New Home Construction in Tucson and Pima County
Building permits closely track the economic growth of the City of Tucson and Pima County. This chart shows the history of total building permits in the Tucson metropolitan area, monthly from January 1970 through May 2020. Most striking is the precipitous decline in building permits during the Great Recession, then the steady but comparatively low rate of building post-2009. Permits went from a peak of over 1,000 per month from April 2005 through September 2005 during the pre-recession housing boom to an average of about 150 permits per month from 2009 through 2011 when development slowed down.
The chart is interactive: scroll over the line to see total permits at any time period.
Building permits are also reported by category, shown below from January 1990 through May 2020. As single-family home construction took off between 2003-2006, there was a decline in multi-family development. However, this data shows that multi-family construction has rebounded since around 2010 and now makes up a sizable portion of overall development activity. Single-family development has been slow since the housing market crash of 2008, and is still below the level seen throughout most of the 1990s.
