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Building Permits

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Government Efficiency August 2026

An Alteration Permits in 15 Days. A New Building Takes 166.

Ballot Question 4 lets the Buildings Commissioner appoint more officials who can sign off on construction documents and directs DOB to build one permit system shared with DEP, FDNY, and DOT. The case for it is in DOB's own filing data: routine work moves quickly, and the housing the City most needs waits the longest.

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The permits that produce housing wait eleven times longer than routine alteration work

Median calendar days from job filing to first permit in DOB NOW, for filings made in 2024 and 2025 that have since received a permit.

Source: NYC Open Data, DOB NOW: Build – Job Application Filings Note: Filings that never received a permit are excluded, so these are waits among applications that succeeded. Job types with fewer than 2,000 filings are omitted.

What Question 4 actually changes. The Charter currently lets only the Commissioner, two Deputy Commissioners, and one Borough Superintendent per borough approve construction documents. That is a small number of signatures for an agency handling roughly 275,000 applications a year. The question removes the cap on deputies, creates borough commissioners who can approve citywide, and directs DOB to build a single permit submission system with the other permitting agencies by 2030. COGE describes the goal as consolidating 40 permits and approvals spread across 18 offices.

And the honest counterpoint. New building waits have already fallen a long way without any Charter amendment: the median was 295 days for jobs filed in 2021 and 148 days for jobs filed in 2025, cut in half through DOB's own process work. That is the argument of this whole report in miniature. The Charter sets part of the ceiling, and management determines where you sit under it.

What is counted: job filings in DOB NOW: Build with both a filing date and a first permit date. The measure is calendar days between the two. DOB NOW replaced the legacy BIS filing system in stages, and new building jobs appear in it from 2021, which is why the trend chart starts there.

Right-censoring: a filing that has not yet received a permit has no first permit date and therefore cannot enter the median, so recent filings are biased toward faster results. The 2021-to-2025 figures quoted above carry the same caveat, and 2025 should be read as directional.

Sources: NYC Open Data, DOB NOW: Build – Job Application Filings; COGE Adopted Final Report (July 23, 2026); COGE Preliminary Report (June 2026).