** 5/13/26 - PEW - Preapproved Building Plans Help Cities Improve Housing Affordability - Drawings cleared in advance save time and costs for municipalities and builders.......
Buzz Sawyer
Preapproved Building Plans Help Cities Improve Housing Affordability
Drawings cleared in advance save time and costs for municipalities and builders
Overview
A growing number of mostly small and midsize cities struggling with new housing production have begun providing preapproved building plans to developers as part of a broader effort to lower the cost of building new homes in their communities. A preapproved plan is a reusable set of design specifications and blueprints that has already been approved by a local government agency and is available for builders to use either free or for a nominal fee. One key goal of these programs is to shorten the preconstruction approval process. Delays caused by the permitting process are one driver of the high cost of new housing development—before construction even begins. Across the United States, research has found that cities with high degrees of housing regulation take 2½ times longer to approve projects than less regulated cities.1 Discretionary processes to approve new apartment buildings, such as requiring special permissions, or mandating public, city staff, or expert review or involvement further delay the construction of multifamily housing.2
Long approval timelines can reduce housing production and increase costs for buyers and renters.3 In Washington state, for example, one study estimates that each month of delay in the permitting process increases the cost of building by 1%, or about $4,400.4 Other studies found that approval delays increased prices in Seattle by $30,000 per unit and in New York City by $50,000 per mid-rise unit.5 Sometimes, delays in the permitting process lead to the cancellation of projects, because the added costs, or increases in the cost of financing or materials, make them financially unfeasible. Other projects are never launched.
Added costs can also price out consumers, because developers might pass them on and increase the eventual price of both for-rent and for-sale homes. One study estimates that for every additional $1,000 that a home costs, more than 115,000 households can no longer afford that home.6 Preapproved plans essentially frontload the plan approval process, eliminating its case-by-case and discretionary components.7 This innovation can shorten preconstruction timelines by months without compromising safety, especially in places that have streamlined their building permit processes. Preapproved plans can also lower builders’ costs because they spend less on architects and designers to draw plans and rework them to obtain permits.
Policymakers across the United States have begun to realize that they can reduce housing costs by making it easier to build in their communities. Interest in preapproved building plans has grown, as evidenced by their increased adoption among municipalities, as well as several state laws that require local governments to offer preapproved plans. However, local planning departments and state policymakers who are curious about bringing preapproved plans to their own cities could benefit if more information were available, including the costs and benefits of preapproved plans and best practices from the most successful programs.
As of 2026, about 40 U.S. jurisdictions have some form of preapproved building plan program, and the state of California has mandated preapproved plans for accessory dwelling units (ADUs), which are additional units built in the yard of, or attached to an existing home. (See Appendix A for the list.) This report gathers existing evidence about preapproved building plans and presents findings from 27 interviews with 16 municipal officials and 11 building professionals about their experiences with preapproved building plans. These interviews were conducted by researchers from The Pew Charitable Trusts during the second half of 2025 and in early 2026.
Key findings:
- Preapproved plans are a policy tool to reduce delay and cost in housing production by standardizing some elements of design and aligning plans to what is allowable under local land-use and building code regulations.
- Preapproved plans have primarily been adopted at the local level but are gaining political momentum at the state and federal level. Four states have passed legislation related to preapproved building plans, three of them in 2025. Two U.S. senators have introduced a federal bill authorizing a pilot grant program.
- Most preapproved plan catalogs focus on delivering smaller buildings, such as ADUs, as well as single-family homes and duplexes. A few more expansive local programs also offer multifamily plans, usually for buildings with six or occasionally eight units and even one up to 12 units.
- Preapproved building plans are still a nascent policy tool. Outside of California, which has required preapproved plans for ADUs since 2025, fewer than 50 cities and counties had published anything related to preapproved plans that researchers could find. Among the local officials who were interviewed, most had implemented their programs only within the past few years. This recency explains why there is no published broad quantitative data measuring specific outcomes of preapproved building plan programs.
- Homebuilders benefit from meaningfully reduced approval times and fewer delays, especially in cities with streamlined permitting, and direct cost savings on architecture and engineering services.
- Cities benefit through improved land utilization, with more homes on less land, and more infill projects—homes in already developed areas that can use existing infrastructure.
- Preapproved plans can facilitate organizational streamlining for cities’ planning departments and require less staff time spent by municipal employees reviewing plans. Cities are also providing support for new and smaller developers, who are more likely than large developers to build individual homes on vacant lots in already developed neighborhoods.
- In places with the most successful preapproved building plan programs, a meaningful number of new homes have been built. Those places include South Bend, Indiana; Jackson, Michigan; Hawaii County, Hawaii; Seattle; and Claremore, Oklahoma.
- Preapproved plans reduce builders’ overall development costs by about 1%-2%. This amounts to $5,000-$10,000 on a $500,000 single-family home and a multiple of that amount for a small multi-unit building.
- Though these plans are promising, they are not a substitute for more sweeping reforms, such as allowing houses on small lots, eliminating parking mandates, allowing apartments on commercially zoned land, or modernizing building codes for small apartment buildings.