HAC-Ed Highlights | Building Smarter: Prefab, Mass Timber, and Navigating the Permit Process

Getting housing built in California requires more than good intentions and a site that pencils on paper. It requires knowing how to structure your process, who to bring in and when, and how to get through a permitting system that varies dramatically from one jurisdiction to the next. At this HAC-Ed session, two practitioners who have learned these lessons the hard way shared what they know and how to help developers now.

Jen Canchola and Emily Marineau from Juno brought a development advisory perspective on prefabrication and mass timber, built on 20+ years of field experience, going through corporate bankruptcy, and coming out the other side with a roadmap for what works. 

Sanem Surel, founder of PermitBox and Toolbox Construction, shared what she's learned from over a decade of navigating permits, feasibility, and construction across Bay Area jurisdictions, and why what works in San Mateo won't necessarily work in Oakland, Sonoma, or anywhere else.

Jen Canchola + Emily Marineau | Juno

Prefab, Mass Timber, and the Process Problem

Canchola opened by describing Juno's origin story with characteristic candor: the company started as a venture-backed effort to productize mass timber housing through a modular kit-of-parts system, 33 components that could be rearranged into 27 different unit types. The pitch made sense but the funding didn't fit. Venture capital requires faster returns than real estate development can deliver, and Juno 1.0 went under.

Canchola and Marineau ultimately completed Juno’s 24-unit mass timber building in East Austin using the system and subsequently bought the assets and IP out of bankruptcy because they believed the underlying idea was sound. What they learned from that project became the foundation for Juno 2.0: a development advisory firm that helps developers execute prefabrication and mass timber by thinking through questions of design and constructability earlier in the process, before those decisions become expensive mistakes in the field.

The process is the problem

The core insight from Juno's work, and from Canchola's 20+ years as a contractor who has built multi-unit product in nearly 20 states, is that most development problems aren't design problems or construction problems, but rather process problems. Specifically, they're the result of making decisions too late and communicating them imperfectly.

Canchola described a familiar pattern: a developer assembles a team, drawings get produced, pricing comes back, it doesn't work, and everyone scrambles to redesign. Then it happens again. By the time the project gets to construction, there have been hundreds of RFIs and the budget has ballooned. The feedback loop is broken because the contractor and the architect aren't talking to each other early enough, and neither of them knows what the developer actually needs the project to achieve.

Her framing: most developers think of their project as a 6-sided die only concentrating on the biggest stakeholders: architect, contractor, capital, engineers. It's actually a 27-sided die. Operations, permanent insurance, due diligence, lender requirements, asset disposition, programming, every subcontractor, and every tier beneath every subcontractor. Each one is a different interest, and each one is a lever. All of them affect design and execution decisions, and all of them need to be figured out earlier than most teams think.

Design to budget, not the other way around

The alternative Juno advocates for is what Canchola calls designing to budget rather than reacting to price. The idea is simple: before drawings get produced, every major stakeholder (lender, equity partner, contractor, architect) should know what the project has to hit financially, and every design decision should be made in service of that number rather than in reaction to it.

This sounds obvious, but in practice, Canchola noted, she has been on projects where a $40+ million budget target was revealed to the general contractor halfway through, and their entire approach changed the moment they heard the number. Getting that conversation out of the way at the beginning, and staying transparent about it throughout, is what separates projects that get built from projects that stall.

Prefabrication and mass timber fit naturally into this approach because they require exactly this kind of early decision-making. The more prefabricated elements in a project, the more certainty you have about design and cost, but only if you've locked in the key decisions before production begins. If you're exploring prefab as a last resort after initial pricing comes back too high, you've already missed the window.

Mass timber: where it works and where it doesn't

On the question of when mass timber makes sense, Canchola was clear that it is not the right answer for every project. But the perception that it's inherently more expensive has killed a lot of conversations before they started. The reason is almost always the same: a contractor who hasn't worked with mass timber prices in an uncertainty premium because they don't know what they're being asked to build. The project dies before it ever really gets evaluated.

Mass timber's sweet spot, in Canchola's view, is the 8-to-14-story range, where speed becomes a meaningful advantage, though as she put it, “you are only as fast as your slowest sub.” The Austin project's structural frame went up in 16 days with five workers. For smaller projects (one or two ADUs, small multifamily), mass timber can still make sense depending on the manufacturer and the developer's sustainability goals, but the economics require careful evaluation. Canchola's advice: don't rule it out, find someone who has done it before, and don't let a contractor who hasn't done it set the price.

→ Have a project you're thinking about for prefab or mass timber? Reach out to Canchola at developers@juno.co.

Sanem Surel | PermitBox + Toolbox Construction

What Permit Expediting Actually Means and Why Feasibility Comes First

Surel runs two businesses simultaneously: Toolbox Construction, a high-end remodel and ADU construction company, and PermitBox, a permit feasibility and expediting service that helps homeowners, contractors, architectural offices, and developers get through the permitting process, or figure out why they're stuck in it.

She came to both businesses through a circuitous path: high-end hospitality design, work with other contractors that guided her interests, and then her own construction company that grew into the permit side as she kept getting calls from teams with projects that needed help, rather that be because of permit packages that didn't match what the client actually wanted to build or feasibility assumptions that turned out to be wrong from the start.

Feasibility before anything else

The most common mistake Surel sees: people go into a project, especially ADU projects, based on assumptions rather than actual feasibility analysis. Though many successful ADUs have been built, hopeful builders still need to pay attention to the specifics first. Elements like flood zones, fire zones, stringent setback requirements, or septic situations in an unincorporated area make everything more complicated.

PermitBox's first step is always feasibility; does this project actually work under the applicable codes and zoning? Only after that does the question of permitting even become relevant, and the answer varies enormously by jurisdiction. What works in San Mateo doesn't work in Oakland. What works in Oakland doesn't work in Sonoma. Every city has its own permitting ecosystem, and Surel's team navigates all of them.

What permit expediting actually is

Surel noted that "permit expediter" is widely misunderstood – people assume it means getting permits faster through some kind of insider access. But what PermitBox actually does is review permit packages before submission to check whether the drawings are complete, code-compliant, and actually ready to submit – because a surprising number aren't.

Once a package is ready, PermitBox helps with portal setup, tracks where applications are in review, interprets and responds to city comments, and coordinates with individual agencies when things get stuck. For larger clients, architectural offices, and developers outside California who want to work in the Bay Area PermitBox provides coordination and feasibility analysis as a local partner, including projects coming in from as far as Philadelphia.

Jurisdiction variability and the case for standardized timelines

Both Surel and Canchola touched on the same underlying frustration: the enormous variability in how different jurisdictions handle permitting, and how much time and money that variability costs developers. Canchola highlighted San Diego's affordable housing permit program as a model: projects going through ministerial approval have a defined number of review rounds and a 30-day first review timeline. It's not perfect, but it creates predictability.

Surel's observation from the field shows that even in cities that have invested in digital permitting infrastructure, the people administering those systems often haven't been adequately trained, which creates new friction even as the technology improves. The gap between what the system is supposed to do and what actually happens in practice is still wide.

Canchola's policy recommendation is centered around effective permitting timeline programs, like San Diego's, not being limited to affordable housing. Any housing going to market helps with affordability over time, and treating all housing supply as worth expediting would unlock more production.

→ Want to learn more about Surel’s work? Reach out to her at sanem@toolboxsf.co.

The Throughline

Both sessions pointed to the same underlying reality: the barriers to getting housing built aren't just policy barriers or financing barriers, they're process barriers, knowledge barriers, and coordination barriers. Knowing what you can build is step one. Knowing what you can afford to build, which permitting pathway applies, who needs to be in the room and when, and how to structure your team to make good decisions early is where projects actually get made or lost.

Building housing in California shouldn't be this hard. But until it gets easier, staying connected to practitioners who have been through it is one of the best tools available.

Stay connected with HAC to keep learning, keep building, and keep moving the needle.

Want to connect further or suggest a future HAC-Ed topic? Reach Brianna at brianna@housingactioncoalition.org.