher construction costs.
For projects with thin margins, including workforce housing, attainable for-sale housing, and deeply affordable development, these changes can often be fatal. Projects rarely fail because standards are too high, but because those standards were not clear early enough.
This dynamic affects all housing types. A small builder delivering infill homes faces the same exposure as a nonprofit preserving existing apartments. In both cases, late surprises destroy feasibility.
Expediting Is Not Rushing, It Is Creating Clarity
Cutting timelines does not mean cutting corners. It means creating clarity early and adhering to it.
Cities that consistently deliver housing do not rely on ad hoc negotiations or shifting expectations. They set clear rules, thresholds, and design parameters up front. Applicants know what will be required. Reviewers know what they are reviewing against.
This predictability reduces redesigns, limits change orders, and allows capital to price risk accurately. In practice, clarity is one of the most effective affordability tools a city has, even though it rarely shows up as a budget line item.
Good Expediting vs. “Fast at Any Cost”
It’s important to distinguish effective expediting from risky shortcuts.
Effective expediting looks like:
· Front-end scoping that identifies required studies and agency signoffs before design is finalized.
· Published checklists, objective thresholds, and “complete application” standards that reduce back-and-forth.
· Parallel processing across departments where legally permissible (planning, building, fire, utilities).
· Early utility coordination so service capacity, easements, and timelines are understood before construction.
· Quality controls: peer review, calibration meetings, and clear accountability so speed doesn’t erode safety.
“Fast at any cost” expediting often looks like:
· Shortening review times by relying on inexperienced staff without sufficient training or supervision.
· Pushing approvals forward while deferring key safety, structural, fire, or infrastructure issues.
· Outsourcing approvals to third parties who are incentivized solely for speed without strong municipal oversight.
One approach builds predictability and trust. The other invites safety failures, public backlash, and lawsuits—and ultimately slows everything down.
Public input works best when it is front-loaded
Delays are rarely caused by public input itself, but by when that input occurs.
Communities that move projects efficiently have already done the hard work of engagement before individual proposals appear. Comprehensive plans, neighborhood plans, corridor plans, and zoning updates, establish a shared vision of what will and will not be supported.
When projects align with adopted plans, review is faster and conflict is reduced. When plans are outdated, vague, or routinely ignored, every project becomes a referendum and timelines stretch unpredictably.
Front-loading community engagement does not sideline residents. It respects them by involving them when their input can still shape outcomes, not after investments are already made.
Staffing is infrastructure
Clarity and coordination depend on people.
Cities that shorten housing timelines invest in qualified planners, engineers, inspectors, and permitting staff. They train staff not only in technical review, but also in customer service and cross-department coordination. Applicants get consistent answers and problems are resolved early instead of passed along.
Utility providers must be brought into the process early, not treated as a final step. Departments should work from the same timeline rather than separate ones.
Understaffed or siloed departments cannot deliver predictability, no matter how well written the regulations may be.
What effective execution looks like in practice
Different cities solve different parts of this problem, depending on their market context.
Fast-growth metros such as Phoenix, Austin, and Charlotte have focused on execution by investing in staffing, standardized reviews, early utility coordination, and parallel processing. These improvements have strengthened predictability across housing types, including for-sale subdivisions, infill development, and mixed-income projects. Although affordability challenges remain, these cities show how time certainty reduces risk and cost across the housing system.
New Rochelle illustrates a complementary lesson. The City explicitly pursued growth and redesigned its processes to achieve it. By partnering with a developer on a downtown master plan that was approved in roughly one year rather than a decade, and by approving thousands of residential units in a single action, the City dramatically reduced entitlement risk. Those process improvements, combined with strong regional demand, unlocked approximately $2.5 billion in private investment and attracted thousands of households priced out of New York City. In that context, development subsidy was not required to initiate production. Public action focused on clarity, speed, and infrastructure rather than filling avoidable financing gaps.
The lesson is not that the same model fits every community, but that process improvement and growth intent must align. One without the other produces limited results.
Expediting is Part of Subsidizing Better
Subsidizing better is not only about directlng public dollars to households the market cannot reach. It is about protecting those dollars from being consumed by avoidable delays and redesigns.
When projects require extra subsidy because timelines stretched out or requirements shifted, that is a system failure. When attainable homes are never built because uncertainty makes them too risky, affordability suffers even without an explicit policy decision.
Reducing entitlement and construction timelines does not eliminate the need for subsidy. It allows public funding to work more effectively by lowering holding costs, minimizing change orders, and preserving feasibility.
Delivery builds trust
Residents’ skepticism is understandable. They have seen plans adopted and ignored, projects delayed and abandoned, and costs rise with little to show for it.
When communities align their plans, processes, staffing, and growth strategy, housing gets delivered. It may not be perfect, but it is predictable. And predictability is what allows trust to rebuild.
Affordability is no longer a mystery. Build housing across types and price points. Subsidize where the market cannot go. Create clarity early. Treat time and uncertainty as the powerful levers they are.
The next post in this series will explore how these dynamics play out in fast-growth metros versus legacy coastal cities, and why market context matters as much as policy choice.
Raquel Favela advises communities and mission-driven partners on housing and community development strategy, with a focus on improving execution and aligning policy goals with market realities.