Executive Overview
Across the globe, the ability to rapidly materialize housing infrastructure has historically served as a core engine of economic mobility, urbanization, and social stability. During the mid-20th century, the Soviet Union famously churned out tens of thousands of modular apartment buildings in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s—some fully assembled in as little as 12 days—cumulatively providing tens of millions of individual apartments for its citizens.
While born of a centralized command economy, this structural velocity is hardly unique to totalitarian states or drab concrete mega-blocks. In contemporary Sweden and Japan, modern, high-quality residential properties are routinely factory-built and assembled in a matter of weeks. These nations leverage prefabrication—the very same industrial blueprint deployed decades ago by Soviet planners—to bypass the traditional bottlenecks of on-site construction.
The United States, by stark contrast, evinces no such urgency.
Read Also
In several of the nation’s highest-cost metropolitan hubs—including San Francisco, New York, and Miami—it now takes an astonishing five years to erect a modestly sized apartment building, measured from the moment an initial application is filed to the day construction is finally completed. This sobering metric is just one of the eye-opening findings featured in a landmark economics working paper that tracks housing construction and permitting timelines across 60 major American cities.
The disparities revealed by the data are staggering. In Raleigh, North Carolina, a developer can complete an entire 20-unit apartment building in roughly the same amount of time it takes local bureaucrats in San Francisco merely to approve the single permit application for a comparable structure, where filings routinely languish for over a year. Meanwhile, in Indianapolis, a detached single-family home can be proposed, permitted, and built from scratch in a mere six months—less than one-eighth of the time required to achieve the same feat in San Francisco.
These systemic delays carry profound economic and social costs. They starve local markets of desperately needed supply at a time when the United States faces a cumulative deficit of millions of homes. They inflate operational overhead through lost staff hours that developers ultimately bake into consumer prices. Most tragically, they result in countless projects that are quietly abandoned altogether, as the arduous, unpredictable approval process discourages all but the most heavily capitalized developers.
As America grapples with an acute housing affordability crisis, the question facing policymakers, urban planners, and economists is clear: How did the United States become a nation where building a home takes longer than building a skyscraper used to, and what will it take to reverse the trend?
Detailed Chronology: A 25-Year Slide into Bureaucratic Stasis
To understand how American homebuilding ground to its current sluggish pace, one must look at the historical trajectory of municipal regulation over the last quarter-century. The newly released working paper—authored by economists Leonardo D’Amico, Evan Soltas, and Audrey Wang—represents the first comprehensive, apples-to-apples dataset comparing homebuilding timelines across the United States.
To construct this dataset, the researchers harvested 1.1 million municipal permits accounting for 2.7 million housing units built between 2000 and 2025. This sample captures approximately one out of every thirteen new homes permitted nationwide over that 25-year span. Rather than simply evaluating how long historically completed projects took from start to finish—which would skew results based on local project complexity—the researchers modeled a standardized, hypothetical project archetype. For multi-family housing, this archetype was a uniform 20-unit building with 1,200 square feet per apartment; for single-family housing, it was a 2,800-square-foot detached home on a 0.15-acre lot.
The historical trendline uncovered by this methodology is alarming. Across the cities sampled, the average time required to push a standardized multi-family building through the permitting phase alone rose from 0.6 years in 2000 to 1.5 years in 2023. For single-family homes, the timeline swelled from 1.6 months in 2000 to 4.9 months in 2023.
[2000] Multi-family Permitting: 0.6 Years --> [2023] Multi-family Permitting: 1.5 Years
[2000] Single-family Permitting: 1.6 Mos. --> [2023] Single-family Permitting: 4.9 Mos.This compounding delay means that a process that once took months now routinely consumes years before a single shovel strikes the earth. Commenting on the absurdity of the timeline inflation, Evan Soltas quipped in a recent interview, "Shouldn’t we be getting faster and more efficient at building housing over time, not slower—especially at a time of acute housing scarcity?"
One Building, Vastly Different Wait Times
"Permitting" encompasses everything that occurs between the initial submission of a development application and the moment a municipality grants authorization to break ground. During this window, municipal officials review the proposal against a labyrinthine array of overlapping codes: structural safety requirements, plumbing specifications, energy efficiency mandates, zoning classifications, and, in many jurisdictions, subjective aesthetic design reviews.
Initial applications are rarely accepted on the first pass. Instead, they are typically flagged for noncompliance, sent back to the developer for iterative revisions, and resubmitted—a cycle that can repeat multiple times.
While the general cultural divide between the rapid, pro-growth development patterns of Texas sunbelt cities and the notoriously slow, litigation-heavy environments of coastal California has long been a fixture of housing policy debates, rigorous empirical comparisons were historically scarce. Soltas noted that the impetus for the research stemmed partly from his own classroom experience. While teaching an urban economics course, he realized that comprehensive baseline data on permitting timelines did not exist. "I realized if I needed that information to teach my students, that it might be useful for other people," he explained.
Crucially, the study revealed that cities with protracted permitting times also suffer from extended construction periods. The longer an application sits in administrative limbo, the longer the actual physical construction takes—a compounding dynamic that widens the chasm between the nation’s fastest and slowest housing markets. Because the researchers controlled for building size and neighborhood density, critics cannot simply dismiss these massive gaps as the inevitable byproduct of building within hyper-dense urban cores like Manhattan.
Supporting Context & Metrics: The Human and Economic Toll
While the working paper does not definitively establish a direct causal link between permitting duration and soaring housing costs, the correlations are unmistakable. Longer permitting timelines are consistently mirrored by higher median home prices and lower overall rates of housing production.
The economic fallout manifests in several distinct ways:
- Supply Suppression: Every month a project spends trapped in administrative review is a month that foundational shelter is withheld from a market facing a documented deficit of millions of housing units.
- Cost Inflation: Developers do not absorb the financial carrying costs of delayed capital, prolonged legal fees, and administrative overhead. These expenses are systematically baked into the final purchase price or rental rate of the completed units.
- Market Consolidation: Small-scale builders and local developers lack the deep financial reserves required to survive multi-year pre-development phases. Consequently, prolonged timelines act as a barrier to entry, leaving the market dominated exclusively by massive, well-resourced corporate developers capable of weathering years of bureaucratic friction.
Furthermore, the data shows a stark decline in the statistical probability of timely bureaucratic approval. In the year 2000, a standardized multi-family housing project faced a 71 percent probability of securing a permit within six months of application. By 2025, that probability plummeted to a mere 44 percent. Although permitting times have shown modest relief from pandemic-era spikes, economists remain deeply uncertain whether this represents genuine structural reform or merely a temporary post-crisis normalization.
Official Statements & Expert Insights
The growing consensus among housing economists, urban planners, and policy reformers points toward structural over-regulation as the primary culprit behind America’s construction slowdown. Yet, identifying specific "smoking guns" remains complex due to the decentralized nature of American municipal governance.
As Leonardo D’Amico, Evan Soltas, and Audrey Wang emphasize in their working paper, the systemic expansion of land-use restrictions is a national phenomenon, not isolated to high-profile progressive bastions. Decades of economic literature demonstrate that zoning codes—which became ubiquitous across the United States during the early-to-mid 20th century—have grown increasingly restrictive over time.
In states like California, statutory frameworks such as the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) have long subjected development projects to exhaustive, multi-layered environmental reviews. Ironically, larger multi-family apartment buildings—which are objectively far more environmentally sustainable and resource-efficient than sprawling single-family subdivisions—are statistically more vulnerable to protracted CEQA challenges. Recognizing this paradox as a direct impediment to housing affordability, California lawmakers have increasingly moved to exempt various urban housing projects from such reviews.
Yet, as the data illustrates, the administrative drag is not confined to states with aggressive environmental statutes. It is a nationwide creep of institutional caution. Expanding building code mandates represent another critical pressure point. While stricter building standards are ostensibly designed to enhance safety and energy efficiency, they often carry a hidden structural bias. Modern codes frequently impose disproportionate burdens on multi-family construction relative to single-family homes, inflating development costs without any clear empirical accounting of whether the marginal benefits outweigh the catastrophic cost of housing that is never built at all.
Future Outlook: Navigating the Path to Housing Abundance
As the empirical evidence mounts, policymakers are forced to confront an uncomfortable truth: America’s homebuilding apparatus is suffering from institutional paralysis.
The debate moving forward will not necessarily center on whether modern safety or energy efficiency standards are desirable, but rather on whether society is willing to measure their full economic toll. It is difficult to argue persuasively that an apartment building deemed structurally safe and livable in Grand Rapids, Michigan, would present an imminent danger to residents in New York City or San Francisco.
Ultimately, municipal leaders and state legislators must answer a fundamental question: What, precisely, is all that extra permitting time buying the public?
If rigorous academic research like the D’Amico-Soltas-Wang working paper achieves its purpose, it will provide urban reformers with the empirical ammunition required to demand accountability from local planning departments. By putting precise, quantifiable numbers on administrative delay, policymakers can begin dismantling the unnecessary bureaucratic tollbooths standing between American families and the foundational American dream of a stable, affordable home.
Comments
Facebook App ID not configured. Please add it in the Customizer.