Sounds like a plan:
Cities embrace pre-approved housing designs
By D. Dowd Muska | September 4, 2026
It’s so obvious, even Los Angeles gets it.
In response to the savage firestorms that struck California’s largest metro region in January 2025, both the city and county of Los Angeles enacted a promising affordable-housing reform. Last summer, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass announced a “pre-approved standard plan pilot program for single-family homes” that created “a public-facing, virtual library of … code-compliant designs.” Several months earlier, Los Angeles County began to accept “designs for pre-approved standard plans for fire rebuilds.”
While its interest stems from a unique circumstance, Los Angeles is participating in a trend gaining significant steam. A May analysis by the Pew Research Center found that a “growing number” of “cities struggling with new housing production have begun providing preapproved building plans to developers as part of a broader effort to lower the cost of building new homes in their communities.” Save money, the thinking goes, by saving time. As Pew wrote, before ground is broken in most communities, blueprints are “evaluated by a series of discretionary boards and commissions such as the planning commission, city council, board of adjustment and preservation committee.”
It’s a process plagued by flaws inherent to the public sector, according to the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Building departments “operate within fixed budget cycles, lengthy hiring processes, and administrative constraints that limit their ability to respond to sudden increases in workload.” With no “way to adapt, temporary surges can become persistent backlogs that delay housing construction and increase costs.” The National Association of Home Builders considers “development review timelines and uncertainty … two of the most headache-inducing elements of the housing development process.”
With few exceptions, any alteration that snips red tape is good. Per the Roosevelt Institute’s Ned Resnikoff:
Speeding up the approval process can … result in small but real cost savings for home builders; it cuts down on some of the costs associated with navigating the bureaucratic approval process and sitting on an undeveloped plot of land. This is essentially a win-win-win: Homebuilders get to move more quickly and save a little bit of money, the city doesn’t need to spend finite staff hours on design review, and the city as a whole gets more housing.
As Strong Towns notes, signing off on a menu of preapproved designs “requires local government to operate as the highest form of collaboration and make the internal shift from vertical approaches to a more horizontal approach.” That’s not an easy task for public bureaucracies of any size. But defying the odds, progress continues — and appears to be accelerating.
Last year, the Detroit Justice Center conducted a “national survey which was distributed to municipal planning departments, regional housing organizations and professional associations.” Responses were received from “the Pacific Northwest, Midwest, Southeast and Southwest.” Nearly one in four cities had “active” preapproval programs, of which 61% saved “more than one month on permitting.” Some cities estimated cost reductions “of $10,000 per unit.”
No two preapproval approaches are identical. The New York Times reported that usually, “programs offer a menu of plans that builders and potential buyers can view online,” with local governments buying or licensing “access to the plans, effectively subsidizing the cost for builders.” Sometimes, the choices are few, while “dozens” of options are available elsewhere. And while many are “available citywide,” others are restricted “to certain neighborhoods.”
Yavapai County, Ariz. — which contains the rapidly growing Quad Cities region of Prescott, Prescott Valley, Chino Valley and Dewey-Humboldt — suffers from a “workforce housing crisis.” So the jurisdiction makes six single-family plans (“one-, two-and three-bedroom designs”) available “at no cost” through its A Home of My Own Program, launched in 2020.
Portland’s blueprints are for single-family homes and “detached Accessory Dwelling Unit construction.” Its “Certified House Plans … are designs pre-approved … for building code compliance to construct homes and ADUs that are identical in design, and construction materials,” injecting “more predictability and some cost savings in the permit review process.”
Cincinnati is accepting submissions for “a set of freely available pre-approved plans for two-, three-, and four-family buildings … followed by construction of two demonstration projects using the plans.” Mayor Aftab Pureval laments that “housing is extremely expensive and extremely complicated” in his city, a reality “particularly true for builders who don’t have the same resources as larger developers, and … the kinds of multifamily missing middle housing that we know residents want.” On September 14, a “Design Competition Awards Ceremony” will be held to “honor the winners in each category.”
For now, Seattle is limiting its focus to accessory dwelling units. According to Pew, since 2019 “190 ADUs have been built through [Seattle’s] preapproved programs and the city’s “Office of Planning & Community Development’s annual reports highlight that the preapproved ADUs reduce approval times by a factor of 2.6.”
In 2024, Tulsa “selected Flintlock LTD, Co. to develop permit-ready housing construction plans.” June saw the release of “the highly anticipated T-Town HOME (Housing Options Made Easy) Catalog, a new collection of pre-approved housing plans designed to make it faster, easier and more affordable to build new homes and housing units in Tulsa.” The 18 selections range “from accessory dwelling units to single-family homes, to duplexes, to fourplexes, a sixplex and even a tenplex.”
Preapproved housing designs are popular, dream-home planner Jennifer Krouse believes, because they are “politically neutral and quicker to implement than some of the structural problems we face, like increasing the cohort of contractors who build or reforming zoning.” But small-scale headway shouldn’t have to wait for sweeping policy changes. Given the enormity of the affordable-housing problem, solutions of any size are welcome.
D. Dowd Muska is a researcher and writer who studies public policy from the limited-government perspective. A veteran of several think tanks, he writes a column and publishes other content at No Dowd About It.