Building permits issued by the city of St. Louis surged in 2014 and 2015. Recovering from the doldrums of the recession, permits totaled $737M in 2014 and $692M in 2015. The total for 2015 would have surpassed 2014, but for the $56M Ikea permit issued in 2014. They haven’t reached the heights of the mid 2000s. Time will tell how 2016 goes.
{Building permits in nominal dollars 1992-2015}
Note: It would help our understanding of regional development to have a map of St. Louis County (and others). However, building permits are handled by municipalities and the hyper-fragmentation of the county and the lack of capacity and aversion to transparency it promotes makes compiling the data a significant research task. The US Census reports there were permits for 1,062 new privately-owned housing-units in 2014 in St. Louis County with a construction cost of $348M (Keep in mind this is only part of the story since it’s just new residential).
