The City and County of San Francisco increases housing permit completeness rating with OnBase Workflow

City and County of San Francisco

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Overview

The San Francisco Permit Center is responsible for approval of all housing permits for the 46 square mile city and county.

On Oct. 2023, California state government signed Assembly Bill 1114 into law, which changed how the city reviews and processes building permits. The bill also had a deadline of implementation of Jan. 1, 2024.

Strategic Programs Manager Mandy Johnson and her team had their work cut out for them to create a process that would eliminate manual operations and create a positive citizen experience when filling out permit applications.

Challenges

San Francisco has historically prioritized housing delivery to alleviate the ongoing housing crisis. Over 300 building permit requests come through the Permit Center each month, but the process has historically been slow, siloed, inefficient, and without structured data or performance tracking. Resolving these challenges had a direct impact on accelerating the delivery of housing.

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Assembly Bill 1114 required San Francisco to implement a streamlined review of housing permits, effective Jan. 1, 2024. Streamlining requirements include 15-day permit review for completeness, and 30- to 60-day permit review for safety and code compliance.

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San Francisco kicked off the project to comply with Assembly Bill 1114 on Nov. 13, 2023. That gave the City and County of San Francisco just under a month and a half to design and implement entirely new permit review policies, tools, and workflow.

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Before Assembly Bill 1114, applicants found the permit review process confusing and unpredictable, with unclear instructions and surprises around every corner.

Solution & Results

DataBank teamed up with the City and County of San Francisco team to build a completely digital application process using OnBase Workflow.

The new completeness review workflow has 3 steps: Applicants submit an application, clerical staff triage the application, and the application goes to up to 10 departments for concurrent review.

Once review is complete, OnBase sends a completeness letter to the applicant with all review findings.

Workflow built in 45 days to accommodate Jan. 1 launch requirement.

The permit center is averaging 5 days for a completeness review, 10 days fewer than required.

New digital process offers a 60% application completeness rate.

Vision

The City and County of San Francisco is continuing to refine the permit completeness process to improve the way constituents apply for housing permits, focusing on delivering faster reviews and fewer review cycles. This work is part of San Francisco's larger "One City" vision for delivering citizen services in a unified, clear, and predictable way.

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