New home construction in North Texas, already handicapped by the City of Dallas’ permitting backlog, is on pace for its worst 12-month period since the Great Recession.

Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) experienced its seventh consecutive month-over-month decline in new single-family home construction (NSF) permits being issued through November 2022, according to building permit data published by the Texas Real Estate Research Center (TRERC) at Texas A&M University.

In November, North Texas homebuilders took out 2,362 NSF permits, bookending a 12-month decline of 32.5% and marking the second worse month for NSF permitting all year.

The region’s building permit slowdown was abrupt and steep, falling from 16,000 in the first quarter to only 9,603 in Q3, according to reporting on data from Residential Strategies.

It is unclear how much the governmental mismanagement in Dallas, the biggest city in DFW, has contributed to the regional decline in permits being taken out. A notoriously significant backlog at the City’s permitting agency likely played no small part in skewing the regional permitting data.

As previously reported in The Dallas Express, the City of Dallas continues to pose unique problems for prospective builders and developers.

Not only does Dallas’ development community have to contend with a slowing housing market, but it must also deal with the City’s permitting agency — the Development Services Department (DSD), which has been plagued with dysfunctional permitting software, a serious shortage of department staff, and unreasonably long wait times.

According to TRERC permit data for November, homebuilders only took out 280 NSF permits in Dallas. This amounted to a year-over-year decline of 38.3%, the steepest drop for Dallas since February 2011, when the City reported an annual decline of 42.7%.

The ultimate responsibility for DSD’s failures falls on the shoulders of controversial Dallas City Manager T.C. Broadnax, who has failed to resolve the City’s permitting troubles within a sensible timeframe, as previously reported in The Dallas Express.