# SF Building Permits

A focused publication that turns San Francisco building permit filings into readable reports about major construction activity.

Public Work / Live

A focused publication that turns San Francisco building permit filings into readable reports about major construction activity.

Direct answer

## What did Devzilla build?

Devzilla built a source, scoring, records, and publishing workflow over San Francisco OpenData so notable permits become contextual reports instead of rows in a municipal dataset.

[Open the live system](https://sf-permits.devzilla.co/) [Inspect the primary source ↗](https://data.sfgov.org/Housing-and-Buildings/Building-Permits/i98e-djp9)

Status**Live**

Type**Devzilla-owned public work**

Stack**Python 3.12 / SQLite / Jinja2 / Socrata Open Data API / Cloudflare Workers**

Constraint

## The challenge

The municipal source is a large operational dataset rather than a publication. Permit rows need to be grouped, scored, and checked before a reader can understand which filings represent meaningful projects and why they matter.

Architecture

## What was built

The pipeline collects permit records from San Francisco OpenData, evaluates them for editorial significance, stores source and publication state in SQLite, and renders static reports with location, scope, valuation, applicant, and neighborhood context.

Engineering decisions

## The choices that shaped the system

-   Keep the primary source link and permit identifiers attached to each report.
-   Publish one notable permit or a small related cluster per article instead of bulk summaries.
-   Separate the records database from generated output so source state survives rebuilds.
-   Serve a static site from Cloudflare while the editorial workflow remains a repeatable agent-run procedure.

Current result

## What exists now

The public site contains twenty-six source-backed reports as of July 2026 and demonstrates a complete path from municipal feed to focused niche publication without inventing facts or hiding provenance.

Related Agency work

## Capabilities behind this system

[

### AI Prototype-to-Production Engineering

Devzilla turns promising AI prototypes into evaluated, observable, cost-aware production systems that client teams can operate.

](https://devzilla.co/services/ai-prototype-to-production/)[

### Geospatial Systems

Devzilla builds spatial data pipelines, location intelligence, and mapping products for systems where geography is part of the decision.

](https://devzilla.co/services/geospatial-systems/)

## Bring Devzilla the difficult source.

We will start with what must be true, what can fail, and who needs to own the result.

[Start a project →](https://devzilla.co/contact/)

Canonical URL: https://devzilla.co/work/sf-building-permits/