San Francisco is at a turning point: the city is rolling out sweeping legislative reform aimed at meeting housing demands, revitalizing neighborhoods, and enabling growth.

To unpack it all, we sat down with Kate McGee, founder and CEO of EBO Strategy, who works on some of San Francisco’s most complex and sensitive development projects. Before founding EBO, Kate served on the government side, as a San Francisco city planner.

In this episode of Permission to Build, Kate offers insight into why jurisdictions often seem so slow in their decision-making, and we discuss technology’s role in bringing more transparency and momentum to the permitting process.

Big decisions take time—especially in San Francisco

After finishing school in Montreal and working in London, Kate’s career led her to San Francisco. Her first day of work was September 11, 2001, a unique kick-off to a two-decade career in a city on the cusp of a new technological era.

San Francisco’s unique relationship to tech startups meant it had a unique opportunity to leverage tech in shaping urban policies. But when Google offered to help build government tools in exchange for access to city data, Kate saw the difficulty the city had in making a decision.

Understanding the stakes for cities

As a city planner, Kate had to ask about not only short and long term implications of such decisions. “How is this data going to be cared for? What’s the long term strategy? What happens if the strategy doesn’t work?” For cities, there’s a real reason for caution: every decision has much deeper implications. Unlike a startup, cities cannot afford to fail.

Speed vs. process: navigating public and private tensions

Kate has witnessed firsthand the disconnect between the pace of private innovation and the slow, deliberative process of public governance. This is a dance: a push and pull where cities have to constantly balance opportunity with caution.

One of EBO’s current projects, the Verde Building in North Beach, captures these tensions. Described by Kate as a “fragile” project, it’s a perfect example of the complexities of building.

Preservation, or innovation?

Ironically, private and public sectors often share the same goals: they want to develop more housing and promote economic growth. The difference often comes down to how they get there. Kate puts it as, there’s one group of people that want to “see what was already there.” And there’s another group that wants “to see more than what was before.”

What developers should know about rezoning and permitting reform in San Francisco

Under new state mandates, San Francisco faces pressure to create capacity for roughly 82,000 new housing units by 2031. To meet that number, the city is undergoing a significant rezoning effort aimed at adding density, especially in what are now being called "high-resource neighborhoods."

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Kate’s recommendation to developers: study the city’s new rezoning maps and focus on two key opportunities:

1. Transit corridors where mid- to high-rise developments are now more feasible.
2. Density-unlocked parcels where previous restrictions are being lifted, making them now viable for larger projects.

Technology’s role in modernizing permitting

For most private companies, getting permits approved in San Francisco (or any jurisdiction for that matter) is like looking into a black box. From identifying the necessary requirements needed, to managing a dozen different stakeholders, permitting becomes a labyrinth of complexity.

On the city side, Kate sees a lot of opportunity in leveraging technology. It can enable cities to create transparency between their own departments, thus simplifying requirements for private builders.

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PermitSF, the city’s new initiative launched by Mayor Lurie in February 2025, aims to be a huge step for San Francisco in simplifying permitting and enabling faster approvals. Similar initiatives like New York’s DOB Now shows how important innovation is in public policy to help close the gap between progress and process.

On the private side, tech-enabled permitting services like Pulley can play a major role in helping reduce friction, breaking down silos, and making it easier for all parties to collaborate. Leading the way in permitting’s digital transformation, Pulley offers a single source of truth for development teams navigating the complex permitting process—not just in San Francisco, but across all cities.

For Kate, a future where there are less silos and more trust between public and private sectors is near: “I feel like we are on the cusp of getting there with permitting.”

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