Building permit records for the Twin Cities

Permits are issued by cities, so a "Twin Cities permit search" is really a different system for every city — each with its own starting date, its own interface and its own vocabulary. We read them into one record and keep the differences visible instead of averaging them away. The table below is the current coverage; it grows as we add cities.

We state scale in round numbers on purpose. The archive grows every week, and we are continuously standardizing how each municipality's own vocabulary and permit types are read, so an exact figure printed on a page would be out of date within days. What does not drift is how far back the record reaches — so that is what we publish per city and per trade.

Every city in the record

"Continuous from" is the year that city's record becomes dense enough to rely on — deliberately NOT the oldest document we hold. A handful of stray early permits exist in several cities and quoting them would overstate coverage by a decade or more. It is also not a promise that every trade goes back that far: each city page breaks the record down by trade, because that is the number that actually answers a question about a roof or a furnace.

The part that isn't a database

Minneapolis kept its permit history on paper index cards for most of a century. We have digitised over 900 thousand of those archive pages and matched over 800 thousand of them to a specific property, which puts pre-computer work back into the same record as last week's furnace permit. That marriage — scanned archive plus modern feed — is the thing a city portal cannot do for you, because the portal only knows what was typed into it. See what that looks like on a real parcel →

Questions the permit record actually answers