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Home Resource Center In the News Home Greenbelt Alliance in the News |
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Greenbelt Alliance In the News
June 5, 2003 Home starts up by 27.2% in state Subheading Kelly Zito, Chronicle Staff WriterHome builders in California are on track to construct 180,000 new homes this year -- the highest number since 1989 and 6 percent more than previously projected. As has become the trend in housing construction in the aftermath of the high-tech bust, Southern California is leading the way. Between January and April, 63,626 building permits for new homes were issued statewide, a 27.2 percent increase from the same period last year, according to the Construction Industry Research Board, a Burbank group that tracks residential building. At that pace, this year's total will easily surpass the 164,000 homes built in 2002, the group said. Earlier in the year, the board predicted that nearly 170,000 homes would be erected in the state in 2003. At the same time, the state's largest real estate trade group expects existing home sales to dip 3 percent, from 547,300 in 2002 to 530,900 this year. Bob Rivinius, executive director of the California Building Industry Association, said historically low interest rates are helping fuel the construction boom. "Interest rates must stay where they are or be lower in order to sustain it, " he said. The building industry maintains that a minimum 230,000 homes -- roughly the number produced in 1989 -- must be built annually in the state to accommodate job and population growth. In the first four months of the year, large increases in home construction in Southern California -- where a more diverse economy has helped the area better weather the high-tech slump -- accounted for much of the increase. In the Riverside-San Bernardino metropolitan area, for example, more than 15,000 new single-family homes and condos were built from January through April, up from about 9,600 last year, a 57.3 percent gain. Permits in Ventura catapulted 127.2 percent, from 672 to 1,527. In Los Angeles, housing permits increased 43.3 percent from 4,788 to 6,861. Certain cities in the Central Valley also saw marked increases. In Merced and Fresno, new housing permits rocketed 93.5 percent and 65.7 percent, respectively. In the Bay Area, the data were mixed. The total permits issued rose to 1, 095, or 58 percent, in the San Francisco metropolitan area; in San Jose housing starts reached 2,823, an increase of 70 percent. However, permits declined on a year-over-year basis by 7.7 percent in Oakland, 23.5 percent in Santa Rosa and 18.3 percent in the Vallejo-Fairfield-Napa corridor. The Oakland area recorded the biggest drop in single-family home construction in the state in the first four months of 2003 -- from 2,410 to 1,692, or 29.8 percent. Builders said environmental groups and exorbitant "impact" fees levied by Bay Area municipalities, combined with a plodding economy, are curbing new construction in the region. But Dan Fahey, spokesman for the Greenbelt Alliance, said builders meet resistance because too often, they construct huge McMansions in areas with poor infrastructure rather than more modest homes on in-fill property near transit centers -- efforts that preserve land and reduce traffic. E-mail Kelly Zito at kzito@sfchronicle.com. ©2003 San Francisco Chronicle ### |
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