It’s surprising, but Oakland’s lefty mayor embraces deregulation
By Sal Rodriguez | December 12, 2025
Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee gets it. The longtime progressive former Congress member has taken a hatchet to the regulatory thicket that’s hindered true progress in Oaktown.
“The city has transformed its permitting process with same-day permits now available in six categories and digital permit wait times reduced from seven days to one day,” the mayor’s office reported in October. “The Planning and Building Department also extended permit center hours and secured $3 million to modernize software. Projects that once took 10 months can now move forward in weeks.”
Besides the convenience of being able to get things done quicker, when it comes to getting things built, time is money. The longer projects get stuck waiting for approvals the costlier projects can get. By ensuring the city is working in an expeditious manner, Mayor Lee is lifting a burden on builders, residents and entrepreneurs who want to invest in the city.
“The city should be a partner, not a roadblock, in getting your business or home renovation or development off the ground,” said Mayor Lee in August.
“Streamlining permitting is one of my top priorities because I know firsthand how frustrating it can be to navigate city processes as a resident of Oakland.”
Accordingly, Lee has overseen the expansion of by-right approval processes for commercial and residential projects alike.
In and around the downtown areas, ground floor uses of commercial properties are no longer subject to conditional use permitting processes that could take six months or longer, reported the San Francisco Chronicle, with the city planning to expand such relief city-wide. In practical terms, this means businesses can more easily get city approvals so they can get to work without having to deal with extra hoops.
“The changes make it easier for businesses such as medical offices, banks, tutoring facilities, pet groomers and fitness studios (to name a few) to open in ground-floor retail spaces up to a certain square-footage,” explained the city’s economic and workforce development department.
The biggest beneficiaries will be those who otherwise might have needed a conditional use permit triggering public hearing requirements. Who has time for that?
Likewise, the city announced a streamlined approval process for single-family homes and developments with up to 30 units provided they meet certain objective design standards. The design standards are helpfully provided by the city in an easy-to-access webpage.
Taken together, Oakland has made meaningful moves to simplify its regulatory demands.
“Oakland won’t solve its housing shortage overnight,” the folks at Strong Towns observed. “But by embracing this straightforward step, the city has positioned itself as a leader in showing how local governments can remove unnecessary barriers.”
That really should be the takeaway here. What Oakland is doing is removing barriers to productive activity that didn’t need to be there in the first place, allowing the city to focus on more substantive issues. If this can happen under the watch of a staunch progressive like Barbara Lee, there’s no excuse from a policy perspective for other cities not to do the same.
The politics, of course, can be another matter.
Indeed, as we’ve covered extensively at the Free Cities Center, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass had an early shot at being a great deregulator. One of her first actions upon taking office at the end of 2022 was an order for city bureaucrats to streamline approvals for affordable housing projects. It worked so well at getting projects to come online that Bass immediately faced pressure from NIMBYs to restrict it, which she did. While she may have appeased angry NIMBYs in the short-term, acquiescing to them is ultimately to the detriment of Angelenos stuck with a broken housing market.
Meanwhile, Lee isn’t the only Bay Area mayor slashing red tape. San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie has prioritized slashing his city’s notoriously onerous regulations, or, as Planning Director Sarah Dennis Phillips put it, “a bunch of dumb rules that no one needs.”
Likewise, San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan (the featured speaker at the Pacific Research Institute’s Sacramento conference on February 19) has leaned into the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to help his city run better and recognizes “we must reduce the cost of construction, reduce fees and streamline permitting so that we can build housing faster and more cost-effectively.”
It’s an encouraging trend to watch. Here’s to hoping more cities are not only paying attention but follow suit.
