San Francisco took 610 days to permit two bathrooms | The Locally Times
Published · The Locally Times
DBI issued permit 202404129892-0 on October 14, 2026, after 610 calendar days of in-house processing.
The San Francisco Department of Building Inspection issued permit 202404129892-0 on October 14, 2026, 610 calendar days and 417 business days after the application was filed on February 12, 2025. The permit covers work at 3660 16th Street: two new bathrooms and a renovated one on the ground floor, a partition wall demolished to add a bedroom, a relocated water heater and range, and a stair connecting the ground floor to the third floor taken out, with a second bathroom added and a kitchen renovated at the adjacent unit. The record lists this work as a renovation of an existing building — bathrooms, a bedroom, a kitchen — not a tower, not a foundation, not a structure the city had never seen before. The record shows the application spent its entire life in the department's In-House channel, the queue where city staff, not an outside expediter, check the plans. Twenty months of processing for a permit to rebuild bathrooms is not a safety inspection; it is a queue. The counterargument deserves its strongest form: this single record shows only how long the permit took, not why, and an application that needed revisions, corrections, or compliance work could legitimately take longer than a clean one. We accept that, and we accept that Building Inspection's core job is checking construction for safety — a job worth doing carefully. But a process that cannot distinguish a bathroom renovation from a structural risk is not careful; it is simply slow, and slowness imposed on ordinary work is a cost the homeowner pays in months of waiting. The department already publishes this record — the filing date, the issuance date, the calendar and business day counts, the processing channel, the scope of work — in its Building Permit Application Issuance Metrics dataset on the city's open data portal. That publication is the right instinct, and it is what makes the case for the next step: the department should set and publish enforceable processing-time standards for routine permits and report its performance against those standards monthly, using the data it already collects. A standard would force the honest conversation this record invites: if a 610-day bathroom permit is within standard, the standard is indefensible; if it is outside standard, the public deserves to know how often the department misses and why. The homeowner at 3660 16th Street filed in February 2025 and received approval in October 2026. The department should set enforceable processing-time standards for routine permits and publish its delay data monthly, so the next bathroom renovation does not take 610 days. This editorial represents the institutional view of The Locally Times. Our reporting is separate and follows document-based standards. We welcome disagreement — write to us at editorial@locallytimes.com.