AI_Permitting_Challenge_Statement.pdf

INNOVATION SHOWCASE CHALLENGE STATEMENT

AI Permitting Innovation Showcase

INNOVATION SHOWCASE

CHALLENGE: Making Housing Permitting Legible Across California's Jurisdictions

Housing permitting is difficult to navigate for applicants and local government staff alike.

Applicants—from homeowners to experienced developers—struggle to understand what is required of them, which pathway to pursue, and where their project stands at any given moment. Staff, meanwhile, spend significant time answering questions, reviewing incomplete applications, and drafting reports that could be automated—time that could instead go toward substantive permit application review and approvals. The status quo is a process that is slow, frustrating, and unevenly translatable across jurisdictions.

Projects that slip months, or even years, mean fewer homes for Californians and higher costs.

California's goal is to help local jurisdictions permit more housing, faster, by making the process clearer for applicants and less burdensome for the staff who run it. Because jurisdictions are differently situated, California is not seeking a single tool that does everything, but AI-enabled solutions across the scenarios below. A jurisdiction may be strong in one area and need help in another, and vendors will have different strengths across them.

Scenario A: Guiding Applicants to a Complete and Well-Routed Application Incomplete and misrouted applications are one of the most common sources of permit delay; this scenario focuses on helping applicants arrive with a complete, compliant, and correctly-routed submission.

Solutions can:

● Guide applicants through what is required to submit a complete application for their specific project, parcel, and jurisdiction, reducing incomplete submissions and the correction cycles that follow;

● Identify the most efficient permitting pathway for a proposed project, accounting for ministerial versus discretionary routes and applicable state streamlining measures such as ADU laws, SB 9 lot splits, SB 35, and AB 2011, and flagging streamlining or exemption eligibility so applicants can make informed decisions about how to proceed;

● Check applications for completeness and for common compliance gaps before submission, flag missing documents and incorrect or insufficient information across the individual documents required

● Provide detailed and easy to use remedies to address incomplete items; and

● Present requirements in plain language and multilingual formats, designed for a wide range of homeowners and builders rather than large-scale developers alone.

Scenario B: Supporting Internal Review Across Entitlement and Building Permit Once an application is submitted to a local jurisdiction, review spans the entitlement and building permit phases and can stall in either. This scenario focuses on helping staff move applications through the full internal process, which may differ across jurisdictions.

● Provide real-time status visibility so applicants and staff can track where a project stands across planning and building departments, without any direct outreach like phone calls or emails;

● Auto-generate first drafts of staff reports and determination letters from case data, freeing planners and building officials to focus their judgment on discretionary findings rather than data transcription;

● Support review of consistency with general plans and zoning, including but not limited to objective, measurable standards such as setbacks, height limits, parking, and building code and engineering requirements, helping staff confirm that submitted plans comply and helping applicants correct issues before resubmittal;

● Assist review of consistency with building codes and other related requirements and help applicants fully and accurately resolve review comments, reducing the repeated review cycles that occur when a resubmittal addresses only some of the items raised.

Scenario C (Supplementary): Staying Current with Changing State Housing Law This scenario is a valued addition, not a core requirement. It reflects a real need in some jurisdictions, particularly smaller ones.

To address the State's ongoing housing crisis, the legislature and administration continue to enact important housing laws but these laws are not always accurately reflected at the local level. This scenario focuses on a searchable resource that reads and interprets current state law and HCD guidance for a specific jurisdiction, helping staff stay current.

● Aggregate California state housing law, HCD technical guidance, and local zoning codes into a searchable resource, and interpret what applies to a given jurisdiction, project, and parcel;

● Show how comparable jurisdictions have interpreted and implemented a requirement, so staff can check their own approach against workable precedent and see where local practice may need to catch up, with enough specificity to make an update straightforward;

● Keep pace with each legislative session, flagging recently passed or amended laws relevant to a jurisdiction and pointing staff to applicable state resources, rather than serving as the authoritative source on legal changes;

A note on scope

● Optionality is a core principle of this showcase. Vendors may address one scenario or all of them, and a solution that does one well is valued alongside a comprehensive one. No vendor is expected to cover everything.

● Specialized and comprehensive solutions are both welcome. A tool that addresses one part of the process well belongs on the bench alongside a full-pipeline platform, and vendors may team up.

● A jurisdiction can start small. A solution that improves one part of the process at modest cost, without forcing a jurisdiction to replace tools it already uses, is a valued approach.

Requirements across all scenarios

California is particularly interested in solutions that apply natural language processing (NLP), machine learning, AI-assisted workflow automation, and AI-assisted analysis to reduce friction across the permitting process. Regardless of scenario, solutions should:

● Protect applicant and jurisdictional data and be transparent with jurisdictions about how their data is stored, processed, retained, and used, consistent with California's Information Practices Act of 1977 (Civil Code § 1798 et seq.) and Government Code §§ 11015.5 and 11019.9, and respecting the privacy rights of Californians whose information the system handles;

● Preserve each jurisdiction's ownership of and continued access to its own data and underlying files, including geographic data such as shapefiles, so that a jurisdiction does not lose access to its information if an engagement ends;

● Accommodate jurisdictions' obligations under the California Public Records Act (Gov. Code § 7920.000 et seq.), including the retrieval and appropriate handling of records that may be subject to disclosure or exemption;

● Be deployable and affordable across jurisdictions of varying size and technical capacity, recognizing that lower-capacity jurisdictions are often those with the greatest need;

● Keep pace with annual legislative change;

● Function as decision support rather than a legal agent, and not substitute for legal review; and

● Align with state accessibility, transparency, security, and data privacy standards, including the California Department of Technology's information security and privacy policies in the State Administrative Manual (SAM, Chapter 5300) and Statewide Information Management Manual (SIMM).

Resources and data:

● California Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD)

● HCD Technical Assistance and Guidance Documents

● California Permit Streamlining Act

● SB 9 and ADU State Law Summaries (HCD)

● California Open Data Portal https://www.hcd.ca.gov/ https://www.hcd.ca.gov/planning-and-community-development/housing-elements https://data.ca.gov/