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For much of its more than 165-year history, there’s been a pretty straightforward, statistical rule in Douglas County: Lawrence has the bigger number.

After all, for a long time now, Lawrence has had about 80% of Douglas County’s total population. So, unless the number was dealing with something like bushels of corn, Lawrence was always going to outpace the rest of the county.

This year, that may not be so in one key area: New single-family homes. Lawrence is on pace to have its worst year on record for new single-family home construction, falling below a mark that was just set in 2022.

But the more interesting trend may be what’s happening just outside of Lawrence. The unincorporated part of Douglas County, plus the cities of Eudora and Baldwin City, have issued more single-family building permits than Lawrence. From Jan. 1 through Aug. 31, Lawrence has issued 34 single-family building permits, while the rest of the county has issued 39.

In other words, the 20% of the county is issuing more building permits than the 80%.

That’s not normal. A Kansas real estate scholar said it also is not healthy.

Stan Longhofer, director of the Wichita State Center for Real Estate, said it is difficult to say exactly how many new homes Lawrence should be building each year, but he’s confident in saying one thing.

“I know the current number is too low,” Longhofer said.

With eight months of the year in the books, Lawrence is on pace to finish 2024 with 51 new single-family building permits. As the Journal-World reported, Lawrence hit a low for single-family building permits in 2022 when 79 permits were issued. City records go back to 1956, meaning that even during the early 1980s when mortgage interest rates were greater than 15%, Lawrence was building more single-family homes than it is today.

Another way to look at it: If Lawrence remains on its current pace, it will finish 2024 about 35% below its previous all-time low, set just two years ago.

With mortgage rates at times topping 7% in 2024, this hasn’t been a great year for home building in any community, Longhofer said. But there is a difference between not being great and setting a new record low. For communities that are growing in population — which Lawrence has been — single-family building totals actually have been rebounding some.

The Home Builders Association of Kansas City has released statistics through June for its eight-county region. Those statistics show that in the first half of the year, single-family home construction was up 11% compared to the first six months of 2023. In Lawrence, single-family home construction through August is down more than 54% from the same period a year ago.

Lawrence is on pace to finish the year with 51 single-family building permits. At the six-month mark, here are the paces that some other growing communities in the Kansas City area are on: Overland Park, 380 single-family homes; Olathe, 356; Spring Hill, 330; Lenexa, 282; Gardner, 124; Shawnee, 88; De Soto, 74; Basehor, 68.

Bobbie Flory, executive director of the Lawrence Home Builders Association, said she had picked up on a different mood among builders in other communities. At a recent conference, she said there was enthusiasm among builders in many other communities. In Lawrence, she said the prevailing emotion is discouragement.

“I went into that conference thinking we were all in the same boat,” Flory said. “Now, I’m not sure we are. I don’t think others are experiencing what we are.”

Certainly there are communities that are experiencing slowdowns in 2024. Topeka, a community that has not been growing in population, is on pace for just 39 single-family building permits. Through July, new single-family home starts are down about 35% from the same period a year ago.

Longhofer, though, said Lawrence may be facing different challenges than some other communities that are struggling to grow housing starts. Some communities simply are lacking the demand from new residents. In Lawrence, Longhofer thinks the issue is more about regulations than a lack of willing residents.

While Longhofer said he’s not aware of all the political dynamics in Lawrence, he’s confident in saying there is a different mindset than in many other communities across Kansas.

“It certainly is the case that as a developer, if you have land, or an option on land, on the periphery of the city, and you would like to have that annexed in and become a part of the city, that process and that willingness of the community to do that is much lower than in other parts of the state,” Longhofer said.

The new lows in housing starts — in 2022 and potentially in 2024 — have come at the same time the city has been emphasizing the importance of infill development, which is where developers build on lots that are already in the city limits rather than in a new subdivision that is created on the edge of town.

Those vacant lots in the city often are not bunched together, but rather are scattered throughout the city. That can make for less efficient construction, but proponents of infill development say it is much more efficient from a big-picture standpoint because it takes advantage of already-built pieces of infrastructure, such as streets and utilities. There are large segments of the planning community that argue building new subdivisions on the edge of town can negatively impact the overall finances of the city because stretching the city limits of a community can increase maintenance costs and create the need for additional fire stations, police patrols and other costly services.

Longhofer contends that analysis about the cost of “greenfield” development can sometimes be correct, but often isn’t. He also said some of the assumptions about the benefits of infill development can be problematic, especially if a community struggles to find enough infill lots to keep up with demand from new residents.

“I think a lot of the efforts to try to push everything into infill, infill, infill, while good-intentioned, sometimes are counterproductive to the larger affordability issues,” Longhofer said.

In other words, if you are not producing enough new housing to keep up with demand, housing prices across the entire market will rise more than they would have otherwise.

In fairness, City Hall leaders have not had an infill-only policy. There have been annexations approved by the Lawrence City Commission in recent years. Local developer Adam Williams filed plans in late 2022 for an approximately 150-home development just south of Interstate 70 and a bit east of Folks Road in northwest Lawrence. But that project is an example of how an annexation doesn’t mean home construction is just around the corner. Despite plans that called for home construction to begin in late 2023, there are no homes close to construction in that development currently.

The city also has annexed property at the southeast corner of U.S. Highway 59 and the South Lawrence Trafficway. Plans call for a mixed-use project with a significant portion of the development devoted to single-family homes and duplexes. However, while the annexation has been approved, other planning items have not been, and actual home construction would appear to be at least a year away.

What has been happening, though, is single-family home construction has been occurring in the unincorporated parts of the county. Of the 39 single-family building permits outside of Lawrence, 29 of them have been in rural Douglas County. (If you are keeping track at home, the other 10 that were outside of Lawrence consisted of seven permits in Eudora and three in Baldwin City. I wasn’t able to determine whether any permits have been issued in Lecompton.)

Flory, the director of the local home builders association, said in her 27 years in the industry, she’s never seen the number of rural single-family permits be so close to the numbers issued in Lawrence.

While she’s happy that rural home construction is keeping some of her member businesses employed, she’s betting that county planners are dismayed that the rural and Lawrence numbers are so nearly equal. In general, rural building lots need to be about 20 acres in size to meet Douglas County regulations. A building lot in Lawrence is almost always just a fraction of an acre.

Flory said there is an argument to be made that the slowdown in Lawrence building is having the “unintentional consequence of taking up more rural space than is really needed.” That largely goes against the county’s growth policies of preserving agricultural spaces and pushing housing development to spaces inside city limits.

Flory and others in the local building industry are holding out hope that new areas of Lawrence will open up for development in the future. The biggest such area is west of the South Lawrence Trafficway, near the Bob Billings interchange. The city has put millions of dollars in its five-year capital improvement plan to do the significant amount of work to extend utilities and other infrastructure across the highway.

The fact the city has included that work in its official plans is seen as a victory for developers who have argued that the availability of land to build upon has been too suppressed in Lawrence. The area west of the SLT could accommodate a few thousand homes over the next decade, but even the most optimistic of scenarios has the start of any home construction years away. Plus, there is the matter of the land still largely being owned by individuals who likely would need to agree to sell to developers before any project would move forward.

Flory is looking forward to the day that local builders could start constructing significant numbers of houses in that area, but currently she has a worry that is more short-term.

“I’m concerned that when we do have lots available, are we going to have the local construction workforce available to build anything on them?” Flory said.

While remodelers in Lawrence still remain in good supply, Flory is worried that local home builders are moving their operations to Kansas City or other communities where construction is happening at a much larger scale.

“It is discouraging right now,” Flory said. “It is hard to sustain the construction industry here with the level of building activity that we have currently.”