Approval Times & Objective Rules
“There are few things simpler and more effective at reducing housing costs than cutting down on approval times and creating objective, consistently applied rules. Affordable cities are those where housing is a predictable, boring, low-yield investment, not a roll of the dice.” -The Affordable City, page 95
I used to believe that efforts to streamline government were simply an attack on the function of government. Often, these efforts came from libertarian-leaning conservatives that didn’t see a real role for government in our lives. While that might have been their motivation, I’m increasingly of the opinion that streamlining efforts have real value if conducted correctly.
Since the start of last year, when I was reappointed to the Planning Commission, the one item that has been coming up again and again is the great number of projects that shouldn’t come before the Commission at all. Whether that was my very first meeting back, where there was a request for a liquor license, or the CUP amendment to allow for a preschool at an existing church, or a variance request for a fence that matches an existing fence, at least half of the items on our agendas this past year should have never come to a public hearing. To be clear, this is not a complaint about the city’s staff, they are just following the rules that have been put in place for them to follow. Many of those rules are found in the City’s municipal code, but some are State and Federal laws that cities are unable to change directly. However, every city has its own set of rules that drive a greater number of discretionary decisions than cities should really be making.
The problem with all of these rules is that it makes it more difficult to get anything done. In some cases, such as zoning writ-large, that was the point of the rule in the first place. In other cases, it’s just the slow accumulation of rules without regard to how the totality of rules affects the ability to make meaningful progress.
Code streamlining, instead of being an effort to limit the role of government, should be viewed with the mindset of freeing government from its logjam to do meaningful work again. On the surface, both mindsets will produce similar efforts, but the details of where the streamlining takes place may be drastically different depending on the mindset from which the effort is undertaken.
The City of Los Angeles is currently undergoing an interesting experiment regarding the quick and predictable approval of affordable housing. At the beginning of her term as mayor, Karen Bass issued an executive order for the city to approve any affordable housing development that met certain conditions within 60 days. The result has been an explosion of affordable housing development by for-profit developers without any government subsidy. While I am a bit concerned about the long-term backlash against these new developments, mostly because the rules are so loose that there is nothing requiring them to fit in the context of the neighborhood, the fact that ensuring quick approvals spurred so much new development simply shows the power of objective rules consistently applied.
The challenge is that objective rules must flow naturally from the context of the community and the vision for its future. Cities must first know where they want to go before they can make objective rules that will lead to the types of development that will be supported by the community. Without this community vision, residents will always want a say in each proposed development and the ability to veto the ones that don’t fit in their personal vision for the future.
In cities that have sat stagnant for too long (which describes most of California), we need to be looking for ways to rapidly transform our cities so they become vibrant and productive places again. The single best way to do this is by creating a vision for the future of our communities and developing objective, predictable rules that can be consistently applied to all proposed new developments.