Nearly 1,000 building permits were issued in Gainesville and Hall County last year for new, single-family homes.
According to the city's Community Development Department, 412 were approved, down by 22 from 2016, when 434 were issued. The 2017 figures include 16 permits for "attached" single-family homes.
Hall County, meanwhile, reports issuing permits for 548 new, single-family homes last year, compared to 410 in 2016.
The residential growth in the county in 2017 did not go unnoticed by county planning commission chairman Don Smallwood at a December planning board meeting.
"It's been a good year," Smallwood said. "We're seeing a little bit of the development coming back."
He noted that residential neighborhoods were the biggest incoming developments. He said that as the growth continues to move into the county, the strategies of some of the developers have changed and smaller homes are now becoming a trend.
"What they're wanting to do is to take the house size down where they had the subdivision already approved," Smallwood said. "And there's not anything wrong with that, you know, it helps get the development going, but we can't take the folks that are there and let them do it on their back."
He also said that an encouraging sign is that some developers are starting projects on sites of previously abandoned subdivision projects.
"I think if the economy keeps getting better, and it seems to be getting better because the attitude of the builders and the attitudes of the folks buying and selling homes and doing stuff is a lot better now...we'll see more folks going back and revisiting these subdivisions," Smallwood said.
He said the county expects the residential growth to continue into 2018, saying that commercial development hasn't been booming at the same rate.
(AccessWDUN's Caleb Hutchins contributed to this report.)
