PermitPulse

PermitPulse is a web app that helps residents, builders, and journalists see how well a city’s permitting office actually performs. It aggregates publicly available permit data (where it exists), normalizes it into a consistent schema, and publishes simple dashboards: median time-to-approve by permit type, backlog size, rework rates, and “time stuck” at each review stage. Users can subscribe to alerts when a permit crosses a delay threshold or when a department’s performance changes significantly. For cities without clean open data, the app supports lightweight CSV uploads from public records responses and crowdsourced status updates from applicants (clearly labeled and confidence-scored). The goal isn’t to “name and shame” but to make bottlenecks measurable, comparable, and hard to ignore. It also provides a public-facing transparency page cities can embed, reducing repetitive status calls and improving trust.