Cranes dot the skyline near Seattle’s Space Needle, signaling the city’s push to tackle its mounting housing crunch.
On Monday, Mayor Bruce Harrell took a bold step to accelerate that momentum, signing an executive order focused on overhauling Seattle’s notoriously sluggish permitting process for both new homes and small businesses.
City leaders are betting on a new approach called the Permitting and Customer Trust Team, or PACT. Their central goal: flatten the bureaucratic hurdles that can stall development, particularly for affordable projects, and bring much needed clarity to applicants. Backlogs, high upfront fees, and confusing requirements have left small businesses especially hamstrung.
Artificial intelligence is now part of Seattle’s answer.
A pilot program, already in limited use since April, will soon become part of daily life for applicants and city staff. The city’s Innovation and Performance team joined forces with tech departments and the construction office to test tools built by CivCheck, a company active in cities across North America.
AI’s Role in Fixing Seattle’s Permit Woes
CivCheck’s platform allows applicants to upload their plans, then receive feedback from AI on what is missing or does not comply with city codes before ever submitting paperwork for formal review.
Once the kinks get ironed out, officials expect this technology to slice typical review times in half. Permits that once required several rounds of corrections may now need just two cycles for most cases, so long as basic standards are met.
“The idea is that the applicant is able to essentially hand the city a permit ready application in the very first submission,” explained Dheekshita Kumar, CivCheck’s co founder and chief executive.
AI will flag errors and incomplete details at an early stage. It will also help new city staff get up to speed, providing on the spot training while minimizing the back-and-forth routine applicants have grown accustomed to.
The urgency is clear. Seattle’s construction and inspections department reviews over fifty-three thousand permit applications each year and inspects nearly a quarter of a million sites. As director Leah Tivoli admitted, “Over the last decade, we have seen the days to issue a permit pretty much triple.”
A recent city audit highlighted how applicants often can’t find the right person to help them, further bogging down a process fraught with delays.
Seattle’s efforts echo similar moves from cities like Los Angeles, Austin, and Honolulu, where technology to speed up review times is already shrinking wait times for permit reviews. In Honolulu’s case, CivCheck technology cut review sessions from up to ninety minutes to just under fifteen.
Officials stress that AI is here as an assistant, not a replacement. Human experts will still handle complex calls, while AI shoulders the more routine troubleshooting.
“I think the tech is going to fix like 80 percent of the issues out there, and then there’s a 20 percent human related need that we want to get more resources to do,” Tivoli said.
Mayor Harrell’s executive order aims for faster, smoother permitting by 2026, part of a broader plan to energize Seattle’s downtown and neighborhoods still recovering from the pandemic slowdown. The city’s PACT team is now racing to get permit times under control and make Seattle’s growth more accessible for everyone with a dream to build, mirroring AI advances in construction industry efficiency in other cities.
