The Approval Process Nobody Explains: Planning vs Building

If I stopped you right now and asked you what it takes to get permission to build your project, I think most of you would give me some version of the same answer. You finish your drawings, you take them down to the city, the city gives you a permit and you build. One trip, one office, and hopefully only one answer. And that's what almost everybody believes going in. And it's wrong in a way that can cost you months, which means time and money. Not because anybody misled you, because nobody sits you down and explains it before you need to know it. So that's what I'm doing today, while you can still use it.

Here's what's actually waiting for you. Inside that city or county building, there are two separate departments, and both of them have to say yes to your project. Two applications, two sets of criteria, two clocks that don't run at the same time. And if your property sits in a homeowner's association, there's a third body sitting in front of both of them.

The planning department approval process and the building permit process are two completely different things. They're different people, they have different questions, different things that they're concerned about, different points in your design. So getting through one of them tells you almost nothing about the other.

Now nobody is hiding this from you. Your architect knows it, your contractor knows it, and the people behind the counter have known it their whole careers. Everybody on the inside already knows. So it never gets explained to the person standing on the outside.

But you're the one writing the checks, and you're the one whose calendar this lands on. And when you don't know the shape of it going in, a few predictable things can happen. You budget one stretch of time, which turns out to be two and sometimes three or four times that. You lock in a design before the office that governs your design has ever even looked at it. You find out about a requirement after the drawings are finished instead of before anybody started them. And none of those are mistakes you'd make if somebody had drawn you the map first.

So that's today, the map before you need it. By the time we're done, you'll know which office does what, which ones your project even touches, what makes your neighbors get a vote on your house, and the order all this happens in. So when you do walk into that building, you already know what's on the other side of that counter.

I want to start here because everything else in this episode hangs off it. Your city or county has two separate bodies that govern what gets built inside their boundaries: the planning department and the building department. And most homeowners think of it as one thing. They say "the city" and that one word is doing a lot of damage. So let's separate them.

The planning department asks what and where. Can you build this at this size, in this spot, on this piece of ground? They care about the footprint. They care about how tall it is. They care about how close it sits to the property line, how much of the lot you're covering, and what it looks like from the street.

The building department asks, how. Is it safe? Does it meet the code? Will it hold up in the snow or wind or a seismic event? Is the wiring right? Is the drainage right?

Here's a way to hold it that I've used for clients for years. Think about your home in two layers. Planning is the outer layer. It's the shape and the skin and the way things sit on the land. Building is the skeleton and the organs. It's everything underneath that keeps you alive in there.

Each of these departments is protecting two different things, which is the cleanest way to understand why they behave so differently. Think about the planning department as protecting your neighborhood. The character of the street, the light your neighbor gets in the backyard, the amount of traffic and runoff the block can absorb. That's a community question. And community questions are partly subjective. Reasonable people disagree about them all the time.

The building department is protecting the people inside the house. You, your kids, whoever buys it from you in twenty years, and the firefighter who has to walk into it on the worst night of their life. That's not subjective at all. It's a written standard, and you either meet it or you don't.

So that difference in what they're protecting is why one of these departments can hold a public meeting about your project and the other one never will.

There are three things people get wrong about these two offices, and each one can cost real money.

Number one, planning approval is not a permit. That's the assumption we opened with today, and it's the single most common one. A planning approval is permission for the concept. It is not permission to build. You cannot pour concrete on planning approval.

Number two, and this one explains a lot of bad advice: not every project touches the planning department. And I'll add something here that ties back to Episode 72 on property taxes. Both of these offices create a permanent record of your project. That record is how the county assessor eventually learns your house got bigger. And it's also the paperwork that protects you when you go to sell it. So the record isn't just red tape, it cuts both directions. We covered the tax side of that in detail.

So if you're redoing your kitchen and you're not moving an exterior wall, not changing the footprint, not adding height to your building, you'll probably never see a planner. You go straight to the building department. The same house, same city, completely different experience. So when your neighbor tells you the permit took four days and your architect tells you it takes four months, they can both be telling you the truth. They're describing two different departments.

And that's the whole reason homeowners give each other terrible information about this. This cuts the other way too. If you're adding square footage, moving an exterior wall, going up, or building new from the ground up especially, you are absolutely in the planning department's world, whether you expected to be or not. So the trigger is almost always the outside of the building. If the outside changes, assume planning is involved and go find out early.

Now number three, and this is one that a lot of people don't see coming: the planning department circles back to you during the process. So you get your planning approval, you spend four months finishing your construction documents, and then you submit for your building permit. And just to be clear, you should be careful about working on your construction documents. Ideally you get planning department approval before you pay everybody to perform your construction documents.

But anyway, you get your planning approval, you finish your construction documents, and then you submit for your building permit, and planning is sitting there in that review too. They pull your final plans and they compare them to what they approved several months ago back in the spring. And if the design moved in a meaningful way while you were developing it, and designs do move, you can be looking at a re-review.

So that's why I get uncomfortable when somebody tells me they're going to submit to both departments at the same time to save time. You can do it. Some people do. But you're gambling that planning doesn't change anything. And if they do, you're now revising a full construction document set instead of that early schematic design stage.

So remember, two offices, two different questions. One of them decides whether you can, the other decides whether it's safe. Get that straight and the rest of this process stops feeling random.

Now let me give you the order these come in, because the order matters a lot more than a lot of people think.

If you're in a homeowners association, your HOA goes first. Not second, not alongside. First. Because your project goes to that design review committee at the end of your schematic design stage, or sometimes early in the schematic design stage. And if you recall, schematic design is your step one when you're working with your architect. And this is back when it's still cheap to make changes, back in the early stages of design, right?

Then it goes to the city planning department and that approval lands at the end of design step three. And then it goes to the building department once your construction documents are finished.

There's a hard reason the HOA sits at the front of that line, not just a convenient one. When your HOA approves you, they hand you a written approval letter, and your city is going to ask you for that letter when you submit. So your HOA isn't a side road running parallel to the city, it's an input to your city application.

I've watched people get this backwards, and it's genuinely expensive. They take a design all the way through city planning, they feel great about it, walk it over to their HOA, and the committee asks for changes to the very thing the city just signed off on. So now you're revising an approved design and going back to the city to get it approved a second time.

We're going to take these in order the way you'll actually live them.

If your property sits inside a homeowners association, this is where your project actually begins, like I said. Before you engage with the city or the county building departments and planning departments, you have a design review committee to get through. And they are going to see your project before anybody at City Hall does.

I did a whole episode on this in Episode 38 on homeowners associations. And honestly, that one hit a nerve. A lot of you had something to say about neighbors having control over what you can build on your property that you own and pay taxes on. So I'm not going to rehash all of that right now. You can go back and listen to that episode because there's a lot of information there if you're in an HOA. But today I want to give you the mechanics because that's the part that actually helps you get through it.

Your HOA typically starts by handing you a documented set of design guidelines for your designer to follow. You get those early, not after the schematic design. You get them before the schematic design. And your design professional, most licensed qualified design professionals know that, and that's the first thing that they do. But it's good for you to know that just in case they inadvertently skip that step.

Then there's an application and the package they want usually looks like this: a survey and a topo, a graphic map of your property, a site plan of your property, floor plans and elevations, your color scheme, and even a preliminary landscape plan. You submit that at roughly the end of your schematic design. And again, hopefully your design professional has conformed to the design review guidelines as they're designing that first step in design called schematic design.

But anyway, you submit it either in the middle or by the end of step one, schematic design. And the committee is usually made up of people who live in your community and they meet on a regular schedule and they'll slate your project for a meeting.

Two pieces of advice here that I give every single client. First, add three-dimensional renderings, even if they aren't required. Most of them cannot read an elevation drawing, which is a flat 2D drawing of the front of your home, for example. Show them a picture of what the house will actually look like and your credibility goes up enormously. I've watched it change the temperature in a room many times. If people can visualize the home, they have a lot less questions. Or sometimes they have more, but at least you're drilling down to the core concerns that they may have.

And then second, go to the meeting yourself. Some owners like to just send their design professionals to it, but go to the meeting yourself because you're the one that has to live with these people. But you also want your architect to be there to handle the technical questions. You should be there because you're a human being who lives on their street, and it's much harder for a committee to be difficult with a neighbor than with a set of drawings.

These meetings can get subjective. It's just true. Somebody's going to have an opinion about your window trim. Expect revisions, don't take it personally, and do a little politicking when you're working with your neighbors that you're going to be around for many years.

Here's the part that a lot of people don't find out: your committee is on a clock too. Most governing documents give the committee a set window to respond to your application. Thirty days, sixty days, something in that range. And in a lot of them, if the committee doesn't respond in time, your request is deemed approved by default.

So pay attention to your design review guidelines in your CC&Rs, covenants, conditions, and restrictions in your HOA. And remember I'm a builder, I'm not an attorney, and this can vary enormously depending on where you live and what your documents say. I've been there though many times, so I can speak from experience. But like I said, go read your CC&Rs before you submit. Find the response window timeline, write the date down, because right now you probably think this is a process where you wait and they decide. It's usually a two-way street and knowing that changes how you follow up.

I'd start that HOA application as early as you reasonably can. Getting your design entrenched with the committee early gives you something solid to build the rest of the drawings on top of. And it means you aren't carrying two unresolved approvals at the same time. If the committee is going to make you change something, you want to know that while it's cheap to change, before you're actually submitted to the planning department.

One last thing here, and this is a piece that ties this whole segment together for the rest of your project. When your HOA approves you, they'll give you a written approval letter. You want to keep that letter and put it somewhere you can actually find it because your city is going to ask for it when you submit. That letter is part of your application. It's not a souvenir. And a lot of times it's the planning department that wants to take a look at that, not even the building department.

So now you've got a design your committee has already blessed and you've got the letter in your hand. That's when you walk into City Hall. Let's go do that now.

Now we're at the city and specifically we're at the planning department. In my experience, this is the department homeowners understand least and fear the most.

Your planning department is enforcing what's usually called the municipal code, and that's the zoning rules. Setbacks, meaning how far you have to stay off the property lines, the height limits, the lot coverage, which is how much of your dirt you're allowed to put a building on, and your floor area ratio in a lot of places, which is a ceiling on how much house you can put on how much land. It even gets into the parking, the trees, and in some neighborhoods, the historic character.

I've covered a lot of those individually before, so I'm not going to dig in and reteach today. You can always go back into the Limitations series that I did. But what I want you to understand today is the process and not necessarily all of the rules.

I told you the formal approval lands at the end of design step three. That's the end of the construction documents in the design process. But the research behind it should have happened before your team drew a single line on the drawings, before the first concept, before anybody showed you a pretty rendering. If that didn't happen, you're already behind and you may not find out for months.

Here's the move I want every one of you to make, and it costs you an hour. Before your design is locked, go make a pre-submittal visit to your planning department. Some jurisdictions have a formal process for this. They'll put you on a calendar, you'll sit down with a planner, and you'll walk through what you're proposing. In other places it's completely informal. You show up at the counter with a sketch. Either way, it exists almost everywhere and it's usually free or close to it.

I've done this before. I worked on a special project in Napa County, and I actually scheduled a formal pre-submittal process and the county of Napa had multiple people attend the meeting. The fire department, the public works department, the planners, and the architects and the engineers and we all met and talked about the project. And we accomplished a tremendous amount there. We learned all of the rules and regulations that are specific to Napa County and also specific to the site that we were working on. And we probably eliminated months of design time and cost for the owner going back and forth on it.

You're going to want to bring something to this meeting. Don't walk in empty-handed and ask general questions because you'll get general answers. Bring your address and your parcel number, bring whatever survey you have. That's one of the very first things that you want to do when you're seriously considering a project. Bring a rough sketch of what you're thinking, or if you have your architect sketch up something conceptually at the very early stage, even before schematic design. Some architects have a step before schematic design, they sometimes call it a discovery exercise, where they move the boxes around on the building or on the property. And bring a written list of your questions, which is exactly what the worksheet for this episode is going to be for, that you'll be able to pick up in the show notes.

Keep in mind that if you're building a custom home or a very large renovation, usually your architect will drive this process. But it's good for you as a homeowner to know as well, so you can ask if this is going to be part of their process. Again, you have to gauge it by the project type. But for custom homes, large projects, you're certainly going to want to consider doing this.

The difference between a vague conversation and a useful one is entirely what you carry through the door. And what you're doing in that meeting is confirming that what you were about to spend real money designing is actually allowed. And if it isn't, you find out while the design is still a drawing instead of after you've paid for a full set of construction documents.

As plainly as I can say it, that hour is the highest return hour in your entire project. There's nothing else you can do in sixty minutes that saves you as much time and money.

Here's a story that ties into this. The McMillans, one of my characters in my Tale of Two Homeowners story that you can listen to in one of the episodes, or you can see it in the prologue and epilogue of the book. But the McMillans are my rock star couple and they came to me wanting to push their kitchen and family room out towards the back of the lot. It's a nice little project, well thought out, and their designer had a concept that they loved.

So I asked one question: has anybody been down to the city with this? And they hadn't. So they went and they sat down with a planner who looked at the lot and pointed out that the rear portion of the property carried an easement running through it that nobody had flagged. It's not visible when you walk around the yard. Not something you'd ever notice standing back there with your cup of coffee in your hand, visualizing your new kitchen. It was on the recorded documents and it had been there since before they owned the place.

That addition as drawn sat partly on top of it. Now if they'd found that out eight months later in plan check at the planning department, they'd have been redesigning a finished construction document set. Instead, they found it out with a concept sketch in their hand. They shifted the whole thing sideways, lost a couple of feet, kept the project, and never lost a day.

One conversation, that's the whole story. It's not dramatic, and that's exactly why I'm telling it, because the version where it goes badly is very dramatic and very expensive.

Now, should you go or should your architect go? My answer is both, and I mean it. Your architect goes because they speak the language and they'll catch things that you won't. You go because you will hear the reasoning behind the rules with your own ears, and that reasoning almost never makes it back to you secondhand in full. You learn what your city actually cares about, and that's worth an hour of your Tuesday.

I want to say something about the planner sitting across that table. That person is not your adversary. I know the reputation. I've been doing this thirty-five-plus years, and I've sat in a lot of those offices. Their job is to apply a written set of rules consistently to everybody in town, including the neighbor who wants to build something that would wreck your view. Most of them are genuinely helpful when you show up prepared. The thing that makes a planner difficult is an application that makes their job impossible, not you.

This next part is the one I want you to hear most because it's the part that decides your timeline, your stress level, and whether the people on your street get an opinion about your house.

There are two fundamentally different tracks your project can go down at the planning department.

Track one: your project conforms to all of the municipal code and the zoning regulations, and it fits inside every rule. It's the right height, it's inside the setbacks, it's under the coverage limit. When that's true in most places, your approval is essentially administrative. A planner checks it against the standards, confirms it complies, and signs it off. Nobody is notified. There's no meeting. There's no hearing. Your neighbors do not find out unless you tell them.

But there's another track, track two, where your project asks for something outside the standard parameters. You want to build a couple feet into a setback, you want an extra four feet of height, you want more floor area than the zoning allows. Or in a lot of places, you're building a brand new home from the ground up, which triggers a review just all by itself.

Now you're in a different world. Now the city notifies your surrounding neighbors. There's a posted period where the public can review your plans. There's a date set for a meeting where people can come and say what they think about your house.

I want you to sit with the difference between those two tracks because homeowners think it's the city that decides which one they're in. It isn't. You decide at the design table months before anybody applies for anything.

That two-foot setback encroachment isn't a two-foot decision. It's a decision to open your project up to public comment, to add months, to add design fees for revisions, and to hand a group of people who have never met you the ability to complain about your project on the record.

Let me put some arithmetic on that because it lands better as numbers than as a warning. A conforming project gets reviewed and signed without anybody outside that office hearing about it. The same project, asking for relief, goes on a meeting calendar. Hearing dates are set by when the body meets, not by when you're ready. And things get continued all the time. One continuance is another month of doing nothing at all. So that second track is measured in months, not weeks. Every one of those months is carrying cost on you.

I've been in several of those hearing rooms, and I'll tell you honestly, I discourage homeowners from volunteering for that if there's any way to avoid it. Not because you'll lose, often you won't, but because it's slow, it's public, and the objections you get are frequently not about the thing that you thought they'd be about. Somebody's worried about your trees. Somebody's worried about the construction traffic. Somebody's been waiting eleven years to say something to your predecessor and you're standing there instead.

Sometimes you genuinely have to go that route. A tough lot, a real constraint, a new home where the review is automatic, no matter what you do. Fine. Then you go in prepared. You go in with your design team and you bring good drawings. And the same thing I told you about your HOA committee applies here. Three-dimensional renderings help enormously because they let people see what you're actually proposing instead of imagining something worse.

But if you're remodeling and you're within a few feet of compliance, I want you to look hard at whether those few feet are worth it. Ask your architect directly, what would it take to stay inside the rules? What do I lose? Sometimes the answer is you lose something you really care about and you go fight for it. That's a legitimate choice. But make it on purpose. That's the whole point here. Don't wander into a public hearing because nobody told you the door was there.

So that's your three gates in order. Your HOA, then the planning department, and then the building department waiting on the far side of your construction documents, which leaves the one question everybody actually wants answered. And that's how long all this actually takes.

Let's try to calibrate your expectations here because this is where you can get hurt on your schedule expectations.

Once your submittal is taken in by the planning department, figure roughly four to six weeks for a planner to get through your plans. And then they'll send some comments back to your design professional, questions and clarifications, things that need to change to comply. Your architect responds and resubmits. The city takes another two or three weeks, and then ideally you get an approval. Add it up and you're at two months minimum. And that's the floor, not the average.

Those numbers are the good version. In busier markets, it stretches, sometimes a lot. It depends on a city's workload, on how many people they have, and enormously on the quality of what you handed them. That last one is the part that you can control. A clean, professional, complete application moves up to the top of the pile. A planner who opens your file and finds everything where it should be will get you an answer faster. That is human nature and it's also just efficient.

A sloppy, non-conforming application bounces around a department for months and comes back to you as a very long list of corrections. It's the same city, the same planner, different outcome driven entirely by what you submitted.

One thing worth knowing here: there's real movement on this right now. A number of places are putting themselves on deadlines for how fast they have to turn a review around. It's uneven and I wouldn't build a schedule around it. But ask your city whether they publish a targeted turnaround time. More and more of them are starting to do that.

I want to connect this to something we talked about in Episode 71 on renovation return on investment. Time is a cost. It doesn't show up on a bid sheet anywhere, but every extra month in approvals is a month of carrying costs. On a longer approval it can quietly become one of your larger line items in your whole project. It belongs in your thinking right alongside the money you're spending on the cabinets.

What do you do while you're waiting? Don't sit still. This is dead time only if you let it be. Depending on your project and how comfortable you and your architect are, plans can often keep progressing while you're waiting on planning approval. That's a judgment call and it belongs to your design professional because it's their risk in developing drawings that might have to change.

But here's what carries no risk at all. Every single decision on your project that planning does not care about, you can be making right now. Interior materials, finishes, fixtures, cabinet layout, tile, plumbing fixtures, lighting, appliances. None of that touches the planning department's criteria, not one bit of it. And I'll tell you from watching a lot of projects, those decisions are exactly the ones that pile up later and start delaying construction. Every one you make during this window is one that isn't holding up your job in month nine. So that's how you turn two months of waiting into two months of progress.

Let's pull this all together. Your city is two offices, not one. Planning decides what and where. Building decides how and whether it's safe. A planning approval is permission for the concept, not permission to build. Whether your neighbors get a vote is not the city's decision. It's a design decision, and you make it long before anybody applies for anything. Of course, unless you're building a whole new home, and that usually triggers it anyway.

The planning and the building, they come in that order. If you're in an HOA, that committee goes first at the end of schematic design or maybe even before the end of schematic design, and their approval letter is part of what your city asks for. Then the planning department, then the building department. Get the guidelines early, bring renderings, show up in person, and go read your own response window that you have in those CC&Rs.

Then go make the pre-submittal visit. One hour before your design locks. Nothing else you can do is worth as much.

For this episode, I put together a worksheet and it's built around exactly what we talked about today. It's two columns, questions to ask your planning department and questions to ask your building department side by side, so you can see which office answers what. Take it with you to that pre-submittal meeting. The link is in the show notes for the episode.

If you want to go deeper, my book, The Awakened Homeowner, you can download it at Amazon or order it and this book is your sidekick all the way through your project. It walks you through the planning approval process in more detail, including a full list of the materials the city will typically ask for on a custom home.

And if you're in the early planning stage right now, take a look at what we're building over at buildquest.co. It's a planning platform for homeowners. It's in development and nearing completion. There's a form right on the site to sign up for early access. There's no cost, no commitment. You'll just be among the first people in. Join our community. You can always email me your questions directly.

In the next episode, we cross the line into the building department and we're going to start with the question I get asked more than any other: do I actually need a permit for this? My contractor says we don't. That one has teeth and I'll see you there.

Remember, I'm Bill Reid, your home building coach, and my mission is to enlighten, empower, and protect you. Let's go make it happen.