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Tanner “The Planner" Blackman does not swing hammers or lay foundations. He does not raise funds or finesse land deals. He does not draft blueprints, write contracts, test soil conditions or calculate the varied seismic loads that a new building can sustain.
Blackman’s job is a mostly under-the-radar, but often indispensable, fixture of California’s urban housing market: He helps people get their building projects approved.
So-called land-use consultants and permit expediters are wayfinders of bureaucracy, sherpas of red tape. If the left hand of a city’s building safety department doesn't know what the right hand of its sanitation bureau is doing, the expediter's job is to pull them into a handshake.
Such services are not in demand everywhere in California. Wherever the path from preliminary application to permit issued is so costly, tedious and unpredictable that developers and desperate homeowners are willing to pay someone else to endure the journey on their behalf, expediters flourish. Los Angeles is one of those places. It’s also where Blackman does most of his work, even though he lives in San Diego.
And yes, he feels a little weird about all of this.
Speaking over Zoom, Blackman wears glasses, a Dodgers hat and the ironic grin of a self-described former urban planning “do-gooder.” As an example of the duties his job sometimes entails, he recounts a recent trip to Los Angeles.
Projects located in L.A.’s hillside neighborhoods require special municipal permission to have dirt taken away. The project Blackman represents is not in a hillside neighborhood, but it is on a road that passes through one, which evidently amounts to the same thing.
A city board had approved an earlier dirt removal plan, but with allowable hauling hours so narrow, the developer estimates the dirt removal would drag on an additional six weeks. Rather than go back to the board, Blackman had to take his case to city council, arguing against this previously approved dirt plan in order to revise it.
Because, of course, he did.
“This whole stupid thing, we had to do this fire drill, get a bunch of extra billable hours for people like me,” he said. “In a perfect world, my job would not need to exist.”
Los Angeles, like many of California’s big cities, is far from Blackman’s perfect world. The state grapples with some of the most expensive housing in the country. For decades, many experts have pointed to the cumbersome and unpredictable pace of getting new homes approved in our desirable metros as one of, if not the, major causes of our housing affordability woes.
State lawmakers have tried to speed things up. They’ve passed dozens of bills aimed at simplifying residential development over the last decade.
But even though Blackman profits off of the regulatory wrinkles that this legislative blitz is supposed to have smoothed out, the new rules don't keep him up at night. Yes, state laws have created new pathways to speedily approve new housing. But there’s still plenty of work out there finding ways to design and coax projects to fit onto those pathways.
“This just creates a new space for us to fight around,” he said.
Meet the fixer
Blackman didn’t set out to become a project pusher.
Fresh out of graduate school, he got a job with the Los Angeles Planning Department and spent most of his five years there studying possible changes to municipal policy. It was illuminating work, but disillusioning too. “After having been inside the beast for a while, I was less convinced that I was on the side of good,” he said. “I felt like the villain in a Kafka novel.”
He landed his first consulting gig in 2015 where he found the work more compatible with his personality. “I’m better at finding the loopholes rather than being the guy who can keep the boat afloat.”
The work goes by a number of different names, which vary by location and speciality. “Land use consultant” is one you’d most like to have on your business card, conferring a degree of cerebral respectability and an expertise in zoning, environmental review and the overlapping complexities of state and local law most relevant at the early “entitlement” stage of development.
Then there’s “permit expediter,” a title that connotes the more lowly trade of assembling the right papers in the right order and pushing them from one city clerk’s window to another.
In fact, Blackman does both jobs. He’s also a registered lobbyist, as are most members of his professional tribe in Los Angeles. He describes his work as “kind of like a lawyer but cheaper” and “project manager,” though not in the corporate sort of way. Tanner Blackman will also accept merely “planner” — “it helps to have a job that rhymes with your name.”
In the plainest of English, he’s a regulatory real estate fixer. Lucky for him, there’s plenty of demand for fixers in Los Angeles. Getting a project okayed is no simple task.
First, a project will often need permission, in general terms, to use a particular piece of land in a particular way — to build a house of a certain size or an apartment building of a specified height.
In the City of Los Angeles, that entitlement process, overseen by the planning department, takes an average of 8.5 months, according to data collected by the state housing department. But it can take much longer than that. The project Blackman needed the haul route permit for was stuck in entitlement for nearly five years.
After the thumbs-up from planning comes a gauntlet of project-specific approvals. Can the proposed building withstand an earthquake? Will it be vulnerable to fire? Does it comply with state and local energy efficiency standards? Is it accessible to those with disabilities? Do trees need to be added to the site? Removed? All of these questions require an answer and every answer comes in the form of a permit.
That’s assuming you know how to get them in the first place.
A typical project might include 25 separate reviews and clearances, said Gary Benjamin, another L.A-based consultant, who spoke to CalMatters earlier this year. “If you aren’t someone like myself who has navigated this process multiple times, you may not even know who to contact,” he said.
Putting a price on permitting
Such complexity is why the city of Los Angeles hosts a thriving market in “ready-to-issue” parcels, plots of bare land that have undergone all the regulatory prep work necessary to build something, but which are physically untouched. From the sidewalk, a vacant lot with the coveted “RTI” designation would look identical to the same one without it. On paper, the RTI plot is months, if not years, further down the approval pipeline.
That makes it much more valuable.
In a recent study, two economists compared the sales prices of lots before and after they’d received the “ready-to-issue” label. Across Los Angeles County, they found that such a state of regulatory readiness adds about 50% to the raw land value.
To put that in perspective, imagine a typical $1.5 million patch of development-primed dirt. Only $1 million of that price reflects the value of the actual land, according to the study. The remaining $500,000 comes from the value of not having to wade through the local review process — and pay insurance, property tax and interest payments while you wait.
That, according to the authors, is the price tag on LA’s approval process.
Which helps explain why people like Blackman can charge tens of thousands of dollars to the developers, builders and landowners who can afford their services.
“Those jobs exist only because we’ve made the process really difficult,” said Evan Soltas, the Princeton economist who co-authored the paper with Harvard’s Jonathan Gruber. “It’s a sad statement of how hard it's become that this has become its own form of expertise.”
What’s the hold up?
Not all delays are created equal.
If one city is especially slow at turning around a set of building permits, that might reflect the fact that it’s especially tricky to build there. Doing heavy construction around existing buildings and infrastructure is going to be inherently more complicated — and may warrant a finer-tooth regulatory once-over — than building the same thing on an untouched plot of exurban farmland.
In many of California’s large cities, “a lot of the work is adjusting and fixing and readapting older buildings, which is much different from building something ground up,” said Andrew Junius, a partner at the Bay Area real estate law firm Reuben, Junius & Rose. “This isn’t like making cookies. Every project is different. Every building is different.”
“I felt like the villain in a Kafka novel.”— Tanner Blackman, land use consultant
But a city’s permitting process can also reflect its specific policy choices. In Los Angeles, most projects with 50 units or more get an extra vetting by the planning department thanks to a city ordinance from 1990. This can add months, if not years, to the development process, which may explain the high number of 49-unit apartment buildings in the city.
Sluggish approvals can also reflect no policy choice at all. In San Francisco, no single entity is responsible for making sure that the various regulatory nodes of government talk to one another.
“It just evolved that way, there was no grand design at the beginning,” said Fred Brousseau, a partner with Harvey M. Rose Associates, a San Francisco consulting company that analyzed the city’s permitting process in a report this spring. Though project delays almost always get blamed on the city, even in cases when the developer is at fault, “it would be useful to have a little more birddogging of the laggard applications,” he said.
A new space for us to fight
Times are changing for California’s expediters.
Once upon a time, whether a housing project progressed or not was left almost entirely to the discretion of California’s local governments and their elected leaders. That made the insidery arts of glad-handing and trading on connections the most prized skills for land use consultants.
But greasing the skids of city government can get dangerously close to greasing palms — a point regularly made by pro-development advocates, small government conservatives and the occasional newspaper editorial board.
In 2021, Walter Wong, maybe California’s most notorious expediter, pleaded guilty in a corruption scandal that shook San Francisco city politics. Among his confessed wrongdoings: Showering top permitting officials with international travel in exchange for the snappy approval of a major mixed-use development project.
Overly exuberant expediters have been prosecuted in New York and Washington, D.C. In 2024, Los Angeles Councilmember José Huizar was sentenced to 13 years in prison for using his perch atop the city’s powerful Planning and Land Use Management Committee to approve development projects in exchange for cash and other gifts.
Quid pro quo-ing one’s way to project approval isn’t as easy as it used to be.
The California Legislature has spent the last decade passing a torrent of housing laws designed to override local approval processes like the ones Blackman has developed an expertise in navigating. “Ministerial approval” or “by right” are the terms of statutory art — as in, the act of building an apartment tower in certain urban neighborhoods is now a right enjoyed by developers, not a privilege to be reluctantly dispensed by skeptical council members.
State lawmakers have also passed a series of laws aimed at speeding up, standardizing and outsourcing the building permitting process.
"The political skillset is less important now,” said Michael Hansen, a San Diego consultant who used to serve as the city’s planning director. Rather than attend meetings downtown trying to convince elected officials of the merits of a project, much of his current work is of a more technical nature: Figuring out if and how a given state streamlining law can be applied to a particular project.
“There’s still quite a bit of work trying to get a project to fit within the ministerial box," he said.
Blackman said he can’t remember the last time he had to convince local elected officials to allow a zoning change, which used to be his professional bread and butter. But “I still think there is abundant work in my space for folks like us,” he said.
His job — which in his heart Blackman believes should not exist — appears to be safe for now.
This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.
