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A new working paper out of Princeton and the University of Chicago's Booth School puts real numbers behind something builders have grumbled about for years: getting a house or apartment building permitted and finished takes wildly different amounts of time depending on where you're building—and the gap has been widening for a quarter century.
Economists Leonardo D'Amico (University of Chicago), Evan Soltas (Princeton University), and Audrey Wang (Princeton University) pulled roughly 1.1 million permit records for 2.7 million housing units across 60 U.S. cities going back to 2000. To make an apples-to-apples comparison, they built a "standardized" project for each city— the same size single-family home and the same size 20-unit apartment building—and estimated how long that identical project would take to permit and complete depending on the city. A quick but important caveat: this is a city-level analysis, built from municipal permit records—not metro-area data. In a lot of the country's core homebuilding markets, particularly fast-growing Sunbelt metros, a large share of single-family construction happens in unincorporated county land or suburban jurisdictions outside the city limits proper. So a metro's overall building climate can look different from what its central city's permitting office reports here.
Single-family: a nearly 8x spread between the fastest and slowest cities
For a standardized single-family home, the fastest cities—Indianapolis, El Paso, and Colorado Springs—push a project from application to completion in around six months. San Francisco, at the other extreme, takes nearly four years, with Miami and Philadelphia close behind at roughly 3.4 years each. The permitting stage alone—not construction, just waiting for approval—explains 30% to 43% of that gap between the slowest and fastest cities. In Miami, permitting alone eats up about 1.4 years; in cities like Indianapolis or Albuquerque, it's a matter of weeks.
Multifamily: coastal cities take twice as long as the Sunbelt
The multifamily pattern echoes the single-family one, just stretched further. A standardized 20-unit apartment building takes about two years in fast-building cities like Raleigh, Grand Rapids, and Reno—versus 4.6 to 4.8 years in San Francisco, Miami, and New York. Charleston, S.C. stands out as an exception to the usual coastal/Sunbelt divide, with one of the longest permitting stretches in the entire dataset despite its smaller-city profile.
The authors find that multifamily permitting time roughly doubled nationally from 2000 to 2023, before showing tentative signs of improvement in the past couple of years. Single-family permitting nearly tripled over the same stretch, albeit from a much smaller base.
Shift in Lennar's average sales price net of incentives since the 2022 peak, by regional segment:
-18.0% --> East
-19.2% --> Central
-29.3% --> Texas/South Central
-17.8% --> West
-24.4% --> All Lennar segments
ResiClub finds that Lennar's share of new-build deliveries in the Texas/South Central segment—where it has the lowest average sales price—shifted up from 20.0% of its deliveries in Q3 2022 to 30.6% of its deliveries in Q2 2026. That segment shift to a higher share in lower-priced Texas/South Central markets did put some additional downward pressure on Lennar's national pricing aggregate. However, when you look within those segments, Lennar's average net of incentives still fell notably across the board. [During the same period, Lennar's average sq ft fell -4.6%).
Do you own single-family rentals?
If so, you're invited to participate in the LendingOne-ResiClub SFR Investor Survey—Q3 2026.
