Arizona is one of the nation’s fastest growing states with a dire need for new housing. Nationwide, government policies slow housing growth, but in Arizona, the Goldwater Institute’s Permit Freedom law makes it easier to build and drives down costs. In a new webinar, Goldwater’s Timothy Sandefur and the Mercatus Center’s Salim Furth discuss how onerous regulations, subjective design standards, and lengthy permitting processes hamper development, and how the Permit Freedom Act cuts through red tape.
“We have to let people build houses,” said Sandefur, Goldwater’s Vice President for Legal Affairs. “I’m originally from California, so I like to say that the California way is to make it illegal to build houses and then wonder why the cost of houses is so high. We don’t want to imitate that in Arizona.”
The webinar, Permitting Reform in Arizona, was hosted by Duncan Schroeder of the Mercatus Center and included Sandefur and Furth, Director of Mercatus’ Urbanity project. The discussion will be eye opening not just for policymakers but for anyone interested in solving the nation’s housing affordability crisis.
“We have a lot of people who are fleeing California who are coming to Arizona, and they’re moving to the Phoenix area and they need housing,” Sandefur said.
Sandefur discussed how permitting processes often turn into bottlenecks that make it harder and more time-consuming for developers to build new homes. With its Permit Freedom Act, the Goldwater Institute has a proven solution. The Permit Freedom Act requires local governments to state all permit requirements clearly and unambiguously, sets clear deadlines for reviewing permit applications, and requires judges or neutral decision-makers to hear appeals when a permit is denied.
In 2023, as housing prices were rising, Arizona enacted the Permit Freedom Act. As a result, permit timelines dropped from 200 days to just 126, on average, according to research by the Common Sense Institute. In cities like Chandler and Mesa, delays fell by 49% and 64%, respectively. In Phoenix, wait times dropped by over 12%. This reform is projected to generate 3,800 more homes annually by 2035, cut new home prices by 5%, create nearly 34,000 new jobs, and pump $6.4 billion into the state’s economy.
The webinar discussion also touched on overly strict zoning regulations and building codes that drive up housing costs as well as problems with architectural design reviews—processes that allow government officials to veto new construction based on nothing more than their own subjective aesthetic tastes.
“We’ve seen this happen a lot,” Sandefur said. “Permit Freedom would make that illegal across the board. The standards have to be subjective.”
Sandefur also noted the Goldwater Institute’s recent victory in Arizona over the Hobbs administration’s illegal water-restriction rule, which effectively halted home construction in the Phoenix area. A trial court ruled in April that the Arizona Department of Water Resources never had the authority to implement a new rule requiring developers to prove that there is a 100-year supply of groundwater throughout Phoenix’s enormous active management area, and not just at the site of their proposed development.
“We sued the state over that and we won, and we’re going to continue winning on that issue,” Sandefur said. “It’s another example of how even outside of the ordinary building permit context you still have to get all sorts of different kinds of permission aside from just your ordinary building permit. Every step where the government can require permission from you is a step where the government can hand a condition or, if it gets really bad, can require bribery.”
Through its Permit Freedom Act and legal fights against harmful government regulations, the Goldwater Institute will continue to stand up for common-sense principles to make it easier to build new homes in Arizona and around the country.
Click here to read more about the Goldwater Institute’s Permit Freedom Act.
