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New York City has a permitting problem. Businesses and developers can wait months to obtain approval to open shop or start construction. To obtain a permit, applicants are often left to navigate a complex array of agencies, each with their own, fragmented software, and byzantine codes. The system is so complex that an entire profession exists — “the expeditor” — whose job is essentially to walk applications through City Hall. The system also produced scandals on a regular schedule: 50 inspectors, expeditors and owners arrested in a 2015 sting;11 Department of Buildings employees charged with taking more than $400,000 in bribes; a former DOB supervisor indicted just three weeks ago for allegedly fast-tracking plan reviews in exchange for $75,000 in cash and travel. And that’s before we get to the federal indictment of Mayor Eric Adams, which alleged that he pressured FDNY officials to permit the high-rise Turkish consulate to open before the building was deemed safe to occupy.
Many American cities — from New York to San Francisco—have pledged to modernize urban permitting. They might look to an unexpected peer for inspiration: The Mexican City of Guadalajara, which has spent the last decade overhauling its permitting regime. Our interview today is with Yunive Moreno, director of Visor Urbano, an online, one-stop shop for issuing commercial permits, developed by Guadalajara in 2016 with support from Bloomberg Philanthropies. It is now hosted by the state of Jalisco (population roughly 9 million), with some 60 cities across Mexico running a version of the platform. Applicants can pull up zoning maps, see what’s allowed on a given parcel and apply for a permit to open a business or begin construction — entirely online. The average turnaround for a permit is three days.
What began as a bureaucratic cleanup project produced an unexpected dividend: a clean digital paper trail that cut out local middlemen who had long extracted fees, formal and otherwise, from business owners navigating the permit process. An impact evaluation from researchers at Oxford and Columbia found an 84% reduction in licensing time, a 74% drop in reports of bribe solicitation by municipal officials, and an 85% drop in solicitation by third-party intermediaries. Some Jalisco municipalities have since seen permit revenue rise 100% to 300% in a single year.
In our interview, Yunive explains how Visor Urbano was built, how it was scaled from a single city to a state of 9 million, and what cities considering the model should know about the politics of digitization. She also offers some blunt advice for anyone considering the same path.
Cara Eckholm: Yunive, thanks for joining.
Yunive Moreno: Hi, Cara. Thanks for having me.
Cara Eckholm: Wonderful. So you were around in 2016 when Visor Urbano was just an idea. How did permitting work in Guadalajara before the platform, and what inspired the push to digitize the process?
Yunive Moreno: The process was, much like in the United States, quite complex. The principal challenge we faced at the time was the asymmetry of information around urban zoning — a lot of paperwork and a lack of transparency about what each permit actually required.
Also, in 2016, the city’s urban planning framework was updated for the first time in more than ten years. Those plans were published as documents full of highly technical language and data that were very difficult for ordinary people — anyone without a background in urban planning — to understand. That’s what motivated us to take those rules and translate them into an easy-to-use platform. With Visor Urbano, you select the property you’re interested in, and within seconds, you can see all the regulations that apply to that zone.
Once you’ve reviewed the applicable rules, you can start your application process entirely online — or, if you prefer, in person at the office. We maintained both channels. Staff at the Visor Urbano office help people digitize their paperwork and navigate the process. That’s how Visor Urbano got started, almost 10 years ago.
Cara Eckholm: It sounds like you’ve come a very long way. Just to make sure I’m understanding correctly — before Visor Urbano, if I were a business owner and wanted to check whether I could open a business at a particular site, I would have had to go in person?
Yunive Moreno: Yes, exactly. Before you could even begin the process of opening a business or starting construction, you had to visit a separate government office that held the urban planning information. That information existed as a kind of legal document — a PDF with hundreds of rules. Guadalajara is divided into, I believe, 10 or 12 zones, and the document ran more than 100 pages.
Cara Eckholm: Right, a zoning code.
Yunive Moreno: Exactly. It was really difficult to read and interpret. So you’d go to that office, and a public servant would analyze your situation manually — reviewing the law, sometimes visiting the site in person — and that process alone could take months, just to confirm whether your project was even permitted in that zone.
There was a large asymmetry of information. Many consulting firms offered to do that analysis for you, but at a significant cost to citizens. What we did was take all of that zoning information and put it into a database. We mapped all the urban zoning rules by district and automated the lookup, which produced what we call “urban fact sheets” for each property, which citizens can download. Each fact sheet says what is allowed — and with that information you can then immediately begin your application online.
For larger projects, a public official still needs to review the application. But for something like a grocery store or other low-impact use, you can get your approval almost instantly.
Cara Eckholm: Where does the three-day average come in? What’s automatic and what requires a human reviewer?
Yunive Moreno: The fact sheets are instantaneous, but the permit application itself requires additional documentation — your ID, proof of property ownership, that kind of paperwork. The review of your uploads takes up to three days, during which a staff member verifies your identity and confirms that the property is legally yours. After that, you’re cleared to open your business.
Cara Eckholm: So just to recap: The zoning code is available online for anyone to consult. You look up a property, see whether your business is permitted there, and if you want to proceed, a human reviewer is looped in — but you’re still applying online and getting a response within about three days. And for more complex construction projects, I assume the review is more intensive. How do you differentiate between something like a grocery store — which gets fast approval — versus a multi-story commercial building?
Yunive Moreno: Yes, we have a hierarchy of project complexity. For all projects, there’s always a technical reviewer on the other side of the screen. For low-impact uses, that specialist works through a clear set of rules, so the process is relatively straightforward. For more complex projects, you should expect the review to take longer — but the key difference is that you can upload everything online: your project plans, architectural drawings, everything the reviewer needs. You no longer have to walk files into an office.
Cara Eckholm: Got it. And how did Visor Urbano go from idea to reality? I understand you initially received support from Bloomberg Philanthropies to build out the software, but that it remained a city-owned and city-operated project. Can you elaborate?
Yunive Moreno: Sure. In 2016, when Visor Urbano was just an idea, we applied for a Bloomberg Philanthropies Mayor’s Challenge in Latin America, and we were one of five winning cities to receive a grant from the foundation. That grant allowed us to build a dedicated technical team within Guadalajara city government, focused exclusively on the project. We believe that this platform opened up information that had for many years been siloed and gatekept. The response from the public was very strong.
Following Guadalajara’s success, we transitioned to working with the state of Jalisco, with the goal of replicating Visor Urbano across all 125 municipalities in the state. That was a real challenge — scaling something built for one of Mexico’s major cities to work for municipalities with vastly different resources and realities. Some of our municipalities have fewer than 100 residents. The needs are completely different.
We developed a new platform, Visor Urbano Jalisco, specifically for the state context. We visited municipalities across the state, ran surveys and listened carefully to understand what each community needed. Many other municipalities didn’t even have computers in their offices. They didn’t have specialized staff to handle permit applications.
So we studied those realities, built Visor Urbano Jalisco accordingly and launched in 2020. The pandemic actually helped us — because people couldn’t go to government offices, there was strong demand for online services. We ran a major communications campaign, and we’ve since launched in 35 municipalities.
Cara Eckholm: I’m curious about how that replication effect actually works in practice. You mentioned that the mayor of Guadalajara later became governor of Jalisco — is that right? Was it his initiative to take the platform statewide?
Yunive Moreno: Yes, exactly. I think the political backing was the key driver of our success. The core values of Visor Urbano — transparency, efficiency and digitalization — were values that the team shared from the beginning. When Mayor Enrique Alfaro transitioned to the governorship of Jalisco, his innovation team moved with him, from the city to the state. The digital innovation agenda came with them, and the goal became bringing to all 125 municipalities the same tools that Guadalajara had. The idea was that it shouldn’t matter if your municipality doesn’t have the resources of a capital city — you should still be able to have your own modern, functional permitting platform.
So we built the software to be adaptable — each municipality can configure the platform to fit its own context. And the Visor Urbano Jalisco team does a lot of on-the-ground work: visiting municipalities, getting to know the staff, building capacity and supporting the transition to a new way of working. It’s a significant amount of people-oriented, soft-skills work alongside the technical implementation.
Cara Eckholm: That’s a great segue to my next question, which was about the political dynamics. Was there any pushback from permitting officers? Because as I understand it, in the old system, there were people making money at various stages of the process who were essentially cut out once everything went online. What was the reaction from those groups — the people working inside city governments, and the intermediaries who were helping shepherd applicants through the process, some legally and some not?
Yunive Moreno: We were actually surprised by how positive the reaction was. Part of that is because Visor Urbano’s initial focus was low-impact permits, which represent about 70% to 80% of all permit applications. But more importantly, we worked proactively with the business chambers — the chambers of commerce and construction industry associations — and tried to create a win-win situation. We showed them how the platform could actually help their work: It gave them better tools for managing higher-impact projects, and it helped their members get more transparent, rapid feedback from the government.
I also think those groups benefited from the platform in a more indirect way: As the process became more efficient, more people chose to go through official channels rather than informal ones. We saw that when the platform works well, it builds trust — people become more willing to engage with government processes and do things by the book.
Cara Eckholm: I’m curious about the platform architecture. Why did you decide to make it open source? Was it always obvious there would be demand from other cities?
Yunive Moreno: From the very beginning — both with Guadalajara and later with Jalisco — we understood that this was a problem facing many cities. We received calls, attended conferences and heard from cities all over Mexico that wanted their own version of Visor Urbano. As a fun fact: In Mexico today, saying “I have my own Visor Urbano” has become shorthand for having an online zoning and permitting platform — even when those systems weren’t built with our code or our support.
Making the code open source was also a commitment we made to Bloomberg Philanthropies from the start. It was part of the foundation’s vision — and one of the final deliverables of our collaboration — to open up Visor Urbano Jalisco in the most accessible and practical way possible. We published the code in late 2024.
Since then, a number of cities have been building on it. We’re always open to helping. And I know that Bloomberg Philanthropies is also running its Cities Ideas Exchange program with Visor Urbano as one of its featured projects, with the goal of replicating it in cities around the world.
Cara Eckholm: How many cities are using Visor Urbano today?
Yunive Moreno: Approximately 60 cities in Mexico.
Cara Eckholm: And has it spread beyond Mexico yet?
Yunive Moreno: Not yet. Through the Bloomberg Cities Ideas Exchange, there are plans to launch in one city in Argentina and one city in Chile, but as of now, there are no implementations outside Mexico as far as I know.
Cara Eckholm: Still, 60 is impressive. And how does the platform work for municipalities that don’t have reliable internet access, or even computers? You mentioned some towns are starting without basic infrastructure.
Yunive Moreno: Yes. As part of the support we provided to municipalities — with philanthropic backing — we were able to supply desktop computers for Visor Urbano in some cases. We’re also continuing to work with the state of Jalisco to expand that support.
But the hardware is often the easier part. The harder, more ongoing work is capacity building — training public servants to use the platform consistently, making sure citizens know how to navigate it and sustaining both sides of that equation over time. We have two sets of users: citizens applying for permits, and the government staff processing them. Serving both well is a continuous effort. It’s a hard process, but a deeply fulfilling one when you see how many people it reaches.
Cara Eckholm: In terms of volume — how many users or downloads have you seen across Jalisco?
Yunive Moreno: Right now, Visor Urbano Jalisco has urban plans available for 10 municipalities. Not every municipality has an updated and digitized urban plan — that’s a separate process — but for the ones we do have, we’ve generated 440,000 urban fact sheet downloads since the platform launched in 2020. That number reflects a lot of interest in doing business and building in the state.
In addition, 35,000 permits have been processed through the platform across the state. We’re really proud of those numbers — it’s the most-used online platform in the state government.
Cara Eckholm: I want to ask about the platform’s impact. I know researchers from Oxford and Columbia came to study Visor Urbano in Guadalajara around 2020. What did they find?
Yunive Moreno: Yes. They came toward the end of the Guadalajara phase and conducted surveys and calls with platform users. They found an 84% reduction in average time for the licensing process, a 74% reduction in reports of bribe solicitation by municipal officials and an 85% reduction in bribe solicitation by third-party intermediaries — what we call “coyotes,” the people who used to help applicants navigate the process.
That impact evaluation was enormously meaningful to us, because fighting corruption in urban development was always one of Visor Urbano’s goals. It’s a sensitive topic — not many cities are willing to openly acknowledge or study corruption in their permitting systems. So having rigorous external evidence was really powerful.
Cara Eckholm: Right, I know Jalisco has been in the news a lot recently related to gang activity. I will say though that corruption-in-permitting is a universal problem. It’s not specific to Jalisco or Mexico. In U.S. cities, we’ve essentially legalized the intermediary role by creating the “expeditor” profession, but every few years there’s a major scandal. In fact, one of the original corruption charges against the last mayor of New York involved pressuring someone to approve a building permit before an inspection had been completed.
It sounds like you’ve made progress relative to where most places are. On that note — the last time we spoke, you mentioned that you also saw a corresponding increase in municipal permitting revenue. The idea being that money that once went to bribes is now being collected by the city. Is that right? And how significant have those revenue increases been?
Yunive Moreno: What we observed in Jalisco is a bit more nuanced than a direct bribe-to-revenue conversion.
In many smaller municipalities, the issue wasn’t exactly bribery in the traditional sense. It was more that there wasn’t really a formal permitting process to speak of. People knew each other, deals were made informally and businesses opened without permits — not necessarily because anyone demanded a bribe, but because that was simply how things worked. A lot of economic activity was happening outside the formal system.
So the revenue increase we’ve seen is largely, we believe, due to people entering the formal economy. When you make the formal process easy, accessible and trustworthy, people who previously operated informally start going through official channels. That’s one major factor.
It’s worth understanding just how significant permits and licenses are as a revenue source for Mexican municipalities. Their principal income streams come from three things: land use and property tax; water usage charges and permit and license fees. That’s essentially the full menu of owned revenue for a local government. So when permit revenue increases substantially, it matters.
And the state benefits too — as municipalities collect more revenue, the state’s federal transfer allocations also increase. We’re currently working to formally institutionalize Visor Urbano Jalisco as a state public policy — moving it from an innovation project to a permanent part of the government structure. It’s a complex process, given the need to respect municipal autonomy, but the case is strong: we have municipalities that have seen revenue increases of 100% to 300% in a single year.
Cara Eckholm: It sounds like the program pays for itself? I hadn’t thought about the informal-to-formal economy angle, but it makes complete sense.
Just to close out — what are the key takeaways for other cities considering digitizing their permitting processes? Any advice?
Yunive Moreno: My advice is simply: start. You don’t need to wait for the perfect moment or have all the resources in place. What you need is the will and the right team. You will encounter resistance and hear a lot of “no’s” along the way — but once you push through that, the benefits become visible and the momentum builds.
I also believe citizens are demanding more information, clearer rules and more power in their own hands. And the lesson from our experience is that when the government delivers better services, people respond.
Cara Eckholm: Of course. Well, thank you so much for your time, Yunive. It’s a great story, and I’m sure it’ll be a source of inspiration for a lot of people.
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