This sounds fast for California. It's taken me about two years to get a site development permit to edit my roofline a bit to make it better at shedding water. I don't have a building permit yet. I desperately want to move out of this state, but my wife (who isn't handling any part of the project or our costs of living) likes the weather and so we're stuck here.

I think we could fix the housing shortage turbo-quick if we passed a constitutional amendment that offered property rights to landowners. But owning land right now is almost meaningless. It's the right to ask for permission to do something on that land, and local governments exist seemingly for the sole purpose of preventing any change whatsoever.

It's probably one of only a handful of root causes of American ossification and cost disease.