Berkeley Undergraduate Journal

California has been suffering from a “housing crisis” for the past several years, an issue which many have regarded as a symptom of a housing supply shortage. Many researchers, policymakers, journalists, and voters alike have pointed to the relatively (at least compared to other states) slow pace of entitling proposed housing projects as a major culprit for why California’s housing shortage persists. These “entitlements” generally include zoning-related permits (e.g. site development permit) and environmental review determinations (e.g. California Environmental Quality Act, CEQA). Importantly, despite the reforms at the state level, local governments have almost exclusive control on the number of local commissions and committees (“land use approval bodies”) that a housing project needs to seek approval from on a project. This paper provides evidence of a positive correlation between the length of time that California housing projects take to acquire land-use entitlements with the number of local land-use approval bodies (such as planning commissions and design review commissions) that have jurisdiction over said entitlements. Using data points on over forty local jurisdictions of varying sizes and geographies (e.g. Central Coast, Los Angeles Area, Bay Area, Central Valley), this paper confirmed the hypothesis with statistical significance in six different development contexts. In the other two regressions, which concerned affordable housing and mixed-income housing project approval timelines, respectively, there was a negative relationship between this approval time and the number of approval bodies. An additional two development contexts, single family and multifamily projects requiring a full scale environmental impact report (EIR) did not reach statistical significance in the regression tests.