Thanks to a new grant from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, state, city and tribal governments can now use artificial intelligence to improve permitting processes and solve common housing problems, such as the one that cost a former Colorado technology employee and his family nearly $100,000.
The grant, announced at the end of May, will provide the government with up to $3 million to implement an automated building code permitting system. They can partner with HUD to evaluate the effectiveness of automated systems, and that feedback will be used to inform future AI grant programs, officials said. Applications are due by July 13th.
“Participating jurisdictions may be able to implement systems such as PermitFlow, Blitz Permits, CivCheck, Permitify, or similar platforms,” HUD said in the grant announcement, as these platforms can assist with application ingestion, integrity checks, automated code screening, and digital workflow management.
Julia Richman is currently vice president of government affairs at Clariti, the software company that owns CivCheck. She also served as Deputy Executive Director and Deputy Chief Operations Officer in the Information Technology Division of the Colorado Governor’s Office and also worked for the City of Boulder. Also, in my personal life, I experienced delays in permits and large costs during home renovation work in 2022.
Richman said his family encountered extensive foundation problems when trying to add on to their home, requiring new permits to continue construction. She filed a second permit application just as the city of Denver was about to change its zoning regulations, amid a flurry of applications from other builders seeking approval before the changes took effect. She said the global health crisis had also made the situation difficult.
“This was 2022, so a lot of employees were leaving the department because of COVID,” she said. “It’s a very difficult job to be on the permitting and planning staff because it’s so complex. The people who come to the counter have a lot at stake, both financially and personally. They’re trying to build a home, they’re trying to set up a business, so it’s really difficult.”
While waiting for permission, the family moved in and paid the mortgage and rent for about seven months. Prices for lumber and other materials began to rise during the pandemic. Richman estimated that the total cost of the project would increase by about 20 percent while the family was waiting for permit approval, totaling about $100,000 in additional costs.
“In 2022, I was introduced to the founders of CivCheck and asked to be an advisor to their efforts. I was really excited about that, in part because I had experienced permitting struggles myself, but also because I had a lot of experience with permitting challenges working in the City of Boulder, which has led the way in innovation and technology. [I] We worked directly with the planning department and understood how difficult permitting and planning can be for the community,” Richman continued.
CivCheck, which was acquired by Clariti in October, acts as a “co-pilot,” surfacing information and making recommendations to human reviewers and applicants, Richman said. He said CivCheck empowers humans to make judgment and safety-critical decisions while AI handles tedious tasks.
“My house that I built had probably 40 or 50 pages of blueprints, and those pages had to have an arrow pointing north on each page,” Richman said. “And in a pre-AI situation, you have humans looking for things like; [at] All pages. …Our platform can show you an arrow pointing north or find information in a set of plans that would take a human 15 to 20 minutes to find. ”
Richman said Clarity is being piloted in about 20 jurisdictions across the country. It was recently adopted in Honolulu after a pilot run in 2022. Takeuchi Apuna, director of the Honolulu Planning and Permitting Department, said the platform is like a “TurboTax for permits,” claiming it has helped cut the city’s housing review time by about 60% by guiding applicants through code requirements before plans reach staff reviewers.
Clariti also helps municipalities apply for HUD grants, free of charge, by providing detailed work plans, cost estimates, and implementation schedules derived from various CivCheck implementations to take the guesswork out of filling out applications.
Richman said that while there are persistent concerns about certain risks associated with automation, such as bias, not all AI tools are the same. Chatbots are one category, automation is another, he said, adding that for cities to take advantage of AI, they need to choose the right tools for each job. She compared background automation tools to letter openers and large language model tools to jackhammers.
“You’re not putting things in place to monitor people. It’s creating inequities and challenges in terms of access to government systems,” she said. “In fact, the platform could make it easier and fairer for casual applicants to interact with the city, because the platform doesn’t know that you’re a big, important developer in the community. They just know that you submitted this application.”
