Denver city officials this week touted progress in reducing construction permit review times, including reaching a goal on residential projects set by Mayor Mike Johnston’s administration.
That success comes with some caveats, and people in the city’s Department of Community Planning and Development acknowledge plenty of room for improvement.
So far this year, the planning department has cut permitting review times for residential construction projects by 33% compared to 2023, the administration announced earlier this week. That exceeds the goal of a 30% reduction that the mayor set when he announced seven citywide goals for this year in February.
The reduction covers the time that development plans are in the hands of city staffers but not the time developers and property owners spend revising them or responding to questions, planning department officials said.
“On average in 2023, it was taking a couple of months to get through the city process in our hands, and now we’re down to a month or so,” said Robert Peek, the city’s director of development system performance. “These are averages, so some people’s experiences are different.”
Residential construction permitting is only one piece of the puzzle for planning department delays that have been a source of consternation for builders in recent years, bridging the leadership of former Mayor Michael Hancock and, for the last year, Johnston. The delays were sharply criticized in a report by the Denver Auditor’s Office earlier this year.
Residential permits pertain to single-family homes and duplexes. Apartment buildings, office towers and other types of commercial development do not fall under that umbrella.
Speeding up review times for those larger projects is still a work in progress. Planning officials report times have fallen 11% so far in 2024 for what they describe as “intermediate commercial projects,” compared to 2023 — shy of the mayor’s goal of a 30% reduction.
Peek pointed to several changes that the city has made — many in response to feedback from the development community — that have helped to speed up review times. They include posting daily time-of-arrival estimates online for scheduled inspections. Sharing those two-hour windows reduces the number of phone calls coming into the department to check on inspection times, allowing staff members to focus on reviews, officials say.
The planning department also has staffed up. In response to backlogs in the residential permitting process in 2022 and 2023, the city approved overtime and brought in a third-party plan review contractor. Cross-training within the department has also helped, Peek said.
Facing a shortage of affordable housing that his administration estimates to be in the range of 44,000 homes, Johnston knows what’s a stake when permit review times delay projects.
He called long review times “a huge driver of cost and a huge deterrent” to development in a meeting with Denver Post journalists last week.
The development community has noticed the increased staffing levels and a change in culture at the planning department, said Morgan Cullen, the director of government affairs for the Home Builders Association of Metro Denver. Reviews have been more consistent and the department is more willing to work with customers to address challenges.
“I would say there have been marked improvements in the timelines,” Cullen said.
He lauded Manish Kumar, whom Johnston picked to lead the planning department in February, for expressing interest in establishing a working group with industry officials.
Cullen said the development community had already identified some other sticking points — including multiple-week delays in the intake process and technical hiccups with the city’s e-permits portal — that, if addressed, could further speed things up.
And he noted changing industry conditions that may also be helping Denver catch up. According to his statistics, Denver builders’ requests for permits for single-family home projects are down 39% compared to this point last summer, as the industry reacts to higher costs.
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