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San Francisco outlines 49 South Van Ness permit center and plans citywide electronic plan review
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Summary
City staff presented the 49 South Van Ness permit-center plan: a 16‑story, 430,000‑square‑foot building featuring a ~40,000‑square‑foot one‑stop permit shop, electronic plan review (Bluebeam), a new queuing system (QLESS) and pilots to phase in paperless filings and consistent hours.
Melissa Whitehouse, the permit center director in the city administrator’s office, told the Planning Commission that the city is moving permit services into a new 16‑story, 430,000‑square‑foot building at 49 South Van Ness with a roughly 40,000‑square‑foot one‑stop permit shop on the second floor and up to 500 transactions per day. “We are gonna be a one‑stop shop,” Whitehouse said, describing plans to co‑locate roughly eight departments and standardize customer hours to 7:30 a.m.–4:30 p.m.
Whitehouse outlined several operational changes aimed at reducing bureaucracy: a centralized cashiering station, a floor‑level print shop, a new customer‑service routing team, and an electronic queuing product the city has piloted (QLESS). She said the city procured Bluebeam for electronic plan review and has run three pilot projects, including an entirely electronic review that moved through departments in the cloud and allowed applicants to review department markups online. “Bluebeam is something that we believe is being used quite frequently in the private sector right now,” Whitehouse said.
Commissioners and members of the public asked how the digital changes would affect public access to plans and whether paper options would remain. Commissioner Imperial asked directly if paper plans would still be available; Whitehouse replied that the city will offer multiple workflows and accommodate customers without Bluebeam, including scanning submitted paper plans for staff review. On cross‑department case management, Whitehouse said planning’s Acela project is currently on hold and that planning will sign off in DBI’s PTS as part of the migration process.
Whitehouse emphasized that the transition will be incremental: the city has piloted queuing and electronic review at existing locations and will scale up to the new building rather than flipping to paperless overnight. Staff said they plan to move into the building in less than three months and will continue piloting to limit operational disruption. Commissioners thanked staff for the presentation and reserved follow‑up questions for more technical briefings by DBI and other departments.
Next steps: staff will continue pilots, refine public‑access workflows for full‑size plan review, and return to the commission with implementation details as the move progresses.
