Team Red and Team Blue are both talking about affordability a lot lately. For local politicians, the conversation has shifted from the general cost of living to the specific, crushing weight of housing. No wonder the cost of purchasing a home in the United States has grown at roughly 2.3 times the rate of the Consumer Price Index over the past decade. But that is just the admission fee. When you factor in the mandatory carry costs like property taxes, insurance and utilities, the cost of maintaining a home has outpaced inflation by an even wider margin. While the price index rose by roughly 38% over the past 10 years, homeowners’ insurance jumped 92%, property taxes 65%, and utilities 52% in the United States. If those numbers feel high, things are even more dire here in Summit County, where the decoupling of housing costs from the rest of the economy is turbo-charged. While the national market grew at twice the rate of inflation, Summit County has been lapping the field. Since 2016, our median sale price has surged from approximately $730,000 to over $1.8 million. For those who are good at math, that is a staggering 146% increase. Experts point to a complex web of factors driving this crisis, and they aren’t wrong. But while we can’t put the inflation genie back in the bottle, our elected officials could start by doing one thing: They could fix time. Wait, what? Change time? Our lawmakers have already proven they can manipulate the clock. What proof? At 2 a.m. on Sunday, Nov. 1, they’ll command most of the nation to fall back. I’ve always wondered why we manage to be late for work when we spring forward, yet nobody ever seems to show up early when we fall back. In the world of development, Standard Time doesn’t exist, only borrowed time. Ask any builder, and they will tell you that every day added to a project’s end is reflected on the future resident’s mortgage. When the county takes two weeks to review a traffic control plan, it costs money. When it takes 14 days for a fire inspector to approve the slope of a driveway, it costs money. When a clerk sends back a plan for a misspelled word and requires another three weeks to approve the correction? Mo money. The reason is simple: Developers aren’t usually sitting on millions in cash. They are juggling architects, engineers, labor and materials fueled by construction financing. Between government-required bonding, insurance extensions, and interest on the construction loan, the daily burn can exceed $3,000 per day. That month and a half of administrative friction adds up to nearly $150,000. And that is for a relatively clean 28-day delay. Most builders in this county would welcome a month-long delay. In reality, typical multi-family projects run over by six months to a year. A six-month delay can add over half a million dollars to the budget, and if that friction drags on for a year, that $10 million project just turned into an $11 million project before the ink is dry on the certificate of occupancy. Our elected officials have shown us they have the power to stop this clock, if only for an hour. They can help by limiting redundant bonding requirements, easing outdated regulations, and mandating “shot clock” time limits on utility providers and plan reviews. Most importantly, we need a return to common sense. If a minor issue like a misspelled word crops up on an application, a simple phone call for a quick revision should replace the current practice of sending a developer to the back of a three-week line. We don’t need our officials to turn back the clock this November. We just need them to stop it from running out on the people who want to live and work here. If we can mandate a change to the sunrise, we can certainly mandate a 24-hour turnaround on a clerical correction and next-day inspections. Every day saved is a dollar kept in the pocket of a local family. Ari Ioannides, chair of the Summit County Republicans, is a recovering tech entrepreneur, founder of BootUP PD, and serves on local government and nonprofit boards. He offers a conservative perspective on local politics. He can be reached at [email protected] The post The Porcupine Quill: There’s a simple way to cut costs in building appeared first on Park Record. ...read more read less