Building Industry & City of Sacramento Collaborate to Improve Housing Supply
October 18, 2017
The City of Sacramento initiated an innovative approach to improving the city’s housing availability: hold collaborative business process improvement workshops with representatives from sixteen leading Sacramento home-builders and the City’s Community Development Department. ThirdWave’s patented Rapid Workflow® methodology was used to assess and re-imagine the City’s existing policies, practices, and technologies related to development permitting.
“The purpose of the Rapid Workflow® workshops was to partner with our development process stakeholders to identify better ways of delivering our services.” Noted Ryan Devore, CDD Director. Representing the private sector, Chris Norem, Director of Governmental and Public Affairs - North State Building Industry Association (BIA), described the purpose of the workshops this way: “Our goal was to work collaboratively with the city staff and the facilitator to identify ways that our industry could work better to the benefit of the city and the community, which desperately needs housing.”
Principals from the following companies participated: BIA, The Hodgson Co., Mohanna Development, Burrell Consulting, Crest Homes, Blackpine, Del Paso Homes, Bardis Homes, and Northwest Land Park.
Noted Norem, “The workshops were very helpful in identifying systematic problems and inefficiencies at the city that the BIA can now work to solve with the staff and City Council.” This positive sentiment was echoed by CDD Director Devore: “The workshops were successful in that we participated in a wholistic discussion with the participation of both city staff who process the work and our customers who use the services. It allowed for an opportunity to learn first-hand of problems identified by both groups and then engage in a collaborative discussion on potential solutions to those problems and the benefits of those solutions for all parties. I look forward to the implementation of the solutions and the resulting higher level of service delivery.”
More than 100 solutions were identified in four workshops, offering plenty of opportunity to streamline the permitting processes, make more effective use of City/Builder resources, mitigate permitting delays, and foster increased housing and economic development.