Governor Shapiro's Housing Action Plan names slow permitting as a barrier to housing production. The money is real. The requirement to modernize is real. Most borough departments are not ready.
State legislatures across the country are raising the bar for what local permitting departments are expected to execute and prove. Florida punishes departments financially for missing deadlines. Texas built an auto-approval mechanism that erases legitimate denials when governing bodies fail to vote in time. Ohio, Colorado, and Montana have all passed housing legislation that names local permitting as a barrier and attaches consequences to falling short. A building department director in any of those states is already living this problem.
Pennsylvania chose a different mechanism. Instead of penalizing failure, the Shapiro administration put $1 billion on the table for municipalities that modernize. The pressure is the same. The direction is the same. Only the lever is different. And for Pennsylvania's 955 boroughs, most averaging around 2,700 residents with small staffs and no dedicated permitting coordinators, the requirement to demonstrate modern, auditable permitting processes is just as real as any penalty.
In February 2026, Governor Josh Shapiro unveiled Pennsylvania's first-ever Housing Action Plan. The plan includes a $1 billion Critical Infrastructure Investment Fund to build and preserve housing across the commonwealth. It explicitly names local permitting processes as part of the problem. This is not a proposal or a pilot. It is announced state policy, and funding is tied to whether municipalities can demonstrate that their permitting and compliance processes meet the standards the plan sets.
The question is not whether this pressure is coming. It already arrived.
The Housing Action Plan does not treat permitting as a minor administrative detail. The plan states that Pennsylvania's permitting and regulatory framework has grown steadily more complex over the decades, with state regulators layering new requirements without revisiting older rules. It identifies lengthy permit approval processes as a direct constraint on housing construction.
The plan asks municipalities to modernize zoning ordinances and digitize local permitting processes. It proposes updates to the Municipalities Planning Code to reduce regulatory barriers. It calls on the state to provide model land-use ordinances to help boroughs that need to update their codes.
The types of housing the plan prioritizes make this harder, not easier. Accessory dwelling units, mixed-use development on main streets and commercial corridors, higher-density residential near transit, and manufactured homes in single-family zones are all listed as priorities. Most borough permitting systems were built around simple single-family residential permits. ADUs, mixed-use projects, and transit-oriented development require different workflows, different documentation, and different compliance logic.
"Local governments must modernize their zoning regulations and permitting processes." - Governor Josh Shapiro, PA Housing Action Plan
Access to state funding requires boroughs to document what they are doing. That means records, not memory. It means permit histories that can be audited, timelines that can be reported, and workflows that produce a paper trail without someone having to manually assemble it.
A borough running permitting on spreadsheets and email threads cannot easily produce that documentation. Neither can a department where institutional knowledge walks out the door when a long-tenured employee retires. Compliance is not just about following rules. It is about proving that you followed them.
Pennsylvania's 955 boroughs average around 2,700 residents. Most have a handful of staff covering multiple roles, no IT department, and no dedicated permitting coordinator. When demand increases, the same people absorb it.
According to the MissionSquare Research Institute 2024 State and Local Workforce Survey, 54 percent of local government respondents expect the largest wave of public sector retirements to hit within the next few years, on top of staffing levels that have not recovered to pre-2020 levels. The retirements coming in the next few years will take decades of institutional knowledge with them. For a small borough, losing one experienced staff member can mean losing the entire permitting operation's institutional memory.
The Housing Action Plan is not the only pressure landing on borough offices in 2026. A Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling in April added new stormwater compliance obligations. Right-to-Know reform is driving more records requests, with appeals hitting a record 3,970 in 2025, a 23 percent increase over the prior year, according to the Pennsylvania Office of Open Records 2025 Annual Report. Each one lands on the same small team.
On top of that, the Housing Action Plan will drive more permit applications for ADUs, mixed-use projects, and higher-density reviews. These are more complex than a standard single-family permit. More documentation, more coordination, more time. None of that changes because a borough is small.
A borough seeking to access Housing Action Plan funding needs three things its current systems may not provide: a permitting process that handles new development types, documentation that satisfies state reporting requirements, and both of those without adding staff.
GovPilot configures permit types for ADUs, mixed-use projects, and higher-density residential applications. Departments can track every step, store every document, and view every timeline in a single system. When a funder or auditor requests records, the answer is in a report, not a filing cabinet. Departments expand their capacity without expanding their headcount because the system handles tracking, routing, and documentation automatically.
That is what the Housing Action Plan requires. It is also what every small-team department needs regardless of what any state plan says.
Pennsylvania put a billion dollars on the table and identified permitting delays as a barrier to building projects. Departments that modernize now will be positioned to capture funding and handle the permit volume that it generates. Departments that do not will watch money go to boroughs that were ready, and answer to their communities for why they were not.
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