Permitting is broken in Somerville. As anyone who’s ever talked to a small business owner or builder can tell you, the city makes it incredibly difficult to build or permit almost anything. It’s a big enough issue that multiple candidates in last year’s city elections made permitting reform a campaign issue. Critically, permitting reform is also a major obstacle to addressing the housing crisis.
It’s a simple fact that Somerville’s permitting significantly increases the cost of housing here. Builders know that a single day of delay of during a foundation inspection can add tens of thousands of dollars in carrying costs. Having to fix an issue with the foundation that is not caught during plans inspection can cost hundreds of thousands. In Somerville, these sorts of issues are common enough that builders build them into their cost calculations. They then must plan for higher rents or sale price upon completion.
There are two reasons for these delays: we require excessive reviews for compliance, and we lack the staff to manage those reviews.
We inspect the building plans, we inspect the planned landscaping and plantings, we inspect the foundations, we inspect the drywall, and many other steps. On their own each step seems like a good idea: we want our buildings to be built well and have a positive impact on the city. But each step requires city staff that is knowledgeable enough about that domain and can assist in remediating any issues that occur. That’s a lot of different reviews for every project in the city, no matter the scale.
Even if our Inspectional Services Department were fully staffed, it would still be quite a challenge to complete all the required reviews. At current staffing levels, city inspections are inevitably behind schedule and sometimes cut corners, leading to numerous problems in construction.
Somerville inspections have been known to miss serious issues as well. We have heard a story of a family that bought a house where one toilet’s sewer connection was not hooked up properly and the waste went straight into the walls. More recently, a friend of mine bought a new house that was poorly planned. Its basement now floods daily because it was built too deep. She recently learned that the issue was identified multiple times during construction, but was never remedied, and inspection for the Certificate of Occupancy was improperly done. Problems like that should not happen in a Inspectional Services Department.
One solution would be to hire more staff and increase wages to improve retention. We know from the city’s own 2025 wage study that many city positions are underpaid, especially compared to our neighbors in Cambridge. Improving staffing would spread the load out and allow the inspectors to have scheduling flexibility and do a better job.
Another solution for the timeline of projects would be improving the speed and efficiency of the existing inspections process. In California, the state has instituted “shot clocks” that require cities to complete the review process in a limited time. If a city falls behind schedule, builders may hire licensed independent reviewers to complete the process for them. Independent review means that builders can know in advance how long permitting will take and how much it will cost, and that certainty is profoundly valuable when planning construction.
A third option would be simplifying our zoning and review requirements. Somerville’s zoning is “form based,” meaning it mandates structure shape, including things like porch depth and gazebo height. None of these restrictions improve health and safety: that’s handled by building code. The vast majority of our zoning rules are purely aesthetic, and many of them provide little or no aesthetic benefit. Checking each rule for compliance can be quite labor-intensive, and it’s entirely possible for the city to simplify them without compromising safety. Somerville YIMBY members have spent the past two years trying to simplify the aesthetic restrictions on dormers, but almost every single aspect of the code could use similar work.
In addition, Somerville over-regulates mid-size projects, giving anything bigger than a triple-decker the same level of site planning scrutiny as a skyscraper. Other cities don’t find that necessary, but in Somerville, even midsize buildings have the administrative costs of truly huge ones.
Mayor Jake Wilson’s administration is currently reorganizing city departments to streamline processes. They hope to have each permitting process flow entirely within one department, reducing miscommunication and delay. Getting the whole process in one place is a great start, but the process itself also needs to be staffed, shortened, and simplified.
A slow and onerous permitting process isn’t just a business development problem. Slow and inconsistent permitting wastes time and money for the city and staff as well as builders and contractors, and that waste translates directly into higher costs and fewer housing options for everyone.