For Cities & Counties · Community Development

Approve more housing
with the staff you have.

CrossBeam reads each submittal against state law and your municipal code, drafts the corrections letter in your city’s own voice, and hands it to your staff to sign. Building and planning. Intake to resubmittal.

Get Access Ask the Permit Assistant

Miniature city hall diorama with a clock tower and flag

The Squeeze

The state has passed 25+ ADU bills since 2016. Cities and counties want to comply. The volume arrived; the staff didn’t. The routine 60% of plan check — stamps present? codes listed? fire rating correct? — is the same work, repeated thousands of times.

429,503

ADU permits in CA since 2018

Shovels.ai

35,800

fewer local gov workers since 2020

UC Berkeley Labor Center

90%+

sent back for corrections in San Jose

Mercury News

A Submittal’s Day at the Counter

Intake

Is this even a complete submittal? CrossBeam Screener answers pass or fail before a plan checker opens the file: every page present, in order, and part of the same project. Incomplete sets bounce at the counter — not three weeks in.

Screener

Review

CrossBeam Pre-Check reads every sheet against the CRC, CBC, CPC, Title 24, and your municipal code. Fails go red and head for the letter. Flags go yellow and don’t — unless your reviewer promotes them. Every finding carries its citation.

Pre-Check

The letter

CrossBeam drafts the corrections letter — findings with code citations, item by item — and your staff promotes, demotes, edits, and signs before anything goes out.

Resubmittal

When the plans come back, CrossBeam Corrections Response checks the new set against your original letter, item by item — was item 12 actually fixed? — and flags unrelated major changes. No from-scratch re-review.

Corrections Response

The phone keeps ringing

The CrossBeam Permit Assistant answers code questions for your staff and your residents, grounded in state code and your local rules. One resident got a complete occupancy-permit walkthrough, with links, in about five minutes — without calling the counter.

Permit Assistant

The Voice of the City

The letter that goes out doesn’t read like a machine wrote it. A final pass restyles every export to match how your city writes — your letterhead, your phrasing, your numbering, your formats. Applicants see your city’s voice, not a template.

Both Departments Read Plans

Spell check for building code.

Ministerial review is math. The plan either complies or it doesn’t — setbacks, spans, fire ratings, stamps. It’s the most compute-intensive review a city runs, and the place AI helps most. Your reviewers keep the engineering judgment; the engine does the cross-referencing.

A first pass for discretionary review.

Zoning is judgment — but the first pass doesn’t have to be. CrossBeam runs a fast, checklist-style planning screen — objective standards checked and cited — so your planners start from a marked-up set instead of a blank one.

The Correction Tax

Your building department pays third-party consultants $150–$175/hr to review plans. When plans come back with corrections — and 60–90% do — the consultant re-reviews at the same hourly rate. But the applicant’s original fee already covered the first review.

Every included correction cycle is a pure cost to the city. $300–$625 per round, recovered $0 from the applicant.

Source: Public consultant contracts — CSG, WC3, Bureau Veritas hourly rates from Huntington Beach, South San Francisco, Alameda city council records

The Misaligned Incentive

Third-party plan review consultants bill hourly. Every correction cycle is more revenue for them. A sloppy submittal that requires 3 rounds of review is more profitable than a clean one approved in 1 round.

No consultant is going to build a tool that reduces their own billable hours.

CSG, WC3, and Bureau Veritas serve the majority of California cities on hourly contracts

The ROI

Modeled on a mid-size CA city (~80K population, ~500 building permits/year, 4–5 building staff)

Direct savings on correction re-reviews$80K/yr

Plan checker hours freed500 hrs/yr

Additional permit throughput+25%

Recovered permit fee revenue$250K/yr

CrossBeam: $12–18K/yr

vs. hiring 3 plan checkers at $336–408K/yr

18–34x cheaper

Based on public consultant contracts, CALBO staffing data, and Buena Park/Huntington Beach budget records

“AI in permitting will rebuild faster and safer, reducing costs and turning a process that can take weeks and months into one that can happen in hours or days.”

— Governor Gavin Newsom, April 2025

On launching AI tools for LA fire recovery permitting · Governor’s Office press release

Human-in-the-loop, always.

AI drafts, humans approve. Fails and flags are your staff’s to promote, demote, or dismiss. Nothing goes out without a signature. Your department stays in the driver’s seat.

Where We Are Today

Piloting with California cities. ADU coverage is the deepest today; the engine reads plan sets generally — Huntington Beach coverage already spans 20+ permit types, from reroofs and pools to solar, EV chargers, and signs.

Bring CrossBeam to Your Counter

Cities and counties can’t self-serve into CrossBeam — and shouldn’t have to. Onboarding wires in your municipal code, your forms, your letterhead, and your writing style. Tell us about your counter and we’ll set up a pilot conversation.