New Homes Authorized in West University Place, 2015 to 2025

What does the eleven-year record actually show?

On this page, West U means the City of West University Place; Southampton, Boulevard Oaks and Rice Village sit inside the City of Houston. Between 2015 and 2025 the Census Bureau's Building Permits Survey recorded 535 new single-family homes authorized in West University Place. Every one of the 535 was a single-unit building; the survey reports no two-unit, three-to-four-unit or five-plus-unit authorizations in the city in any of those years. The combined declared valuation was $470,095,813, an average of about $878,684 per authorized home.

The annual figures are set out below exactly as the survey publishes them, taken from the December year-to-date place file for each year in the South Region. The Bureau reports twelve months of coverage for the city in every year of the series, so no year is a partial count.

Two things are worth reading off the table. The count moves within a band rather than along a trend: 64 in 2018 and 62 in 2019 at the high end, 35 in 2024 at the low end, and a return to 48 in 2025 close to the eleven-year average. The declared valuation per home, by contrast, does move in one direction, from about $811,438 in 2015 to about $1,035,071 in 2025. What is being permitted has become larger or more expensive to build, or both.

Why does that count as a replacement rate?

Because the denominator is fixed. West University Place occupies about two square miles inside boundaries it cannot extend, and it has effectively no vacant land, so a new home authorized here is almost always a home built where another home stood. The 2020 Census counted 5,308 housing units in the city, and the stock has stayed close to flat while those 535 authorizations were issued.

That is what turns a count into a rate. Roughly one home in ten was authorized for replacement inside eleven years: not one in ten added, one in ten rebuilt. In a city that could still absorb new subdivisions the same number would describe growth and would mean something entirely different for an owner deciding what to do with an older house.

The last column of the table is the reason the rate persists rather than exhausting itself. Replacement stays economic as long as the finished house is worth more than the site plus the build, and declared valuation per authorized home has risen across the same decade in which land values in this market rose. Neither figure predicts next year; together they describe a process that has run continuously for eleven years.

What does the series not measure?

It does not count demolitions. The Building Permits Survey counts residential buildings authorized for construction, and West University Place issues demolition permits through a separate process that no national series collects. A house removed without a replacement being permitted appears nowhere in this table.

It does not count completions either. A permit authorized in December is often a house finished the following year, and a permit authorized is occasionally a house never built. Reading a single year as a count of new houses that appeared that year will be wrong at the edges of the series and wrong by more in any year when the market turned.

Two further gaps run in the same direction and both understate the turnover. Two adjacent houses removed so that one larger house can be built on a consolidated site are one authorization and two demolitions. A gut renovation that leaves enough structure standing to avoid being a new home is not in the series at all, though to a neighbour and to a comparable sale it is the same event. The honest label for this series is new homes authorized, and this site uses no other.

What is a declared valuation, and what is it worth knowing?

It is the construction value the applicant states on the permit application, published by the Census Bureau alongside the count. It is not construction cost, not the finished value of the house, and not the price the house later sells for. Applicants have their own reasons for the figure they write, and the Bureau publishes it without adjustment.

Read as a series it still carries information, because the same reporting convention applies throughout. A rising declared valuation per authorized home tells you that what is being permitted has changed, in the direction of larger or more expensive houses. Read as an absolute it tells you very little: dividing an annual total by an annual count gives an average declared valuation, which is a statement about paperwork rather than about buildings.

What can this page not tell you?

How many West U houses were actually torn down. That number exists (the city issues the demolition permits), but it is not published in any searchable form, so nothing here can convert the proxy into a measurement. A Texas Public Information Act request to the city's Community Development office for annual residential demolition counts over the same period would close the gap, and this site would rather name it than fill it with an estimate.

Which streets or blocks the authorizations fell on. The survey publishes by place, so the whole city is one row per year and no geography inside it is visible. Whether replacement is concentrated in particular sections is a real question this table cannot touch.

And whether your own house is one of the ones a builder would replace. That is a question about your site rather than about the city, and it is answered from the zoning tables and a tree survey rather than from a permit series.