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Six US cities issued 6,102 building permits in one week, and only 121 were for new buildings - what city open data says about construction right now

Every large American city publishes the permits its building department issues, usually the next day, on an open-data portal. The formats differ, the vocabularies differ, the lags differ. On 8 November 2026 I read the week of 31 October to 6 November from six of them with the new US Building Permits Actor, which maps the six into one table, and this is what a week of permitted construction looks like.

6,102 permits, six very different registers

Los Angeles is not asleep: its dataset is refreshed once a week and was a week behind (last issue date 31 October). That is the first lesson of this data: before comparing cities, check each register’s latest date, which the Actor prints in every run.

By day of issue: Monday 1,120, Tuesday 492, Wednesday 1,970, Thursday 1,264, Friday 1,213, and 43 over the weekend. Wednesday is New York’s big day.

What gets permitted

New buildings are 2% of the permits. Seattle issued 33 of them, Austin 65, Chicago 20, San Francisco 2. New York issued some too, but its DOB NOW register files new buildings and alterations under the same “General Construction” label, so they only show up through the description (“A new 8 story building with affordable housing”, $43.4M, was one of them).

New York’s 825 permits for sidewalk sheds, scaffolds and construction fences deserve their own line: they are a quarter of the city’s weekly permits and the reason the city looks like a building site. For a scaffolding company, that list, with the general contractor named on each permit, is the market.

The largest permits of the week

Who is on the permit

Three of the six cities publish the contractor company on the permit: New York on 100% of its rows, Austin on 89%, Chicago on 82%. San Francisco, Seattle and Los Angeles do not. Owners and applicants are often individuals; the Actor keeps company names only and drops the people, whatever the city publishes.

The week’s most frequent names say something about each market. In Austin, one battery installer took out 105 “auxiliary power” electrical permits in five days, more than any general contractor. In New York, the two busiest permittees are a scaffolding firm and a filing consultancy. In Chicago, the top contractor is a solar installer.

Renewals, trade permits and other traps

• New York publishes a row each time a permit is renewed: 1,455 of its 3,615 rows are renewals. The Actor flags them and can drop them.
• Austin’s volume is mostly trade permits (electrical 463, plumbing 345, mechanical 221), issued separately from the building permit; a valuation is declared on fewer than one row in ten.
• San Francisco’s 341 “over-the-counter alterations” are the city’s everyday work: a median of $21,733, kitchens, roofs, seismic bolts.
• Housing units are only comparable for new buildings: Austin’s 65 new buildings carry 92 units, Seattle’s 33 carry 41.

Reproduce it

The whole week, all six cities:

{ "dateFrom": "2026-10-31", "dateTo": "2026-11-06", "maxPermitsPerCity": 5000 }

New buildings in Austin and Seattle over the last two weeks:

{ "cities": ["austin", "seattle"], "daysBack": 14, "categories": ["new_building"] }

$2 per 1,000 permits, the first 20 of every run free, one free summary row per city. Every row links to the permit record or dataset of the city.

Source: open-data portals of the cities of New York (DOB NOW: Build, approved permits), Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Austin and Seattle, read on 8 November 2026 for issue dates 31 October to 6 November 2026. Categories are the Actor’s mapping of each city’s own permit and work types; costs are as declared by the applicants.