Not all states are that bad. In the midwest things tend to be approved much faster. Which is why our housing costs are not as bad as CA (still not great, but they much more reflect the cost of building)
That's because there isn't usually enough demand to really set up a good building office greasy palm operation, but corruption certainly happens there too (Cuyahoga county has seen issues over the years and Chicago alderman corruption is legendary). If you don't have demand, onerous building process will just turn developers away and they will opt to build somewhere with about the same demand and less process. Sometimes that's even used as a tool to quiet development on purpose. If you have a situation where there is a lot of demand, like in the bay area where they've added 7 jobs per unit of house constructed over the past decade generating huge latent housing demand, councilmembers know they can make the process as slow and unforgiving as they want and developers are still strongly financially incentivized to build to meet this huge demand, and not only will suffer through the process but will often actually pay the councilmember a bribe or echange favors in some way to speed up the wheels. The more obtuse and complex the process, the more levers a corrupted official can pull to speed things up or slow things down and keep it looking like routine process on the face and out of the press, until the FBI finally gets prosecutable evidence of quid pro quo and puts in the indictment.
