County lags in building rebound

Posted on April 16, 2013

By Kristine Williams

Construction in Calaveras County has been slowly picking up over the past few months, though the increase in activity mostly has been in relation to small repair and addition projects – like this structure in San Andreas – as compared to single-family homes.

A Bureau of Labor Statistics report released earlier this month noted a single bright spot for March’s Employment Report – construction-related jobs are trending upward across the nation, and Calaveras County is no exception.

County Building Official Jeff White expressed cautious optimism as he described building trends in Calaveras County, saying that the department was essentially in the same boat as last year, having issued eight permits for new residential housing in the first three-months of 2013, compared to seven in the first three-months of 2012.

“Permit activity has gone up a little bit,” said White. “We’re not headed in the wrong direction but I’m not really excited about opening up a parade on it.”

He said that in the past few weeks he’s had increased traffic in the number of people inquiring about permit fee estimates for new dwellings, indicating that interest in new construction may be picking up, meaning more buyers are entering into the market and people who may have been hesitating about selling their homes are also deciding to put them on the market.

California, one of the states hit hardest by the nation’s economic recession due to the burst of the housing bubble, may potentially be one of the states that sees its construction sector improve at a faster pace than the rest of the nation.

In the San Francisco Bay Area, a building boom seems to be resurging, though construction has been focused mostly on multi-family apartment housing. Single-family home growth is increasing at a much slower rate, as White said was the case for Calaveras County.

“I’m not pessimistic regarding how things are going,” he said.

Lumber yards around the county reflected White’s comments, saying that though sales were up slightly, the increase was “nothing to write home about.”

“It slowly seems like people are letting loose with a little bit of their money,” said Randy Gult of Sender’s Market in Mountain Ranch. “But, every time you start to get ahead they (government) take an extra sixty-bucks out of your check.”

Randy Perea, sales manager for Calaveras Lumber in Angels Camp, also said he has been seeing the building business pick up slightly both in seasonal construction and other projects across the county.

“The activity is there,” said Perea. “The trend for the last couple years has been more activity.”

Perea noted that much of the increased activity he sees appears to be for home repair projects as opposed to entirely new single-family housing structures, though he did say that he’s been selling to a range of both individuals and larger contractors.

One county contractor, Clay Dillashaw, who has owned Dillashaw Construction alongside his brother Hal since 1982, wasn’t holding his breath, saying that purchasing an already constructed house was still far cheaper than what it cost to build a new one.

That, coupled with the fact that many banks are still holding onto a lot of foreclosed properties to avoid “flooding the market,” means that new home construction will probably remain on the backburner for the foreseeable future.

Still, Dillashaw noted that both the Bay Area and Sacramento regions typically indicate what’s to come for Calaveras County and that trends here tend to be about a year-and-a-half behind what’s going on in the state’s more urbanized regions.

“Even once it does pick up, it’s going to take years for it to get back to decent and it will never get back to where it was,” said Dillashaw. “It’s gonna be a while yet.”

Contact Kristine Williams at kristine@calaverasenterprise.com