Modernizing Seattle’s Permitting Process

“The permitting process has gotten more difficult and more arduous over the years as the code itself has gotten more complex...more pages of code, more things, more diagrams, more hoops to jump through”

—Architect

Housing costs are rising, and so are the costs of building new homes. While many forces are driving this trend, the City has direct control over one critical piece: the permitting process. Permits exist for good reasons: they make sure our homes are safe, efficient, and built to community standards. But the system has grown unwieldy. A typical project may now navigate 30+ approvals across eight departments, involving dozens of teams. This complexity adds time, uncertainty, and direct costs to housing projects. These factors put existing projects at risk and cause new projects to be canceled before they start. In both cases, the city loses desperately needed housing units.

To imagine and co-design permitting solutions, IP hosted hackathons with residents, technologists, students, architects, and developers. Their working prototypes reinforced IP’s direction and demonstrated the art of the possible with today’s quickly evolving technology.

By the Numbers

170 days for median middle housing projects to get a construction permit, compared to 30-50 days in comparable cities
30+ possible types of approvals from 8 different departments required to complete housing projects
50-70% of applications are incomplete at first submission due to a complex, poorly-understood process
2x as long to get a construction permit now as it did ten years ago

Challenge

A national scan showed how far Seattle has drifted from peer cities. While other jurisdictions issue middle-housing permits in 30–50 days and large multifamily permits in about 90 days, Seattle’s medians have grown to 170 days and 672 days, respectively. To close this gap, the Innovation & Performance Team (IP) is working across departments to build a shared set of facts and dashboards to prioritize actions and measure impact. While individual teams coordinate the best they can, no single group inside the City has the holistic view that applicants do, which makes it difficult to understand where delays occur or how to improve the system as a whole.

Creating a Faster, Simpler Permitting Experience

To design a better permitting experience, the Innovation & Performance Team (IP) began by studying the permit timeline from the applicant’s point of view. One surprising insight stood out: half of total permit time was in the applicant’s hands. Homebuilders, architects, and designers are working to get through the process quickly, but feel like the system is working against them. They named complex rules, hard-to-interpret requirements, and highly technical submittals as the top three barriers to progress, not financing issues or demand for services.

To understand where applicants were getting stuck, IP shifted from tracking “days in review” to focusing on cycle counts and approval rates. The data revealed that some review types required in nearly all applications were failing almost every first-round submittal, with Drainage reviews being at the top of the list. As a result of our engagement, equipped with new data and insights, the Drainage review team improved processes, guides, FAQs, and help videos, boosting approval rates by nearly 10% in six months. Initial reviews are now approved more than 20% of the time, up from 1%.

We unlocked thousands of correction comment letters for the first time which showed that 50–70% of applications arrived incomplete or incorrect. This finding laid the foundation for CivCheck, an AI-assisted pre-screening tool that helps applicants catch errors early. Reviewers reported 92% accuracy and said it freed them to focus on the most complex issues. Applicants agreed: “I’d rather fix problems today and get through the first review.” To make requirements even clearer, IP is now mapping project-specific triggers across five departments so applicants understand exactly what permits they need for their project and site.

IP is focused on illuminating the full permitting journey, gathering cross-department data, stitching together milestones, and establishing shared facts about the end-to-end process to better understand the journey applicants experience across 8 departments and 30+ approvals. The team began by publishing performance data for the Construction Permit and is expanding to additional permit types and departments to reveal where delays occur and how to improve coordination citywide.

Results

Drainage review team improved processes, guides, FAQs, and help videos, boosting approval rates by nearly 10% in six months. Initial reviews are now approved more than 20% of the time up from 1%
With newly-published open data posted online at data.seattle.gov, Seattle is now one of the most transparent jurisdictions in the nation with its construction permitting data

Modernizing Seattle’s Permitting Process

By the Numbers

Challenge

Creating a Faster, Simpler Permitting Experience

Results

Partners

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Innovation and Performance

Citywide Information

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