Builders and homeowners on San Mateo County's urban Midcoast can start filing for new home permits again on Tuesday, Nov. 10. The county says the California Coastal Commission approved its fix for the area's 40-unit-a-year housing cap on Nov. 4, ending a freeze that has blocked new residential building permit applications since March (via County of San Mateo).
The reopening runs through the county's Online Permit Portal. Anyone who already holds an approved coastal development permit or coastal exemption (a CDP or CDX) for a home can apply for the building permit as soon as the portal opens.
The county's Local Coastal Program caps new housing in the urban Midcoast at 40 units per calendar year, and ADUs count toward that number. Policy 1.23 lets the county go past 40 in a given year only if the average over that year and the next two stays at or under 40.
The problem came in 2025. The county issued 102 permits that year, 71 of them for the Cypress Point affordable housing project, according to a June bulletin from the Planning and Building Department. Under the three-year averaging rule, that left room for just 18 units across all of 2026 and 2027, and the county said that without a change it couldn't issue new residential building permits until Jan. 1, 2028.
In March the county stopped taking applications for new dwelling units and canceled building permit applications that had seen no activity for more than six months. Planning applications kept moving, and active building permits were still processed, per the county's March release as reprinted by Coastside Buzz.
The county's answer was to change how the average is figured. As proposed in June, the amendment drops the forward-looking three-year average and instead counts the average number of permits issued per year going back to Jan. 1, 2013. Years when the Midcoast came in under 40 units would offset the 2025 spike.
The county Planning Commission voted 4-1 on May 27 to recommend the change, after the MidCoast Community Council raised concerns about it at its own meeting that night. The county held a community meeting on June 30 at the District 3 supervisor's office in Princeton. Because the cap is part of the Local Coastal Program, the change also needed the Coastal Commission's sign-off, which the county says came on Nov. 4. The county's Nov. 6 announcement doesn't describe the final language the commission approved.
If your application was one of the ones canceled in March, it isn't necessarily dead. Applicants can log into the portal, upload whatever was missing and pay any outstanding fees to reactivate it.
The county is strongly encouraging people to do that within 30 days, by Friday, Dec. 4, to get priority processing. The hard deadline is Thursday, Feb. 4, 2027. Applications that aren't reactivated by then will be permanently canceled, and the applicant will have to start a new permit application from scratch.
The county says questions about what's missing, or help uploading documents, should go to the Building Permit Technician assigned to the case.
Why it matters for Contractors
If you build or remodel on the coastside, there's likely a backlog of homeowners who have been waiting since spring, and some of them may not know their application was canceled. It's worth checking with past and current clients now. Getting a reactivated file complete by Dec. 4 puts it at the front of the line, and missing Feb. 4 means starting over, with new fees and a new place in the queue.
Clients who already hold an approved CDP or CDX are the quickest jobs to get moving, since they can file for the building permit on Nov. 10. For everyone else, the cap itself hasn't gone away; the county has only changed how it averages permits over time. ADUs still count toward the 40-unit limit, so it's a good idea to keep plans complete and file early rather than assume there will be room later.