US building permits by county and city, as one tidy table (Census Building Permits Survey)

If you sell building products, build homes or lend on construction, monthly building permit counts are one of the earliest demand signals you can get. The US Census Bureau publishes them for every state, county and permit-issuing place through the Building Permits Survey (BPS), free. The catch is the format.

如果您销售建筑产品、建造房屋或提供建筑贷款，每月的建筑许可数量是您可以获得的最早的需求信号之一。美国人口普查局通过建筑许可调查 (BPS) 免费发布每个州、县和颁发许可地区的此类数据。问题在于其格式。

Why the raw files are hard to use BPS is published as dozens of fixed-layout text files per month, one per geography level and region. Columns are positional and split by structure type: 1 unit, 2 units, 3-4 units and 5+ units, each with buildings, units and valuation. State files report valuation in thousands of dollars while place files report dollars, so a naive join gives you numbers that are off by 1,000x. The newest month appears with a lag, and you have to work out which month is the latest one published.

原始文件难以使用的原因在于，BPS 每月发布数十个固定布局的文本文件，每个地理级别和区域对应一个文件。列是按位置排列的，并按结构类型划分：1 单元、2 单元、3-4 单元和 5 个以上单元，每种类型都有建筑物、单元和估值。州级文件以千美元为单位报告估值，而地方文件以美元为单位，因此简单的合并会导致数字出现 1000 倍的偏差。最新月份的数据会有滞后，您必须自行确定已发布的最新月份是哪一个。

Doing it by hand Browse the BPS data directory on www2.census.gov and pick the geography (state, county, place, metro) and period (monthly, year-to-date, annual). Parse the fixed-width columns using the layout notes for that file type. Convert state valuations from thousands to dollars before comparing them with county or place figures. Add FIPS codes so the table can be joined to anything else you have.

手动操作：浏览 www2.census.gov 上的 BPS 数据目录，选择地理位置（州、县、地点、大都市区）和周期（月度、年初至今、年度）。使用该文件类型的布局说明解析固定宽度的列。在将州级估值与县或地方数据进行比较之前，先将其从千美元转换为美元。添加 FIPS 代码，以便该表可以与您拥有的任何其他数据进行合并。

Doing it in one run I packaged those steps as an Apify Actor: US Building Permits by City, County & State. It finds the latest published month, downloads every file for the periods and geography you choose, and returns one row per place per period with named columns such as units1, units5plus and totalValueUsd, already in dollars. You can filter by state, by name and by a minimum number of units, and export to CSV or Excel.

一键完成：我将这些步骤封装为一个 Apify Actor：按城市、县和州划分的美国建筑许可。它会自动查找最新发布的月份，下载您选择的周期和地理位置的所有文件，并为每个地点和周期返回一行数据，其中包含已转换为美元的命名列，如 units1、units5plus 和 totalValueUsd。您可以按州、名称和最小单元数进行筛选，并导出为 CSV 或 Excel 文件。

Reading the numbers sensibly Permits are authorisations, not starts or completions, and some places issue none at all, so a missing small town is not the same as zero construction. Single-family and 5+ unit counts move for different reasons, so look at them separately rather than only at the total.

理智地解读数据：许可只是授权，而非开工或完工，而且有些地方根本不发放许可，因此缺失某个小镇的数据并不等同于零建设。单户住宅和 5 个以上单元的住宅数量变动原因各不相同，因此请分别查看它们，而不是只看总数。