Rent Too Damn High? Blame City Permitting Delays
A new study of 60 U.S. cities finds that cities that take longer to issue building permits for new homes tend to have higher rents. In “Where Is Housing Slow to Build, And Is It Getting Slower?” researchers found that a new apartment building in Los Angeles or San Francisco took more than four years from building-permit application to completed construction – about double the roughly two years in Sunbelt cities such as Orlando and Phoenix.
The connection between long permitting timelines and rents is an under-explored area of housing research; this new report finds a strong link between rents and permitting delays.
Key Takeaways:
- Long Waits, High Rents. Among dozens of cities studied, those with longer apartment permit waits had higher median rents. Each extra year of waiting for a permit is linked to roughly 40 percent higher rents.
- Permits Take a Year Longer in Slow-Building Cities. In the slowest cities, it took about two years longer to get a standard apartment building from permit request to completion than in the fastest cities. About one of those extra years was due to permit approval time.
- Permit Waits Increased Over Past 20 Years. On average across all the cities studied, approval took 0.6 years for an apartment permit requested in 2000 and 1.5 years for one requested in 2023, and the increase appeared in every region.
The authors compare cities using one standard project. They collected 1.1 million permit records from 60 cities from 2000 to 2025 and estimated how long it would take to build a 20-unit apartment building or a detached house in each, adjusting for recorded project characteristics. Measured waits likely run low because some pre-application reviews are missing.
Longer Waits Track Higher Rents, But Other Factors Could Drive The Relationship. Apartment permit approval time accounts for about half of the variation in median rents, and each added year of wait correlates with rents about 39 percent higher. One extra year of waiting for a building permit costs a developer another year of borrowing, which would justify roughly 8 percent higher rents. Yet cities where apartment permits take a year longer to approve have median rents about 39 percent higher, five times that. Land also sells for more in those cities, even though longer waits should lower land prices by shrinking what developers can pay. Both surprises may tell a simple story: desirable cities restrict housing, and slow permits are one part of a broader array of restrictive policies.
Slow Cities Take a Year Longer Than Fast Cities on Permits. When ranking cities by total time from application to completion, apartments in cities near the slow end (25th percentile) take 2.2 to 2.9 years longer than those near the fast end (75th percentile), and permit approval accounts for 0.9 to 1.1 of those years. In cities where permits take longer to issue, projects also take longer to finish once the permit is in hand. Where an apartment permit takes a year longer to issue, the full trip from application to finished building takes about two years longer. The study did not investigate why the two stages move together.
Apartment Permit Waits Have More Than Doubled Since 2000. An apartment application filed in these cities in 2000 took about seven months to get approved on average, and one filed in 2023 took about a year and a half, so developers now wait much longer before they can start building. The share of apartments approved within six months fell from 71 percent of 2000 applications to 44 percent of 2025 applications, though the 2025 figure is only partly observed. Approval waits have eased somewhat since 2023, but the latest estimates are the least certain.
The study shows that permit delay can be measured across cities, but only after heavy cleanup of inconsistent records. The authors propose standardized reporting, such as through the Census Bureau’s permit surveys, so every city is measured the same way. That would make it routine to see which cities are slowest, whether waits are getting longer, and whether time is lost before the permit is issued or after, so reformers have information to target the right stage. However, permits are one stage in a longer process, so speeding them up is likely only a part of the reforms needed.
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