Building permits by county

Chart

Use the API

Each series and location is its own small file. The examples follow the series and location picked above. See the docs for versions, caching and errors.

# One series for one place (.json or .csv)
curl -s "https://api.housingdata.dev/v1/building-permits/permits/usa.json"

# Every series and place in one file
curl -sO "https://api.housingdata.dev/v1/building-permits/download/building-permits.csv"

import polars as pl

# One series for one place
df = pl.read_csv("https://api.housingdata.dev/v1/building-permits/permits/usa.csv")

# Every series and place, with series and location columns
everything = pl.read_parquet("https://api.housingdata.dev/v1/building-permits/download/building-permits.parquet")

const res = await fetch("https://api.housingdata.dev/v1/building-permits/permits/usa.json");
if (!res.ok) throw new Error((await res.json()).detail); // errors are problem+json
const { meta, data } = await res.json();
console.log(meta.location_name, data.at(-1)); // { date, value, ... }

Downloads

The whole dataset in one file, with series and location columns. Parquet keeps the column types and is much smaller.

• building-permits.csv CSV
• building-permits.parquet Parquet

Schema and series

Each series file has these columns. The bulk downloads add series and location columns in front.

Series

Locations

Covers all 3,222 US counties and equivalents (ids: us-county- plus the 5-digit FIPS code); all 57 US states and equivalents (ids: us- plus the USPS code (us-ca, us-dc)); 19 more named places.

Place names come from the shared location registry; see Sources.

Source and license

Source

US Census Bureau, Building Permits Survey, annual county files

Publisher

US Census Bureau

License

US Government work (public domain in the United States) (LicenseRef-US-Government-Work)

Commercial use

Allowed

Credit the source with this exact text:

Checked every 7 days. If the source hasn't changed in 15 months, the status page flags it as stale.

Endpoints

Every URL for this dataset. To pin the current version, put it after the id: /v1/building-permits@<version>. The API reference describes each response.