How unevenly new home approvals fall across the counties of the Houston metro

the Houston metro · Data as of 2026-09-16 · ALEX Intelligence

Methodology

Source:

U.S. Census Bureau, Building Permits Survey, county annual totals, 2025; population from U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 5-year estimates, 2024

Measure

One-unit homes permitted per 1,000 residents, ranked highest first across Austin, Brazoria, Chambers, Fort Bend, Galveston, Harris, Liberty, Montgomery, San Jacinto, Waller, TX (10 ranked in total).

How the headline figure is computed

San Jacinto County against Harris County, the highest and lowest of the 10 units compared. Every unit is named individually in the table below and each figure is that unit's own; none of them is a figure for the market as a whole. The median across the 10 is 9.8.

Universe

The counties this market is made of, each carrying its own one-unit permit total for 2025 expressed per 1,000 residents so that counties of very different size can be set beside one another at all. Counties below 5,000 residents, and any the American Community Survey gives no population for, are excluded rather than normalised on a guess. A county absent from the Census permit file is dropped rather than counted as zero: the survey reports a genuine zero for a county with no activity, so an absent county is one the file does not cover, and those are different facts. 95% of the units counted here came from permit offices that reported rather than from imputation.

Vintage

2025

Reproduce this query

https://www2.census.gov/econ/bps/County/co2025a.txt

Every figure on this page is computed directly from the dataset named above by ALEX Intelligence. No figure on this page was written by hand or by a language model. The query is stated so that anyone can re-run it and obtain the same table.