Columbus Permitted 219 New Homes Last Week, Down From 440

Columbus issued building permits for 219 new homes in the week of October 19 to 25, 2026, half the 440 units permitted the week before. Three apartment permits supplied 200 of those homes, while the city's single-family permitting stayed at a steady trickle of 19 houses.

How CREN counted the week

CREN queried the City of Columbus open building-permits dataset, which the city dedicates to the public domain under a Creative Commons Zero waiver, through its ArcGIS feature service, for every new-structure permit the city issued from October 19 through October 25, 2026. The query returned 27 permits carrying 219 housing units and a combined declared value of about $37.2 million. Those permits split into three multifamily permits, 19 one-, two-, and three-family permits, and five commercial permits that listed no dwellings. The figures are current as of an October 26, 2026 pull that captured permits the city entered through October 23, and the city updates the feed daily.

Apartments supplied almost every new home

Nearly all of the week's homes — 200 of the 219 units — came from just three multifamily permits. The largest was a $13.8 million permit for a 104-unit apartment building at 135 Cleveland Avenue, near downtown Columbus, issued October 19, 2026. Two more permits, each for a 48-unit building at 4520 and 4530 Hall Road on the far west side, split the rest at $7 million apiece, both issued the same day. CREN found no City Council legislation or developer record naming the builders of these by-right apartment projects, so their details beyond the permits remain unverified.

Where the new homes are going

The homes cluster on opposite sides of the city. The downtown 43215 ZIP code led with 104 units, all in the single Cleveland Avenue building, followed by the west-side 43228 code with 97 units across the two Hall Road buildings and one house. The remaining 18 houses were scattered through the Canal Winchester, Galloway, Hilliard, and Grove City fringes of the city, in the 43110, 43119, 43026, and 43123 ZIP codes.

A thinner year for apartments

Weekly permit counts swing hard because large apartment buildings arrive in lumps, so the steadier measure is the running yearly total. So far in 2026, Columbus has permitted 5,835 new homes, down about 24 percent from the 7,705 it had permitted by the same point in 2025.

The decline is concentrated in apartments: multifamily permits have authorized 5,112 units this year against 7,011 a year earlier, a drop of about 27 percent. Single-family building has moved the other way, with 723 one-, two-, and three-family units permitted so far in 2026 against 694 by the same date in 2025, a rise of about 4 percent. Last week fit the pattern, its 219 homes trailing the 562 the city permitted in the same week of October 2025.

What the permit record does and does not show

These counts carry limits. A building permit authorizes work but does not prove that construction has started, so the 219 homes are approvals on paper, not finished or occupied housing. One project can carry several permits, so a permit count is not a project count. Declared value is the applicant's own construction estimate, not a sale price or an appraisal, and applicants enter the unit counts themselves. Because the feed updates daily, late entries can still raise last week's total after this report.

What to watch next

The next checkpoint is CREN's permit pull one week from now, which will show whether the 219-home week was a lull between large apartment filings or the start of a slower stretch. The wider question is the year-to-date gap: whether multifamily permitting narrows the roughly 27 percent shortfall in the final two months of 2026, which the weekly counts through November and December will reveal.