You know, I came across something that really speaks to the heart of why California's housing crisis persists, and it's a story about a fellow named Tanner Blackman who makes his living helping developers navigate Los Angeles' permitting maze. According to CalMatters Housing, Blackman is what you'd call a permit expediter or land-use consultant, basically someone who knows all the ins and outs of getting projects approved through the city bureaucracy. He's the guy who figures out which department to talk to, what paperwork goes where, and how to untangle the red tape when different city agencies aren't communicating with each other.
The reason someone like Blackman exists is simple: getting a housing project approved in Los Angeles is maddeningly complicated. The planning approval process alone takes an average of about eight and a half months, though projects can easily get stuck for years. After planning approval comes an entire cascade of other permits and reviews covering everything from earthquake safety to disability access to environmental concerns. According to the article, a typical project might need twenty-five separate reviews and clearances from various city departments. If you're not someone who's done this dance before, you might not even know where to start.
Even Blackman himself acknowledges the absurdity of the situation. CalMatters shares an example where he had to take a project to city council just to modify hauling hours for dirt removal because it was on a road passing through a hillside neighborhood, even though the project itself wasn't in the hillside area. The regulatory gymnastics required added weeks to the timeline and extra billable hours for people like him. Blackman actually said that in a perfect world, his job wouldn't need to exist.
Now here's the interesting part: the state has been trying to fix this problem. Over the last decade, lawmakers have passed dozens of bills designed to streamline housing approvals and create faster pathways for new development. But as Blackman points out, these new state laws don't really eliminate the need for people like him. They just shift where the battles happen. There's always something new to navigate, another angle to work through. It's created what you might call a regulatory arms race.
What I'm seeing locally here in the Bay Area is much the same dynamic. We've got some wonderfully intentioned state legislation aimed at speeding things up, but our local cities still maintain enormous control over the approval process, and that complexity creates demand for specialized expertise. Fremont and other East Bay cities aren't quite as labyrinthine as Los Angeles, but we're not immune to this pattern either. Until we truly streamline the process at the local level and make it predictable enough that developers don't need to hire specialists just to understand it, we're going to keep paying the hidden cost of complexity in higher housing prices and fewer homes built.
