Mayor Daniel Lurie slashes
red tape in San Francisco
By Sal Rodriguez | September 15, 2025
Since taking office in January, San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie has made streamlining his city’s notoriously challenging regulatory processes a top priority. In February, Lurie established PermitSF, a multi-agency effort tasked with speeding up and simplifying the city’s permitting processes.
By May, the city could point to some in-house reforms: the city at least had a single webpage where all of its permitting information could be easily accessed and customer service inquiries to multiple departments now go to the same place to ensure prompt responses.
These changes aren’t the sort of thing that gets anyone excited, but they’re the back-to-basics work that make things easier for people not used to navigating byzantine municipal processes. Over time, the initiative also saw through more tangible changes.
Restaurant owners no longer needed to make in-person trips to the city’s Permit Center to have candles on their tables. Business owners no longer need to get the city’s permission to “paint the name of their business on their façade or put up a small sign in their window,” per the city website. Nor do businesses need to shell out $300 to $2,500 annually to have “sidewalk tables and chairs and sidewalk merchandise displays.”
On September 2, Lurie unveiled a package of reforms pushing further reforms getting government out of the way of ordinary people. At a press conference, Lurie began with the story of Judy and Ed Craine. The couple was hit with a$1,500 fine for parking their car in their own driveway.
“We got this email saying we can’t park in the pad anymore. I said what, that’s crazy,” recounted Ed, according to a story from the local ABC affiliate. The couple had to face off with the city’s Planning Department, which “gave them a challenge: prove that parking was a historic use on the lot, and they might get a waiver.”
Eventually, the city capitulated, grandfathering in the couple’s parking space and waiving the fine. “One viewer, a manager of an aerial photography collection, found a photo from 1958 that showed a car on the concrete pad in front of the house,” ABC 7 reported.
“Today, I am proud to introduce legislation that puts an end to this maddening rule,” Lurie said. “This legislation will instantly end 123 open cases and prevent countless others from dealing with future headaches.”
“Today, I am proud to introduce legislation that puts an end to this maddening rule,” —Daniel Lurie
From there, he unveiled further proposed reforms. “All of these things combined … remove a bunch of dumb rules that no one needs, like the one that prevented San Franciscans from parking in their own driveways,” said San Francisco Planning Director Sarah Dennis Phillips at the press conference.
These include making it easier for buildings deemed historic to be reused instead of sitting vacant. “Historic buildings often have unique architecture making them harder to fill with traditional tenants,” the mayor’s office explained. “Adding greater flexibility for these special buildings will ensure they won’t fall into disrepair due to disinvestment.”
The city is also moving to issue “over-the-counter” permits for small restaurants seeking to remodel. Instead of requiring business owners to wait around for up to a month to get approval, the city is moving to make it possible for permits to be issued on the spot.
And for large housing developments, the city will drop a requirement that developers meet with city staff as part of the permitting application process. “Something that has frustrated people for decades,” Lurie said. “It was unnecessary and that meeting is gone.”
Every regulatory delay adds up. As the Biden Council of Economic Advisors noted last year, “Permitting delays contribute to the nationwide housing shortage by increasing the cost of new housing development, leading would-be deals to not pencil out.” They pointed out that developers of multifamily housing in San Francisco could wait as long as 33 months for their permits to be approved, compared to eight months in nearby Oakland.
Taken together, it’s apparent that Lurie understands the need to disentangle San Franciscans from the red tape politicians and bureaucrats have imposed on them over the course of decades. The more red tape he can slash, the easier residents, business owners and homebuilders can breathe.
It’s also a lesson for other cities. If San Francisco can get real about the problem of red tape, why not you?
Sal Rodriguez is opinion editor for the Southern California News Group and a senior fellow with the Pacific Research Institute. He is the author of “Dynamism or Decay? Getting City Hall Out of the Way,” published by the Pacific Research Institute.
