San Diego’s severely understaffed building department will get some outside help to speed up the permit process and clear a backlog of applications.
The City Council agreed this week to pay two private companies $2.5 million each to help review permit applications on new development over the next two years. This follows an analysis released in November that tried to explain why the city is so “woefully off pace” from meeting housing production goals.
It can take the better part of a year or more for San Diego’s Development Services Department to issue relatively straightforward housing permits, according to industry experts. Officials anticipate the two companies, NV5 and Interwest Consulting Group, will be able to start chipping away at those delays within the next couple weeks.
“We cannot effectively address our housing and homelessness crisis without building more housing,” City Council President Sean Elo-Rivera said in a statement. “Approving workforce support for the Development Services Department is one of the tools we must use to allow for cheaper and faster production of homes to meaningfully improve housing availability and affordability.”
A regional housing study projected San Diego will need more than 13,500 new housing units every year to meet the demand of all income levels by the end of the decade. Last year, the city only authorized construction on roughly a third of that.
Half of San Diego’s housing supply are rental units and less than 1% are vacant, records show. The lack of availability has driven up rents by 15%, according to a study from the Southern California Rental Housing Association.
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