Honolulu planning office uses ‘TurboTax-like’ AI tool to help applicants reduce mistakes

As cities across the country look for ways to speed up housing development, the Honolulu Department of Planning and Permitting has debuted a new artificial intelligence tool to reduce residential permitting backlogs and shrink timelines to review applications.

Last week, the department began using “AI Studio,” software from the Canadian firm Clariti, designed to help city and county permitting offices identify where AI tools can reduce delays, improve application quality and streamline reviews.

Dawn Takeuchi Apuna, the department’s director, said the software flags possible code issues, identifies missing information and highlights potential problem areas for both applicants and reviewers.

“It’s kind of like TurboTax for permitting,” Apuna said in an interview. “The AI really helps guide applicants through a much better quality application, and then in turn it means less review cycles and faster turnaround.”

Apuna, who has led the city-county department for four years, said the city piloted the software in 2022 as part of a broader modernization effort that also included overhauling its legacy permitting platform and shifting to electronic plan reviews after years of criticism over permit delays. She said the technology has helped cut residential review times by roughly 60% by guiding applicants through code requirements before plans ever reach staff reviewers.

According to the Census Bureau, Honolulu County receives about 20,000 building permit applications annually, across all construction types, but only authorizes about 1,400 new private housing units per year.

“Building permit themselves are very complicated, the various codes that apply because scopes are always different and unique,” Apuna explained, adding that she’s spoken to other municipalities, like the City of Los Angeles, that are also interested in the tool. “I think they were all dealing with the same challenges as far as plan quality and these backlogs.”

Apuna said the AI tool also serves as a training tool for staff, highlighting areas of concern in plans.

“It’ll highlight and flag a part of the plans that we’re focused on, so when we have new staff come in, it’s just a really clear, consistent way to go through the actual plan,” she said.

The department is only using the tool to assist with residential single and two-family residential permitting, but Apuna said Honolulu is preparing to expand to commercial permitting this summer and could eventually require applicants to use the system. The effort builds on deployments already underway in Honolulu, where officials are using the Clariti’s CivCheck AI plan review platform to reduce repetitive review cycles and improve first-round approval rates.