During his campaign, Mayor Corey O’Connor pledged to overhaul the city’s permitting system. On his first day in office in January, he doubled down on that promise by signing an executive order requiring a multidepartmental review of how the city issues permits.
Data obtained through OneStopPGH, the city’s online permitting portal, shows that work may be paying off.
As of July, it’s typically taken 11 days to issue a building and development application permit — a prerequisite for most construction projects, including renovations, repairs, additions and new developments. It took the city about 27 days to issue a BDA permit during the same period last year.
Construction projects also often require additional permitting for electrical and mechanical work. The typical number of days that it takes for the city to issue these permits decreased by five and 30 days, respectively, over the same time periods.
The O’Connor administration isn’t declaring victory. A mayoral spokesperson wrote that the city will wait until it can evaluate a full year’s worth of post-reform permit processes before reaching conclusions.
Some construction experts and architects welcome the city’s quickened pace. But they, as well as the city, say there is still a lot more work to be done to address longstanding issues that have become increasingly apparent as the city continues to build.
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For Steve Massaro, president of the O’Hara Township-based Massaro Corporation, Pittsburgh’s permitting process was often slow and inconsistent from one job to the next. As a result, workers would be on the site with no work to be done.
“You’re kind of nibbling around the edges on your construction project,” he said. “So, your clock is ticking from a schedule perspective, but you can’t attack the job.”
But this summer was unusual: Each of the eight projects the company worked on finished on time, he said. One of those projects, an expansion of The Neighborhood Academy’s campus in Stanton Heights, offers a glimpse at what it takes to build in Pittsburgh.
The private school, which serves middle-schoolers and high school students, wanted to expand its two existing buildings by a cumulative 20,000 square feet. Off the bat, the project required:
- A review by the Department of Mobility and Infrastructure to determine whether the project required a traffic study.
- A zoning review, because the school sits in an area reserved for residential use, along with a review by the City Planning Commission. The body recommended the application to Pittsburgh City Council in May 2025.
- City Council’s review, which included a public hearing. Council passed a resolution approving the conditional use of the additional buildings in July 2025.
- A handful of other permits related to the inner workings of a building, such as electricity, sprinkler systems, fire alarms and suppression systems. Major construction projects also often require stormwater permits.
While the permitting process might feel far removed from reality for some Pittsburghers, it impacts many construction projects that serve a community purpose, such as The Neighborhood Academy, Massaro said. In that case, because contractors worked across two buildings, it’s easy to see how permitting speeds have changed since last year.
The school was able to open for the new school year with the additions available for use, Massaro said.
“Every building has a use and a purpose. Some are schools, some are health clinics, some are community buildings, and the longer it would take to get permits, the longer it would take to get inspections, the more the public would have to wait to receive the benefit of [that facility],” he said.
From a construction boom to COVID
To Rob Pfaffmann, the founder of the architecture firm Pfaffmann + Associates and a longtime permitting and code reform advocate, the permitting process in Pittsburgh has always been more or less the same.
When he began working in the area as an architect in the 1980s, the city had few staff members responsible for reviewing project plans. And as the years progressed, he said, the construction and zoning codes that Pittsburgh followed began to match reality less.
Still, the issues weren’t so apparent in the past, Pfaffmann said, largely because the city wasn’t building as much. All of these issues converged more than a decade ago, however, when Pittsburgh experienced a boom in construction activity and built about 7,750 multifamily units between 2010 and 2022 — roughly as many units as it built in the 30 preceding years.
The permitting system has faltered since, Pfaffmann said.
“I think [the City of Pittsburgh] got caught — no fault of their own — by the boom in our economy,” said Pfaffmann. “That does expose the sort of flaws in the city processes that worked fine when there was no development.”
The COVID-19 pandemic further revealed some of those challenges. For example: The state’s building code requires at least two exits in all multifamily buildings. That’s a challenge for developing office-to-residential conversions, which became popular after the pandemic shook up downtown office markets.
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Between the start of COVID and 2024, permit applicants mostly relied on the city’s online permit portal. “Some people felt like it was screaming into the void,” said Endy Fierro, executive director of the American Institute of Architects’ Pittsburgh chapter. Then the city opened its in-person OneStopPGH counter, but pre-application meetings, which can smooth the process and have mostly been voluntary, rely heavily on departmental bandwidth, he said.
Learning from the past
The city is trying to chip away at some of those longstanding issues, said O’Connor’s Deputy Chief of Staff Matt Singer.
After city agencies’ 60-day review of their current processes, the O’Connor administration released a report outlining the three-phase approach that it’d take to reform permitting. The first phase, which is ongoing, includes re-establishing mandatory pre-application reviews and “strengthening intake review procedures” to catch application mistakes before thorough reviews take place.
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The first phase also reduces the need for professional drawings for some small residential construction projects, and establishes a new program for permitting minor changes — such as replacing an HVAC unit — without having to go through a design review.
Some of the recent changes rolled out in the city’s first phase of permitting reform focus on departmental capacity. Two project managers from the mayor’s office have been assigned to work with PLI, City Planning and DOMI on permitting reform.
At the same time, Singer said “the purpose of our work isn’t to force applicants or reviewers to inorganically move faster just to rush.” Projects still must go through multiple steps, which include inspections, he said.
The city plans to share an update in mid-September on the progress of phase one and when it plans to enter phase two, which mostly focuses on reforming the zoning code. That work has already begun on several fronts — from simplifying language to removing parking space requirements and adding provisions for accessory dwelling units.
So far, the city’s own analysis of permits of all types for single-family homes shows that the median number of days has decreased from 11 in January to 5 in June.
“We can’t always control the speed of the applicant. That said, though, some of our initial data is showing that … our applicant response times have also decreased, meaning that applicants themselves are also having a quicker turnaround,” Singer said.
Mia Hollie is the economic development and housing reporter for Pittsburgh’s Public Source. She can be reached at mia@publicsource.org.
This story was fact-checked by Octavia Liku.
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