This Mexican city went paperless — and permitting times dropped by 84%

In 2016, the city of Guadalajara, Mexico created a paperless, online permitting system for commercial projects. Since then, the platform, Visor Urbano, was adopted by the state of Jalisco, and around 60 cities now participate.

As Cara Eckholm explains in a piece in Vital City, "What began as a bureaucratic cleanup project produced an unexpected dividend: a clean digital paper trail that cut out local middlemen who had long extracted fees, formal and otherwise, from business owners navigating the permit process." By streamlining the process, the project has been able to reduce licensing time by 84% and increase permitting revenue in some municipalities by 100% to 300% in one year. The new platform also led to a drop in bribe solicitation by city officials and third-party intermediaries. 

Eckholm notes that most U.S. cities still rely on in-person permitting in a series of Byzantine processes that have created an entirely new profession entirely dedicated to walking applications through City Hall, the "expediter."

In an interview, Yunive Moreno, director of Visor Urbano, says the platform has processed 35,000 applications so far, making it the most-used online platform the state government uses. In advising other cities, Moreno says, "My advice is simply: start. You don’t need to wait for the perfect moment or have all the resources in place. What you need is the will and the right team."