How tech sped up Honolulu’s housing permits

For years, the Honolulu Department of Planning and Permitting made headlines for all the wrong reasons. Building permits sat in limbo for months, sometimes years, frustrating stakeholders across the city.

But the department has dramatically slashed parts of its permitting timeline, thanks in part to new technology, including artificial intelligence.

“I think we're at a point where we're finally turning a new page in our story,” said the department’s Second Deputy Director Regina Malepeai.

Around the country, slow permitting processes hinder construction and can be a critical slowdown as communities continue to navigate high housing costs and a shortage of units. Ever-changing regulations can be difficult for builders and city staff to stay on top of, and in many places, outdated technology isn’t meeting the needs of planning departments. 

As part of the new page in its story, planners in Honolulu are embracing innovative tools in their efforts to move building applications faster through the pipeline.

Keeping the public up to date as regulations, requirements and ordinances change over time is difficult, said Abe Toma, the department’s innovation director. That leads to one of the biggest challenges that slow down permit approvals: low-quality applications.

“We run into issues … because the initial plan that comes in just is not close to being something that we can even start reviewing,” Toma said, “because it's missing a lot of pieces that are required for review, and it's not compliant with the rules that it needs to be following.” That leads to a lot of back and forth between applicants and the department, he said, causing delays.

To improve the caliber of plans coming in, the department started using robotic process automation in 2022 to check the completeness of applications in a pre-screening, Malepeai said. The bot runs each application through a checklist, and if information is missing or incomplete, the application is rejected. By implementing automation, the pre-check process was slashed from about six months in 2022 to now just a few days, Toma added.

Once pre-screening improved, the backlog of applications then shifted to reviewers checking code compliance. That’s a more complicated part of the permitting system, Malepeai said, because it requires a strong understanding of local codes and regulations.

In 2023, the department partnered with CivCheck, a software company that uses AI to build jurisdiction-specific platforms to streamline permitting. The software guides users through the permit application process, ensuring applicants are submitting all the necessary documentation and information, said the company’s CEO and co-founder Dheekshita Kumar. CivCheck also checks for code compliance issues, including conflicts in zoning, building codes and fire codes. 

On the municipal side, CivCheck helps streamline the review process by presenting reviewers with a list of regulations associated with the specific project they’re reviewing and highlighting key information related to code compliance. The software will also offer a suggestion as to whether the plans are code compliant based on specific points in the plan, but the final decision always lies with the reviewer, Kumar said. 

In Honolulu, this helped reduce the time reviewers spent on each plan from about 60 to 90 minutes on average per application, to 15 to 20 minutes.

“It's not like AI is replacing the plan reviewer or completely automating the whole process,” Kumar said. “The AI is acting more like a copilot, and in doing so, is just reducing the time it takes for the plan reviewer to make a decision on whether or not a project is compliant with a given regulation.”

CivCheck also aims to help train a new generation of plan reviewers, Kumar said. Many cities are losing experienced plan reviewers to retirement, and it often takes new hires years to fully understand how to move through an application and what to look for. CivCheck works with a department’s senior reviewers to “translate their knowledge onto the platform so that even the most entry-level plan reviewers can conduct the review to the same level of quality as your most experienced plan reviewers,” Kumar said.

CivCheck is now working with several other cities. The software is in no way meant to replace city employees, but rather to augment existing workflows, Kumar said, adding that human input is critical to tasks like permitting that ultimately affect residents’ health and safety. 

Now that the pilot program with Honolulu has ended, the department is working with CivCheck to develop a long-term partnership, Malepeai said. 

“It's important that we do our reviews and that we can ensure compliance and that rules are being followed — that's critical, and we understand that,” she said. “But if we can do it more efficiently so that it doesn't take months and months or years for people to get through DPP to their next step, that's the goal.”