Clariti AI Studio launches to help cities solve permitting delays

As municipalities adopt AI tools to cut days or weeks from permitting and approval timelines, one company has introduced a free training initiative for local governments taking baby steps to explore deploying the technology internally. 

Clariti recently announced the launch of Clarita AI Studio, which offers municipalities customized workshops that demonstrate how AI can reduce delays and drudge work, and improve consistency in the permitting and review process. Clarita’s AI plan review tool, CivCheck, has already proven to reduce plan review times by 70% in Honolulu.

The announcement comes as municipalities across the United States face pressure to streamline housing development.

Julia Richman, VP of Government Relations at Clariti, told HousingWire’s The Builder’s Daily that many cities recognize that their permitting and approval processes are inefficient. However, they often don’t know how to streamline the process. That’s where the workshops and the plan review tool come in handy. 

A problem with personal significance 

For Richman, the problem that Clariti and CivCheck aim to address has both professional and personal significance. 

She previously worked for the Colorado Governor’s Office of Information Technology. Before that, Richman was the Chief Innovation Officer for the City of Boulder, CO, a city known for its complex land-use and zoning regulations. 

“I got firsthand knowledge of the sort of pain and suffering that planning departments have in these kinds of environments. Employees who are really motivated to make a difference and to do their jobs were hamstrung in lots of different ways,” Richman said. 

In 2021, Richman began a gut renovation of her 110-year-old Denver, CO  home, originally planning to simply add a bathroom in preparation for starting a family. But after the demolition exposed major issues with the home’s aging brick foundation, Richman’s contractor advised against rebuilding on it, so she ultimately redesigned the project as a full teardown and rebuild on the same lot. 

However, the project took far longer than she had hoped. 

“We lost nine months while we waited for someone to look at the permit,” Richman explained. 

Finding and fixing inefficiencies

Denver’s permitting delays were driven by a perfect storm. A surge of applications hit the city at the same time staffing levels were strained in the wake of the COVID pandemic, generating a huge backlog that the planning department is still working through, despite some recent improvements. 

In a bid to address this glut of applications, the City of Denver entered into a partnership with Clariti in April, joining other cities like San Jose, Honolulu, Seattle, Vancouver, Calgary and Toronto that have engaged CivCheck to streamline their permitting. Many other municipalities, like Seattle, Louisville, Boston, Los Angeles and Harris County, Texas, have similarly partnered with competing AI tools. 

As Richman explained, many cities receive low-quality or incomplete submissions, typically from inexperienced individual applicants. These faulty applications can overwhelm understaffed municipal departments, often delaying approvals for professional applicants such as homebuilders and developers.

Richman cited the work that Clariti did with the City of San Jose, California, to exemplify this challenge. 

“We did a pilot for them looking at ADUs, and about 75% of the applications that came in to the city around ADUs were incomplete. They were missing documents that needed to be a part of that application, etc. And we see that all over,” she said. 

CivCheck aims to simplify and improve the quality of these applications before they even reach the city, helping reviewers complete permit reviews more efficiently and opening up bandwidth to review larger applications from builders and developers. 

The platform also automates tasks like finding information within massive plan sets and locating relevant codes and checks, which can shorten hours-long tasks into minutes. 

The platform additionally makes reviews more consistent across reviewers and reduces the back-and-forth process of cat and mouse that frustrates architects, engineers and developers. Cities using CivCheck saw roughly 50% fewer review cycles, indicating the potential for positive change. 

“We typically see time reduction somewhere along the lines of 70% on average. So this is not sort of fiddling around the edges,” Richman explained. 

A closer look at the Clariti AI Studio 

Since joining Clariti, Richman has worked to streamline permitting and approvals for nearly 20 planning departments. In her experience, these municipalities, from large cities like Denver and Toronto to small mountain communities in Colorado, often need outside assistance to streamline the process. 

“They don’t often have time to figure out what the actual problems are. They know they have a problem and they know it’s really bad, but they don’t know why, or what they could do to fix it,” Richman explained. 

Richman referred to Seattle, a Clariti customer, as a city with a particularly complex set of regulations and codes, which can create an unpredictable and frustrating process for applicants. For cities like Seattle looking to simplify their review and approval processes, the Clariti AI Studio can be a valuable tool. 

“The AI studio is going to be this really useful tool for communities, to have a little bit of dedicated time to really diagnose what’s wrong with their processes,” she said. “We’ll sort of diagnose what communities it’s a fit for, and how their problem can be best solved, whether with technology or business process or something else.”

On a shot clock

As more municipalities and states adopt AI to streamline their permitting and approvals, those that haven’t yet adopted the latest technology will likely feel the pressure to do so. 

If that pressure isn’t felt internally, it will likely come from legislators. Many states have already implemented or passed “shot clock” laws, which mandate that local governments initiate or complete reviews within a specified timeframe. Georgia, for example, recently passed a law setting a 45-day deadline for initial permit reviews, followed by 20 days for a second review and 14 days for subsequent submissions. 

As the pressure on municipalities to meet these types of deadlines grows, so does interest in AI tools like CivCheck. However, the challenge is that this is a new technology, and many municipalities are still learning how to implement it effectively and responsibly within a constrained budget. 

“Right now, people are really poking around. We’re seeing lots of pilots,” Richman said. “We do see a lot of communities exploring this. Our RFP pipeline has been very healthy, and it’s really all over the map in terms of the New York Cities and Torontos of the world, but also, I just saw an RFP from Southlake, Texas, a community of 30,000 people. Everybody’s really trying to solve this problem.”