The Housing Crisis Has a Mysterious, Unknowable Cause, But At Least Civilytics Can Speed Up the Permits

America is short nearly 3.8 million homes. Median home prices have surged 60% since 2019. The median first-time homebuyer is now 38 years old, an all-time record. And in places like San Jose, a typical family would need to spend 80% of their income just to make a mortgage payment. One might wonder: what shadowy, inscrutable force could possibly be causing this?

Surely not the concerned citizens of Wellesley, Massachusetts, who technically rezoned for more housing under their state’s MBTA Communities Act but (whoopsie) built essentially none of it. As Boston University professor Katherine Levine Einstein put it, some communities have seized on loopholes “to meet the letter of the law but not its intent, which was to create thousands of new homes.” Classic compliance energy. A+ for paperwork, F for actual houses.

And surely not the City of Tacoma, Washington, which initially gave itself a self-imposed deadline of 100,000 days to approve a construction permit. For those keeping score, that’s roughly 274 years, just in case you wanted to break ground sometime around the year 2299. (They later corrected it to 100 days, claiming it was a typo. Sure.) Meanwhile, King County clocked permits at 1,557 days (over four years), burning through an estimated $243,000 in carrying costs per project. As a state report concluded, “many local governments that claim to care about improving housing affordability are not aligning their actions to their words.”

It’s truly a mystery. Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies reports a record 22.6 million renter households are now cost-burdened. Up for Growth’s 2025 report shows the national housing gap hovering near 3.78 million units. San Francisco takes a leisurely 280 days (about nine months, the gestational period of a human child) just to process a building permit. You could literally conceive and deliver a baby in the time it takes San Francisco to tell you whether your blueprints are acceptable.

Yale professor David Schleicher summed up the paradox perfectly: “Everyone wants new housing, but no one wants it on their block.” Some people, it turns out, are deeply committed to housing affordability in the abstract, just not within eyeshot of their Restoration Hardware patio set. Academic research from San Francisco’s planning commission meetings found that hearings are dominated by older, wealthier homeowners who show up to oppose projects while the people who actually need housing are, predictably, too busy working to attend a four-hour meeting on a Tuesday afternoon.

The National Association of Home Builders estimates that regulatory compliance can add up to one-third of the cost of a $300,000 home, and builders in Arizona report needing 40 to 50 permits per subdivision. Spencer Kamps of the Home Builders Association of Central Arizona has called the process “cumbersome” and “very difficult,” which is frankly diplomatic. The AIA and the U.S. Conference of Mayors found that 42% of American households spend more than 30% of their income on housing, and that production remains constrained by “outdated and lengthy permitting processes.”

But here’s the good news. For the municipalities that actually want to build, the pro-growth local governments that are tired of watching their communities price out teachers, nurses, and anyone under 40, Civilytics is building the tools to help.

Civilytics is a civic technology platform designed to automate and streamline the land development review process. Instead of manually cross-referencing site plans against zoning codes, setback requirements, and municipal ordinances, a process that currently takes months and generates enough paperwork to deforest a small county, Civilytics uses automated compliance analysis to do it in a fraction of the time. Think of it as giving your planning department a co-pilot that never calls in sick, never misfiles an application, and never gives itself a 274-year deadline.

We can’t make people stop showing up to public hearings to argue that a three-story apartment building will “destroy the character” of a strip mall parking lot. That’s a protected civic tradition, apparently. But we can make sure that the governments who are ready to say “yes” have the technology to back it up: faster reviews, fewer bottlenecks, and a permitting process that doesn’t treat housing like a national security threat.

The housing crisis has a lot of causes. Interest rates. Labor shortages. Material costs. And one other thing that nobody can quite put their finger on. But whatever that thing is, Civilytics will be here to help the cities that are ready to build, whether their neighbors like it or not.

Civilytics: Because the permitting process shouldn’t take longer than the construction.