Or increase planning department funding with higher emphasis on throughput. It's the bureaucratic delay (nearly a year for approvals or revisions in many places) that causes much of the pain, not the regulations themselves.

About the biggest delay in Seattle permitting is the requirement to get a board of volunteer assholes to approve the visual appearance of the project, which is estimated to add an average of 8 months to the permitting process but is allowed to last for an indefinite period. The average total permitting time for these projects (over 35,000sq ft) is about 18 months.

Hopefully they will be thrown out soon. The really fun note is that these boards are almost entirely made up of architects who are getting the chance to single-handedly destroy a competitor’s work.

This sucks. In addition to adding so much time and costs to projects, visual approval boards are going to be culturally suffocating. Some of the most iconic structures in the world were widely considered to be eye sores when new, see: Eiffel Tower.

Seems like the first amendment should prohibit that, but so far courts have not agreed.

At minimum any sort of approval system needs to come with some sort of rubric to bypass it: "build it this way and it's approved automatically". It gives the approvers the same agency while prohibiting holding anything up, and it puts the onus on the approvers to say what they want to see instead of the builders finding a way to hit a nebulous target.

Funding bureaucracy only serves to increase the amount of bureaucracy

Giving them money is unlikely to help. They do not have any incentive to go faster.

The better solution along these lines is to give them a week to render a decision (with stated reasoning that can be immediately appealed) or the application is automatically approved. Then they can request more resources if they don't have enough to be thorough but what they can't do is delay rendering a decision.

The regulations themselves are what forces bureaucratic review though. Fewer regulations would mean more throughput with the same resources.

Where I used to live, it cost $7k to get a plot of land ready to build on. Today, that cost is $70k and 6months to 1y to get past all the permits and paperwork. And then having to deal with a governing body that doesn't understand how money works, and it is no surprise no one builds affordable houses anymore.