Everything's bigger in Texas...

Cool post Uxbridge. If I get laid off again I think I'll head west to look for work instead of North.

It'd be nice if the article clarified whether it's "multifamily units permitted" and "multifamily permits issued." There's a big difference. One MF permit may include dozens of dwelling units.

do you have a sense of how those numbers compare to what they were before the crash and the preceding boom...back 7-10 years ago before things got too hot?

Multifamily permits issued is what it is. I'm not sure if they are for metro areas or within the legal boundries.

October 2006 was down 26% from 2005.

Another interesting statistic was that multi-family construction permits were down 24.1% between October 2004 and 2005. Similar figures for similar months. Seems to me that the condo market was already seen to be going sour and was throttled back by 2005. Single-family and duplex construction however peaked around this month.

In October 2005, 2,071,000 permits were issued (single-family, duplex, small apartment buildings and buildings with 5+ units.).

In October 2010, only 550,000 permits were issued-- down 74% from last year. Multi-family is only down about 60% compared to the near 76% single-family is.

Mind you, the permitting data includes only privately-owned projects.

Now, for the "actualities."

In October 2010, 519,000 units started construction.

Out of those, 436,000 are single-family units and only 74,000 units of multi-family were actually started. That makes multi-family projects started a -75% change from September 2010.

In October 2005, 2,014,000 units started construction.

Out of those, 1,704,000 were single-family and 271 were multi-family. Multi-family construction has a -11.7% from September 2005.

Overall, [b]multi-family construction is up 51% from last year. Good news for architects everywhere.

wow! thanks for posting that.

Well, what I find interesting seems to be the number of cancellations on multi-family construction.

In many instances, you have to take a project basically through design documentation to even apply from permitting. What this says is firms are being paid to at least take projects through the beginning stages. Somewhere after the permitting process, they seem to be getting shot down (lack of funding, lack of feasibility, lack of planning approval).

But, construction or not, the number of private multi-family units has been on a steady rise now for over 2 years in at least the permitting stage with solid growth over the last year for construction.

It may not be the American dream... but it looks like things are looking up.