A new state audit says New York City's building machine is hitting the brakes. Builders and property owners are waiting longer for plan approvals and routine inspections, stretching project timelines even as the Department of Buildings continues to hit deadlines for the most urgent cases. Those added days and weeks are landing right as City Hall is trying to speed up housing production.
Brooklyn Eagle first surfaced the comptroller's findings on July 2, breaking down the audit and pointing readers to the full report. The story helped pull the document's dry but crucial numbers into an increasingly loud debate over whether the city can move faster on housing without easing up on enforcement.
Audit flags longer waits for approvals and inspections
According to a June report by the Office of the State Comptroller, the Department of Buildings regulates more than one million buildings and oversees over 44,400 active construction sites across the five boroughs. The audit found the average time from initial plan review to approval rose to 20.3 days in 2025, and the interval from application to approval climbed to 23.6 days during the first four months of fiscal year 2026. The report also notes that DOB staff are spending more time coaching applicants through corrections, which has stretched the total filing-to-approval timeline.
Staffing and budget strain the agency
The slowdown was "attributed to staffing and budget constraints," according to the Office of the State Comptroller. OSC's analysis finds that DOB's full-time headcount remains below its early-pandemic peak and that turnover is elevated in several technical and inspectorial titles. The office links those trends to slower service and more uneven inspection response times, a combination that can frustrate both builders and neighbors waiting on enforcement.
Mayor's housing push hits administrative bottlenecks
Mayor Zohran Mamdani's Block by Block housing plan and the SPEED (Streamlining Procedures to Expedite Equitable Development) task force are designed to shave months - up to eight months on some affordable projects and as much as two years for rezonings - off development schedules. But the comptroller warns that without clearer performance data and more staff, those promised gains on paper may be tough to realize in the real world. As outlined by the Mayor's Office, the plan pairs streamlined procedures with new investments that are supposed to accelerate production.
Recommendations and next steps
The audit urges DOB to make its public performance metrics more transparent and more useful for decision-makers, to better track inspector productivity, and to more clearly account for how private inspection vendors fit into the system so bottlenecks are visible to both policymakers and the public. Brooklyn Eagle highlighted those recommendations, while industry reporting points to long-term staffing losses that make reform feel less like a nice-to-have and more like a necessity. The New York Construction Report notes that DOB construction-related staff fell more than 21% between March 2021 and March 2025, a shortfall the comptroller flags as consequential.
For builders, tenants and neighborhood groups, the audit lays out a kind of roadmap for where DOB operations and City Hall housing goals have to meet. The next few months will test whether the agency, the mayor's SPEED reforms and any budget or hiring changes can actually tighten review and inspection timelines without chipping away at safety and code enforcement.
