Florida started penalizing bureaucratic delay. Housing permits spiked | Hacker News Reader

Florida started penalizing bureaucratic delay. Housing permits spiked

washingtonpost.com

43 pointszbrozek10 comments

This is exactly what we need more of in America.

A great policy move, with measurable benefits that incentivizes government committees to be more rather than less efficient.

It's also amazing to see this reported upon by the Washington Post.

> It's also amazing to see this reported upon by the Washington Post.

It's an opinion piece, it's not reporting. So take all claims made with a grain of salt.

Building consents being processed faster is generally a good thing, if quality is maintained. If quality is sacrificed for speed, then you'll end up with poor quality housing.

>then you'll end up with poor quality housing.

I’m not at all convinced this is something worth caring about. In most sectors of the economy it is possible to get low quality for low money.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surfside_condominium_collapse

Quality does matter and can have serious consequences.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surfside_condominium_collapse

40 year old building that criminally ignored maintenance. I wouldn't cite that as a cautionary tale on building cheap. Multi-tenant buildings should always have a bigger regulatory burden than single family. However, building a single family home should have most regulatory burdens removed and let homeowners take responsibility for choosing their own tradeoffs.

I'd call it a cautionary tale of favoring lower costs over being safer. It would also be outrageous and tragic if 3 kids died in a substandard home.

The problem with letting homeowners take responsibility is that most of the homeowners don't direct the building of their homes. So to ensure the homeowner has a basic understanding of what they're buying we implement minimum standards in a building code. We even have a permit process to make sure that those standards are planned for and met with inspections at various points.

A poorly built building, disregarding catastrophic collapse, can

a) affect your health. [0]

b) lose large amounts of value, requiring significant investment of extra capital to remedy. Given a home is usually a person's largest investment, this can be ruinous. [1] [2] [3]

There's a reason building designs are regulated, and plans checked to ensure that they're appropriate for the planned site. Again, not saying that building consent processing shouldn't be sped up, it's a significant bottle-neck, but you have to accept that old trade-off, fast, good, cheap, choose two.

I'm not sure what level of government handles these things in Florida, is it at a county level? Anyhow, how have they implemented changes in response to this bill? Have they hired additional staff? How is that being funded, is it coming at the cost of other municipal spending, or will they increase application fees or taxes?

Or, will they just start rubber-stamping applications to meet the requirements with the staff they have? Or, were they just all sitting around with their thumbs up their butt? I highly doubt it's the latter, but seeing as it was implied throughout the entire article, I'll offer it for consideration.

The article was completely silent on this. And history is rife with the unintended consequences of well-intentioned policies. For example, when a centre-right government in my country wanted to reduce the amount of people on waiting lists for publicly funded elective procedures, it set targets, and penalties. But it didn't increase funding, as it believed that there was "waste" in the system, so wanted the healthcare providers to reduce that "waste" and use it to fund more surgeries. Then the consequences kicked in - people were put on "secret" waiting lists until they could be seen within the timeframes set by central government for the "official" waiting list [4]. Some people were simply not put on a waiting list for surgery they needed, because they wouldn't get it in time.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indoor_mold#Causes_and_growing...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaky_homes_crisis

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaky_condo_crisis

[3]: http://users.encs.concordia.ca/~raojw/crd/reference/referenc...

[4]: https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/memo-reveals-secret-waiting-li...

Just raise the cost of your permits by 66% so that after the maximum 50% penalty it still costs the same.

---

Although if the permit process was often (>50% of applications) taking over 30 days I do wonder how they achieved this faster time. Is it a less thorough review? Did they pull people from other departments? Was the person making the decision not the person who sent out the application's status and so it just sat on somebodies desk?

An improvement of efficacy of over 100% from just passing a law seems very suspicious.

It makes sense to me given that permitting office had no incentive to do its job previously.

If I were to guess, most of the time was sitting on various desks.

With a lot of government agencies, processing time is just a function of backlog que.

I had a trivial vehicle title issue and it took 9 months to get resolved. It would move from department to department spending 3 months on a desk in each department.

Each task was a 1 minute assessment, (is a box checked), or sometimes simply forwarding it to another group.

It would have taken much longer, but I spent a dozen hours calling in and convinced the bureaucrats to skip the que a few times.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com