I chatted with small scale developers from across the country for their recommendations on basic changes that any city can make to encourage and welcome development. Here are the four things that rose to the top of the list:

1. Simplify the permitting process.

A number of developers I chatted with brought up the convoluted, expensive and lengthy permitting process that so many cities require for even something as simple as adding an extra bedroom to a home or building a patio in front of a restaurant. As developer Andrew Gibson shared, “One of the most frustrating parts about dealing with most municipalities is the arbitrary nature of the process. It is nearly impossible to accurately predict review time, required documents, and total costs associated with permitting and agency required public improvements. I’ve been building for 15 years and am very diligent about trying to nail down the variables, but I am inevitably hit with some new or slightly modified requirement on most jobs. [It's] endlessly frustrating.”

The developers I talked with suggested expediting and simplifying these processes so that they can be clearly followed — and don’t require a dictionary to understand. And if your city is still requiring paper copies of proposals, move it into the 21st century and put that process online.

Cities can also ensure that permitting occurs more smoothly by having all requests and questions go through one office. Many developers I spoke with mentioned that their cities have multiple offices handling different aspects of permitting, and a basic question requires them to run around to five people just to get an answer.

House permitting in one place with a clear and simple step-by-step process and you will make developers’ lives a whole lot easier — and probably city employees’ lives easier too.

2. Reduce or waive fees for small projects with low impact.

For a small developer implementing a small project — say, converting a duplex into a triplex — the impact fees involved can be utterly cost-prohibitive. “Make impact fees actually correlate to something,” developer Danielle Zeghbib requests. “In Portland, builders pay $20k in system development fees per unit, regardless of whether the unit is a 250 sq ft microunit in an apartment building, or a 3,500 sq ft [single family home].”

When you account for the fact that infill development does not require new roads, street lights or sidewalks, or add much to the municipal budget at all — especially in relation to the tax value per acre that these sorts of developments provide — lowering impact fees is a no-brainer if it means that more vacant spaces will become productive places.

3. Eliminate requirements like minimum lot sizes, parking, floor area ratios and open spaces.

These sorts of requirements drastically limit the ability of a developer to do simple things like add a small unit onto an existing home or build a second story onto a one-floor commercial space. Most of these requirements stem from imagined concerns about over-crowding. In reality, the majority of neighborhoods will not suffer or even look much different if every house is no longer required to have a large front lawn and a two-car garage.

And any concern over a house that looks slightly different than the others on the block should be mitigated by the knowledge that removing requirements about lot size, parking, FAR and open space will allow more people to be affordably housed and more businesses to be able to open. Get rid of these requirements and you open the door to lots of valuable development in your city.