Three changes Berkeley could make, each with the evidence behind it and the finding that would prove it wrong. Two of the three started out as something else and were rewritten when the City's own records disagreed with them.
Two things here work differently from the main page, and both are worth knowing before you weigh any of it. The recommendations are my reading of what the measurements imply, not measurements themselves. And the permit-workflow figures below are the one part of this site not computed live in your browser: they come from a script run against the City's permit records, committed as tools/adu_review_times.py and data/adu-records.json so the numbers can be re-derived without taking the City's word or mine.
Berkeley is not slow to approve, by the only comparison available. It clears an apartment building in about six months, faster than most of California, and has permitted a higher share of its state allocation than the median of the 539 jurisdictions filing the same report. That is true, and it cuts against everything below.
But approval time is counted from the day an application arrives, while every deadline the City is actually held to starts later, when the application is deemed complete. On small projects the City's own permit records put the wait to reach completeness at a median of 116 days, on the same order as the entire application-to-approval time the State ever sees. The years that follow approval are not measured by anyone. The six-month figure is not wrong. It is describing a process whose slowest stretches sit outside every clock that governs it.
The levers Council reached for in April 2026 were all cost levers, and the City's own consultant put the feasibility gap on a ten-unit condominium at sixteen points of return while finding that removing the in-lieu fee entirely closes two to five. RAND, measuring 140 completed projects, found time to be the dominant cost driver and priced a month of California predevelopment at roughly $1,284 per home. If that is right, the unpulled levers are the ones that shorten time and reduce uncertainty, and all three below need the same precondition: knowing where the time goes.
Every statutory deadline that applies to Berkeley starts at the same moment: when an application is deemed complete. AB 2234 gives 30 business days for projects of 25 homes or fewer and 60 for larger ones. The state ADU statute gives 60 days. AB 1332 gives 30 days where an applicant uses a preapproved plan. All of them run from completeness.
Completeness is not approval, and the two stages are different kinds of work. Reaching completeness is the intake gate: the City confirming an application has everything it needs, the right drawings, forms, fees and studies, before anyone assesses whether the project is any good. The decision that follows is the actual review against zoning and code.
The intake gate is the longer of the two, and nothing measures it. Reading the City's own permit workflow records, the median wait from submittal to being deemed complete is 116 days. The decision that follows takes 52.
A city in this position can report perfect compliance with every deadline it is subject to, and the report will be true, and it will describe about a third of the wait. That is the reason to ask for something more than statutory metrics.
The opportunity is a procurement already underway. On 20 January 2026 Council awarded Clariti Cloud $5,359,128 to replace Accela over twenty months. The report says the system will deliver "compliance with State laws (e.g. AB 2234 electronic submittal and permit tracking requirements)" and is "necessary to improve transparency and reduce permit processing times." Compliance tracking alone would measure the 52 days and miss the 116.
And some of it is not missing so much as switched off. The permit portal Berkeley runs today ships with a record-comment facility, a timeline and an activity view. Its published configuration marks all three unavailable.
No public measure of the 116-day stage, and no obligation to produce one.
Live permit status reachable only through an undocumented vendor front end. The State's copy runs about 16 months behind.
A resident had to reconstruct all of this from workflow milestones.
Both halves published: how long an application waits to be accepted as complete, and how long the decision takes once it is.
Plan-check round counts published, which is the mechanism behind the first half.
A documented machine-readable feed, so nobody has to reconstruct it again.
The cheap path is already in the specification. Section 4.14 asks for "API integration with GIS" and "the ability to drill down from spatial maps into the Permitting system to view open, expired, or pending permits." Berkeley's ArcGIS is already publicly queryable. If permit data is going to flow there anyway, public visibility is a decision about which layer is public, not a new integration.
Where the State's file gives a reason for a project stalling, it is overwhelmingly money: 2,390 homes across 16 sites, 42% of the waiting room, recorded as awaiting public financing. Berkeley does commit money ahead of that, through Housing Trust Fund reservations. The problem is how long they last.
HTF policy limits a reservation to 24 months, a rule the City describes as being there "to ensure that City funds are not indefinitely committed to projects that are not moving forward." That is a reasonable guard against dead projects. It is also calibrated below the process it is meant to survive.
The consequence is visible in the City's own agenda. On 10 February 2026 staff asked Council to extend every active reservation it holds.
24-month term against a funding assembly that takes about as long, with renewal requiring a Council item.
Funding rounds released "when there are sufficient funds in the HTF to warrant releasing a NOFA", not on a calendar and not aligned to state deadlines.
Revenue is volatile: $10.7m in FY24, $831,000 in FY25.
A term matched to observed timelines, or renewal delegated to the City Manager with notice to Council.
A commitment a developer can carry through a full state application cycle without it expiring mid-round.
Longer term, a revolving construction fund, where the constraint is turnover rather than annual revenue.
On size, which is the obvious objection. At roughly $9m a year against a LIHTC median development cost near $250,000 a unit, Berkeley cannot be a large single source. Montgomery County, Maryland is the counter-example worth reading: a $100m revolving construction fund, financed by housing-authority bonds the county services, which converts to permanent financing at lease-up and repays itself so the same capital lends again. It targets 6,000 units over twenty years, 30% of them permanently affordable, and made its first loan of $14.3m in December 2021. A revolving fund does not need to be large. It needs to turn over.
Accessory dwelling units are the quiet majority of Berkeley's permitting workload: 801 separate filings produced 827 homes between 2018 and 2025, about 103 homes a year, steady across eight years and 18.3% of every home the city permits. This page originally recommended that Berkeley adopt preapproved plans for them. It already has. AB 1332 required every California city to run such a programme by 1 January 2025, and Berkeley's gallery is that programme.
So the question is not whether to build one. It is whether the one that exists touches the thing causing the delay. The permit records say the delay is revision cycles.
The obvious explanation would be that an application crawls from desk to desk. It does not. The technical reviews run concurrently, and the desk that consolidates them adds a single day.
What the number of desks does change is the chance of a correction. Each additional reviewer is another independent opportunity to find something, and finding something is what costs the eleven weeks.
That leaves one lever. Review is already concurrent, consolidation is already fast, and the handoffs are already cheap, so there is no process streamlining left to win. The only thing that shortens this is reducing what a reviewer can flag, before the application is filed. What prevents a correction is knowing the requirement in advance, which is precisely what AB 2234 already obliges the City to publish: a checklist of what makes an application complete, plus worked examples. Preapproved plans are one form of that, and Berkeley's version is narrow.
Twelve factory-built designs, nothing for a unit framed on the lot, covering ADUs only.
The benefit is a fee discount plus "often more quickly", with no service standard and no published uptake.
63% of permits still go through at least one revision, and nothing tests a design against the lot before filing.
Standard plans for units framed on the lot, which is what the permit record shows Berkeley actually builds.
A published cap of two plan checks absent a written health-or-safety finding, adopted voluntarily.
The programme extended to duplexes and fourplexes before it is required to be.
A check that runs a design against the actual parcel before anything is filed.
The last one already exists and does not need building. A preapproved plan is generic and a lot is not, so the gap between "this design is approved" and "this design works here" is where a correction lives. Symbium runs that check for any address in California, with the state ADU rules and the local ordinance compiled into it, and sells a staff-side version that produces the applicable checklist and the comment letter. Chula Vista has adopted a tool of this kind. Berkeley links a calculator today, but it estimates costs, fees and rents and does not test whether anything fits.
Worth being exact about the technology, because the wrong framing invites the wrong objection. The useful layer is deterministic, the zoning code compiled into rules, which is what makes a setback finding auditable and defensible by a planner. Generative and AI-assisted tools have a real place around it, in drafting a compliant massing against the lot's topography and existing structures and in writing the correction letter, but not in making the determination.