Residential building permit activity in the City of Dallas slowed in February.

Dallas’ building permit process has been a hot topic among the development community as of late, considering the costly and time-consuming nature of slow turnaround times, the recent launch of the city’s online permit dashboard, and Governor Abbott’s proposed plan to fix the problem.

The city’s Development Services Department (DSD) oversees local building permit applications and is responsible for issuing local construction permits and ensuring sustainable land development in Dallas. Andrew Espinoza manages DSD, taking over the Dallas’ Chief Building Official role last summer.

At the start of the year, Espinoza and DSD rolled out a comprehensive online permitting tool that tracks monthly single-family permit activity in Dallas.

DSD only has two months of available data for 2023, with no notable difference in performance metrics between January and February, according to the Residential Permit Activity Dashboard (RPAD).

Development Services took 64 days to issue a single-family building permit in February based on multiple revisions, a 13-day decrease compared to January’s 77-day turnaround time, RPAD data shows.

It is important to note that February’s issuance time drops to 29 days for permit applications that require zero revisions.

While a median decrease of 13 days can be perceived as a positive month-over-month change for the Department, February’s metrics were more than double DSD’s 15-day performance goal and hundreds of percent higher than the three-to-five days it took before the pandemic, The Dallas Express previously reported.

Dallas’ building permit process is costly for the local development community. At a recent Dallas Regional Chamber luncheon, Governor Greg Abbott spotlighted the issue and how disruptive it is to Texas’ economic development goals.

“[If] you’re holding a piece of property for 30 months, incapable of building on it because you lack a permit, that’s costing you a lot of money,” Abbott told the audience of local business professionals.

Out of the 101 residential permit applications submitted in February, the department issued 71% or 77 single-family permits within its performance goal timeframe, whereas 32 were not, RPAD metrics show.

Regarding the total residential permit count issued in February, DSD approved 172 residential permits in February, including 87 issued in 2023 and 85 left over from last year. This marked a 24% decrease from 213 issued by the Department in January, according to a comparison of available 2023 RPAD data.

Despite the slight month-over-month dip in the median days to issue, subjectively long turnaround times have caused a backlog that Dallas City Manager T.C. Broadnax and Espinoza have yet to clear.

Considering that DSD made no significant reduction in the issuance time from January to February, it will be quite revealing to see how they perform when March’s single-family permit activity gets released on April 1.