San Jose permitted 23,987 homes it never finished.

01 · The graveyard

75,123 permits expired without a final inspection.

The city publishes four datasets of building permits and the largest by far is the expired one: 75,123 records against 17,109 active. Strip out the small work and 765 permits over a million dollars each - $4.48B of declared construction and 9,763 homes - were issued and never finished.

Whose work stopped

Owner of record on expired permits over a million dollars, as the city spells it.

Which permits expired this fortnight, and who owns them, is the first section of the read. Get it every second Monday →

02 · The clock

Half the pipeline is entitled and not building.

51 of the 112 mapped projects sit at Planning Approved - permission in hand, nothing out of the ground. Their file numbers carry the year they were opened, and the median of that cohort is 2019. The review cohort still holds files from 2012.

The oldest files still open

When one of these moves, it moves quietly - the city announces nothing. We diff the register every fortnight and the movements are the second section. Get it →

03 · The queue

10,327 permits are open right now, holding 11,578 homes and $4.54B of work.

Median age 128 days. 3,927 are past six months, 1,200 past a year, 355 past two. The oldest open permit was issued on 1997-10-22 - 10,556 days ago - on a single-family at 6429 Pelham Ct , San Jose Ca 95123-4941.

Who is waiting longest

Median age of the open permits each owner is carrying, minimum eight open. This is the single most checkable statement about who is stuck.

Your own row, and the subtype benchmark it should be measured against, is what a call with us starts from. Or take the fortnightly read first →

04 · The cost line

What San Jose declares it costs to build, by what is being built.

Declared valuation over declared square footage, per permit, by subtype - the quartile range with the median marked. This is the only free, city-wide, like-for-like cost reference that exists here, and it is the number a bid should be checked against before it is signed.

The same table, cut to your subtype and your years, with your own permits marked on it - that is the bid check. The read carries it quarterly →

05 · The league table

Everyone building here, measured the same way.

Thirty largest owners by declared value, out of 369 firms with ten or more permits. Build time is the median days from issue to final inspection on the permits that have one; "still open" means their current work has not finalled yet, which on a large project is normal and on a small one is not.

We hold this for every one of the 369, plus filing cadence and open queue age. It is how a call starts with us already knowing the answer. Take the read →

06 · Method

Where every number came from.

Four public files, read the same way every fortnight. No survey, no panel, no proprietary feed - which is the point: you can check us.