Laboring in a hole in the ground on Manhattan’s East 58th Street, Gamma Real Estate’s construction crews don’t quit for the weekend. They’ve been working Saturdays since June, trying to outrun New York City’s bureaucracy.

Gamma is excavating for a planned 799-foot (244-meter) condominium tower near the corner of Sutton Place, and is racing to finish the foundation before a potential rezoning can disrupt its plans. The building’s height is legal under current laws that govern the area. Neighborhood residents, who say it’s too tall for the sliver of Midtown close to the East River waterfront, are trying to change that.

Steady U.S. new-home construction in August together with a jump in permits indicate the housing market was moving ahead before a likely temporary hit from Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, government figures showed Tuesday.

As reports trickled in of sinking streets, collapsed bridges, flooded refineries and overtopped dams, engineers, contractors and government officials remained focused on saving lives during the continuing disaster of Hurricane Harvey in Texas before assessing the damage of the storm and subsequent flooding.

Reprinted courtesy of ENR reporters Pam Radtke Russell, Debra K. Rubin, Aileen Cho and Louise Poirier

According to a new report, the most active metropolitan areas include Chicago, where an inventory logjam appears to be loosening. Also, Colorado Springs, Washington, D.C., and Reno, Nevada, near Tesla’s massive battery factory, which is attracting workers and driving housing demand. The least active metros are San Francisco, where the median home value has topped $1 million, and Rochester, N.Y., where a typical home is worth $177,000.

Canadian home construction is on pace for its best year since the 2008-2009 recession, with builders showing no sign of being slowed by rising interest rates or fears of a housing correction.

Work began on an annualized 222,324 homes in July, the third-fastest monthly pace since 2012, the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corp. reported Wednesday. Starts have averaged about 215,000 in 2017, which puts the industry on track for the most new residential construction since 2007 if the current pace continues.

It’s widely agreed that housing markets across the U.S. are hurting for new inventory, driving up prices and postponing homeownership for young Americans. What’s driving the inventory shortage is a murkier matter.

A new report from Trulia tests some popular explanations and comes to this conclusion: We’re going to have to build our way out of it.

In a logical world, builders would rush to put up homes in the U.S. regions adding jobs at the fastest pace. In reality, it's not so simple.

San Francisco's metropolitan area added 373,000 net new jobs in the last five years—but issued permits for only 58,000 units of new housing. The lack of new construction has exacerbated housing costs in the Bay Area, making the San Francisco metro among the cruelest markets in the U.S. Over the same period, Houston added 346,000 jobs and permitted 260,000 new dwellings, five times as many units per new job as San Francisco.

Orange County, CA-based Raintree Partners is investing big time in California. The real estate investment company announced last week that it currently under construction on three mixed-use projects in California totaling more than $500 million in value.

Genton Property Group (GPG) announced May 30 that construction on the Four Seasons Private Residences Los Angeles is underway this week after finalization and funding of a $239 million construction loan last week.

The home building industry “has turned brisk and is gaining momentum as consumers of various ages, motivated by high consumer confidence, seek new places to live,” ABC News reported.

This March single-family homes sales increased by 15.6 percent over March of last year, according to the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Furthermore, “the median national price paid for new homes has been rising steeply, ascending from about $230,000 in 2012 to about $311,000 currently."

Since 2007, the U.S. has been underbilling, ABC News stated: “[T]he nation needs an estimated 1.5 million new homes of various types annually to meet the demand, but there haven’t been that many since 2007. Since then, the scenario has been one of pronounced under-building. After the housing bubble popped in 2008, home sales plummeted, bottoming out in 2013-14. But it started picking up markedly in late 2015/early 2016.”

Aberdeen Investment Management projects that "pent-up demand" for homes "will propel industry growth well into the 2020s."

New York’s condo market is brimming with costly apartments in glittering new towers. Now it’s about to get more pricey homes, this time in a building that’s more than a century old.

Ziel Feldman’s HFZ Capital Group plans to convert 95 empty rental units at the Belnord, a gated complex occupying a full square block on the Upper West Side, into condos that will be listed at $3,000 a square foot on average -- more than the boroughwide average for new-development sales in the first quarter. He’s hired architect Robert A.M. Stern for the project at the landmarked limestone-and-brick building, reaching for a formula that’s succeeded at other properties that have pushed price boundaries in Manhattan.