A big push to streamline housing development, and bend cost and affordability barriers for would-be homeowners and renters, increasingly focuses on reducing painfully-elongated permitting review times, a chronic hurdle for builders and developers.
The City of Honolulu, like many other cities across the United States, knows this impediment all too well.
In 2021, the City of Honolulu’s Department of Planning & Permitting was embroiled in a federal investigation stemming, in part, from the city’s lengthy permit review process.
Dawn Takeuchi took over as director of the department and began working for the city around the time that the United States District Court for the District of Hawaii unsealed charges against several employees in the department.
The charges alleged that government employees within the department accepted bribes to expedite or influence building permits and inspections.
According to Takeuchi, Honolulu’s permitting department faced severe backlogs, with single-family permits sometimes taking two years or more, and commercial projects languishing even longer at the time.
As a result, a number of applicants aimed to skirt such lengthy reviews by going beyond the law.
“I think the way things were running, there was an opportunity for exploitation of those conditions. That was an even bigger black eye on the department, so we struggled with trying to dig ourselves out of a hole,” Takeuchi told HousingWire TBD.
As Takeuchi put it, the department’s woes stemmed from several issues. COVID disruptions, staffing shortages, outdated 30-year-old technology and the federal indictments all played a role.
The city’s planning and permitting department slowly improved over the last several years, but according to reporting from the Honolulu Civil Beat, the city’s residential permitting time still averaged eight months as of early 2025.
To modernize the department, Honolulu pivoted, replacing its legacy systems beginning in August 2025 with a new AI permitting software, CivCheck.
Early results show promising results.
Early progress
Q1 2026 data shows that permits processed through CivCheck reduced average permit decision times from 73 days to 32.5 days. This review process currently only applies to single-family, duplex, ADUs, additions and renovations – smaller projects that require shorter review timelines – but the improvements open up the possibility of streamlined reviews for larger projects like multifamily towers.
The City of Honolulu plans to use CivCheck to review commercial pre-checks launching later this summer, and a future expansion of the platform will review affordable housing and other large-scale projects in the near future.
“Our department having faster permits is absolutely helpful for applicants and landowners,” Takeuchi said. “In such a short time, so much can change with interest rates or construction costs. We ship in pretty much everything when it comes to construction, so timing is of the essence. People want to be able to get a permit quickly.”
However, Takeuchi acknowledged that rolling out the new technology takes time, and it is a transition for staff members.
“It’s definitely a transition that is challenging for a lot of our staff, which is understandable. So we just have to provide more training and a greater comfort level for them. But that’s the number one challenge, I think, in technology modernization,” she explained.
Streamlined reviews
When planning staff have to review permit applications manually, it can take weeks or months to get a response. When a response finally comes, a missing document or code issue means starting over. Delays build up, and housing production slows down. AI permit review platforms like CivCheck can catch mistakes quickly so that they are addressed early on in the process, therefore speeding up the process.
The technology doesn’t replace reviewers. Instead, it helps ensure every application is submitted to the correct standards before entering the manual review stage.
“CivCheck, our AI-guided plan review solution, catches those issues before a reviewer ever opens the file, so applicants show up with something complete, and staff spend their time making decisions instead of chasing paperwork,” said Cyrus Symoom, CEO at Clariti, the parent company of CivCheck.
A growing movement
As the housing crisis intensifies and technology rapidly improves, a growing chorus of municipalities have adopted platforms that enable AI-driven permitting plan reviews, in a bid to streamline housing development.
Honolulu was an early adopter. Other cities such as Austin, Seattle, Los Angeles, San Jose, Boston, and Denver have also explored and adopted AI platforms to streamline permitting reviews.
State legislators may be expediting the adoption process by requiring municipalities to review permit applications more quickly. Many states have already passed or are considering “shot clock” laws, which require local governments to initiate or complete reviews within a specified timeframe.
Legislation in Georgia is one example. A recently passed state bill set a 45-day deadline for initial permit reviews, followed by 20 days for a second review and 14 days for ensuing submissions. To meet these deadline requirements, many municipalities may be compelled to adopt AI to speed up the review process.
However, rolling out those platforms isn’t easy, and it comes with a cost. The City of Honolulu, for example, invested $7 million to get CivCheck up and running, a price tag that city officials received substantial local pushback for.
In a bid to help with this high price tag, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) recently announced a $3 million grant program to help state, local, and tribal governments adopt AI-driven permitting and building code review tools.
While the funding is a relatively small drop in the bucket, the new grant program signals that the federal government believes in the technology’s potential.
“The bigger signal is HUD naming this a priority at all. Permitting went from a niche operational issue to something Washington treats as central to getting housing built,” Symoom said.