How states, cities can use federal funds to fix permitting delays with AI

Thanks to a new grant from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, states, cities and tribal governments can improve their permitting processes with artificial intelligence — solving common housing issues, including one that cost a former Colorado technology official and her family nearly $100,000.

The grant, which was announced at the end of May, offers governments up to $3 million to deploy automated building code permitting systems. They can partner with HUD to evaluate the effectiveness of the automated systems, feedback the agency said it will use to inform future AI grant programs. Applications are open until July 13.

In the grant’s announcement, HUD states that “participating jurisdictions could deploy systems such as PermitFlow, Blitz Permits, CivCheck, Permitify, or similar platforms,” as these platforms can assist with application intake, completeness checks, automated code screening and digital workflow management.

Julia Richman is the current vice president of government affairs at the software company Clariti, which owns CivCheck. She also served as the deputy executive director and deputy chief operations officer at the Colorado Governor’s Office of Information Technology and worked for the City of Boulder. And in her personal life, she experienced costly permitting delays during a home renovation in 2022.

When attempting to expand her home, Richman said her family ran into extensive foundation issues, requiring new permits to continue construction. She submitted a second permit application just as Denver was changing zoning regulations, amid an onslaught of rushed applications from other builders who were trying to get approval before the changes were enacted. She said the situation was also made difficult by the global health crisis.

“This was 2022 so a lot of employees had left the department following COVID,” she said. “It’s a very difficult job to be permit intake or plan review staff, just because it’s so complicated. Folks who are coming to the counter have a lot on the line financially, personally — they’re trying to build homes, they’re trying to build businesses, and so it’s really difficult.”

While waiting for the permits to be approved, her family moved out, and, for about seven months, paid a mortgage and rent. The costs of lumber and other materials had begun rising during the pandemic; Richman estimated the total project cost rose about 20% more while her family waited for the permits to be approved, totaling at about $100,000 in extra costs.

“In 2022, I’d gotten introduced to the founders of CivCheck, and they had asked me to become an adviser to their efforts, and I was really excited about that, in part because I was going through my own permitting woes, but also I had gotten a lot of exposure to the challenges of permitting working for the City of Boulder, where I led innovation and technology, so really [I] worked firsthand with with the planning department and understood just how difficult permitting and planning is for communities,” Richman continued.

Richman said that CivCheck, which was acquired by Clariti in October, serves as a “co-pilot” that surfaces information and makes recommendations for human reviewers and applicants. She said it CivCheck keeps humans in the loop for judgment and safety-critical decisions, while the AI handles tedious tasks.

“My house that I built probably had 40 or 50 pages of plans, and on those pages, each page has to have a north arrow,” Richman said. “And so in the pre‑AI context, you have a human being who’s looking [at] every single page. … Our platform will surface the north arrow, or find the information on a plan set that a human being would take 15, 20 minutes to find.” 

Richman said Clariti is being piloted by roughly 20 jurisdictions across the country. It was recently adopted in Honolulu after a pilot in 2022. Takeuchi Apuna, director of Honolulu’s Department of Planning and Permitting, has said the platform is like “TurboTax for permitting” and claimed it helped cut residential review times in her city by roughly 60%, by guiding applicants through code requirements before plans ever reach staff reviewers.

Clariti is also helping municipalities, free of charge, apply for HUD grants, by supplying detailed work plans, cost estimates and deployment timelines drawn from its various CivCheck deployments, so local governments don’t have to guess when filling out applications.

Richman said that while worries about certain risks with automation, such as bias, are founded, not all AI tools are the same. Chatbots are one category, while automation is another, she said, and added that to be responsible with AI, cities need to pick the right tool for each job. She compared background automation tools to a letter opener and large language model tools to a jackhammer.

“You’re not deploying something that’s spying on people, that’s creating inequity or challenges with access to government systems,” she said. “In fact, the platform might actually make it easier and more equitable for the casual applicant to interact with the city, because the platform doesn’t know that you’re a big, important developer in a community. They just know that you’ve submitted this application.”