Rafael Spring

Y Combinator just published the list of startups it wants to fund next winter. One of them is AI for City Hall. In some American cities, YC writes, getting a building permit takes longer than building the house. By its own math, if every permit in the country were approved in a tenth of the time, cities would collect $16 billion more a year in property tax. There are 19,000 cities in America, and almost all of them still check drawings against the code by hand. I like the idea. My first company, while I was still at Columbia in the 1980s, redeveloped buildings in Tribeca and SoHo, so I have stood on the other side of that counter. But look at what the waiting actually costs. In 2021 the National Association of Home Builders surveyed more than 2,000 builders and found that regulation accounts for $93,870 of the price of an average new home, 23.8% of it. Only about $2,400 of that is the pure cost of delay. The rest is fees, building codes that keep changing, design standards beyond the ordinary, and land the government takes or forces you to leave empty. So AI can make City Hall faster. It cannot make it cheaper. A model that approves a bad rulebook in one day still leaves the same $94,000 inside the average new house, just sooner. The startup I would fund does both: it reads every permit, and it also measures what each rule costs the family that will buy the house. Then it publishes the numbers and lets voters decide which rules are worth paying for. Faster bureaucracy is progress. Less bureaucracy is reform.