Greenovation during COVID19

Has COVID19 also lowered people’s investments in going green?

Residents of Boston invest milions in their properties and the city through renovations and other alteration in the lands. Annually, thousands of citizens decide to renovate their properties and add more energy efficient features to it. Using the building permit of City of Boston, we can have an insight into these trends. Let’s see what categories of green permits exist?
According to the permits description, there are four recognizable categories, and some of them might seem pretty close, but are actually quite different in definition. The categories are:

  • weatherization
  • insulation
  • air sealing
  • solar cells
    Just like any other element tied to human society, buidling permits are also exposed to the pandemic going around. Some leading thinkers have expressed concern that the pandemic is drawing attention away from sustainability. The building permits data set gives us a unique way to test whether this is reflected in how people are investing in their properties.




In order to test our hypothesis, we need to compare the general trend of issuing green permits from January to July in both years of 2019 and 2020. Let’s get into it!
First, let’s see if the trend of issuing all types of permits has changed pre-covid vs during.

As apparent in figure 1, the number of permits has droped drastically from January to Jun 2020 compared to its trend in 2019, but it still shows an increase starting from April. In the month of April alone, there is a 77% drop in the total number of permits. This is the highest drop reported yet. 

It would be interesting to look at the growth rate of issuing permits for these two time periods.


Despite the apparent consistant growth rate in January, there is a visible drop in the following two months. After that, we can see the recovery process begining again with a more steep slope from May to Jun than from April to May. Permits’ growth rate goes up to 0.6 in Jun of 2020 relative to the same month in 2019, still suffering from a 40% decrease compared to January.

Buidling permits are also an indicator of the residents’ investments in their properties. Let’s see how is that been going during the pandemic in comparison with 2019 when there was no crisis on hand.


Maybe we should look at the investment rate of 2019 vs 2020 to understand it better.


Here we wintess a more unified fall starting from January. This can very much be justified with the anxiety of the job market getting worse as the pandemic found its way into our country. Relative value of permits goes up to 0.8 in June of 2020 relative to the same month in 2019, still suffering from a 45% decrease compared to January.


So far, we analyzed all permits including green ones. But how would all these trends look like if only looking at energy related permits?



Despite what we saw in figure 4 and according to figure 10, there is an immediet drop in the number of green permits at the start of the year. This can be sue to the fact that green permits may be concieved as less essential and more expensive compared to other types of renovations. Green permits go up to 0.6 in June of 2020 relative to the same month in 2019, still suffering from a 60% decrease compared to January.



Would the growth rate of green permits values tell the same story?

Figure 5 also presents the same type of pattern where there are two rising points and three drops. More analysis is required to get to the possible reasons for this of course. Values of green permits go up to 0.6 in Jun of 2020 relative to the same month in 2019, still showing a 68% decrease compared to January.

The counts are not always the best tools to describe a phenomenon. So, let’s create a metric: what is the percentage of green permits for each parcel?

According to figure 6, there is a huge spike in the percentage of parcels with green permits in March. Other than this observation, the same pattern is actually visible in 2019; although with a far less aggresive rise. Tihs could be due to a specific project in a census tract. More analysis is needed.

We can see the recovery process already taking place in Boston. An intereting takeaway here is that during this process, the relative value of permits goes back up to 0.8 in June while relative values of green permits only increases back up to 0.6 in June with a 68% decrease compared to that of January. In addition, the bouncing back for all types of permits makes up for 60% of pre-COVID numbers while it compensates for omly 40% of green permits in pre-COVID status.