How much new housing has been built?

The Census Bureau's Building Permits Survey collects, from every permit office in Ohio, the new privately owned housing units it authorized each year: single-family houses, duplexes, small buildings and apartment buildings of five or more units, with the construction value the applicant declared. The map shows units authorized from 2016 through 2025 per 1,000 residents of the city, village, township or county building department that covers most of each ZIP, and the card gives the yearly counts, the mix and the dollar value. Columbus alone permitted 52,000 units in the decade, most of them apartments; the county building departments of Union, Delaware and Warren counties lead per head. Remodels and commercial work are not in the survey, and in the 39 counties whose county office reports only buildings of four or more units, houses in the townships are not counted at all. For Columbus and Westerville the card can list every permit on every house in the ZIP since 2016, loaded only when asked for: house numbers, dates, the work, the declared value and the contractor, from the cities' own permit records.

1,229 of 1,233 ZIPs have data; median 14.1 per 1,000 residents.

Legend

Map of Ohio by Building permits

Source

Census Bureau Building Permits Survey, annual place files 2016 to 2025: new privately owned housing units, buildings and construction value authorized by each Ohio permit office, given to each ZIP through the jurisdiction where most of its residents live; every permit on every house, house by house, from 20 open sources (306 ZIPs; the ledgers load on demand): Columbus (2016 to 2026-09, ArcGIS FeatureServer / opendata.columbus.gov); Cleveland (2016 to 2026-09, ArcGIS FeatureServer); Cincinnati (2016 to 2026-09, Socrata open data); Dayton (2016 to 2026-09, Accela Citizen Access (General Search, no login) plus, where fetched, the per-permit CapDetail.aspx page); Clermont County (EnerGov) (2016 to 2026-09, Tyler EnerGov Citizen Self Service (CSS) search API); Summit County Fiscal Office CAMA permit table (2016 to 2026-08, file (Drupal "Data Downloads" library, CAMA table export set shared with Richland County)); Kettering (regional building department) (2016 to 2026-09, Accela Citizen Access, unauthenticated General Search (HTML grid, no API/export) plus, where fetched, the per-permit CapDetail.aspx page); Delaware County (2022 to 2026-08, Yearly XLSX reports); Medina County (2016 to 2026-09, Own PHP permit-search website (form POST + session-cookie GET, no CSV/export)); Worthington (EnerGov) (2016 to 2026-09, Tyler EnerGov Citizen Self Service (CSS) search API); Xenia (2016 to 2026-09, ArcGIS Enterprise FeatureServer -- the city's own permit-application system of record, not a GIS export of a separate permitting system); Union County (2024 to 2026-08, Monthly XLSX reports); Richland County Auditor (2016 to 2026-08, flat-file CAMA table export on a public Google Drive folder (no API, no login)); Westerville (2016 to 2026-09, ArcGIS FeatureServer (Cityworks transparency layers)); Champaign County (2025 to 2026-08, Monthly PDF reports on the county's own website (an old fixed-width mainframe report, one file per month, indexed at .../Building-Regulations/Permits/permits.html)); Fulton County (2016 to 2026-09, ArcGIS FeatureServer (Fulton County Engineer's office ArcGIS Online org, public, no login)); Springboro (2025 to 2026-07, CivicPlus Archive Center (monthly PDF reports)); Mansfield, Accela Citizen Access (2025 to 2026-09, Accela Citizen Access (ASP.NET WebForms General Search; no login, no published API)); Oxford (2024 to 2026-07, Monthly XLSX reports); Pickaway County (2026 to 2026-08, Monthly report PDF, self-overwriting (no year anywhere in the filename or URL))

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