Yuba City permitted roughly 130 single-family homes last year, its strongest annual total since before the Great Recession, as the Northern California city adds a new hotel, a planned health facility and a $75 million affordable-housing project to its growing skyline.
City planners detailed the surge in single-family residential permits as part of a broader development update, according to citizenportal.ai, which reported that the roughly 130 permits marked the city's highest annual total since before the Great Recession. The same report notes that Yuba City is developing a new SpringHill Suites hotel among its ongoing commercial projects.
Feather River Tribal Health has also purchased the former Evans Furniture building and plans to develop a health facility there, per the same account. Together, the projects point to a city adding housing stock and commercial square footage at a pace it hasn't seen in more than a decade.
A $75 Million Push for Affordable Housing
The most ambitious piece of that expansion is Merriment Village Apartments, a roughly $75 million affordable-housing project planned to total 218 low-income units, according to The Sacramento Bee. Ground broke during the week of December 10, 2025, at the nearly 7.5-acre Walton Avenue lot, the outlet reported, with the first phase consisting of a four-story, 79-unit building.
A second phase will add multiple buildings on the same lot housing 139 units along with support services, the Bee reported. At least 70 of those second-phase units are intended for veterans waiting for low-income housing, and California's governor's office separately described the same phase, known as Merriment Village Apartments Phase II, as reserving 70 units for veterans facing homelessness with a behavioral health challenge, with supportive services and property management located onsite.
Getting the project to groundbreaking wasn't simple. The Bee reported a funding gap of approximately $7.5 million between secured funding and construction bids, a shortfall Habitat for Humanity Yuba-Sutter ultimately closed with a line of credit from Five Star Bank in Yuba City. Yuba City is also eligible to apply for up to $48 million through California's Homekey+ program to support the project's second phase, according to the same report.
Listings and Prices, Measured Carefully
Federal data tracked by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis maintains a median-listing-price series for the Yuba City metro area, measured in U.S. dollars and not seasonally adjusted. A companion active-listing series tracks the count of active single-family and condo or townhome listings each month, excluding pending sales.
Anyone comparing those figures across years should tread carefully. Realtor.com introduced a new methodology in September 2022, and data released since October 2022 is not directly comparable with earlier releases, per FRED's documentation on both series. FRED also maintains a relative-listing-price series, defined as a market's median listing price divided by the median listing price for the U.S. overall, alongside an all-transactions house price index for the Yuba City metro area that uses the first quarter of 1995 as its baseline value of 100, estimated using sales prices and appraisal data.
What the Growth Means Locally
The combination of a record permitting year, a major affordable-housing groundbreaking, and new commercial development, including the SpringHill Suites hotel and the planned Feather River Tribal Health facility in the old Evans Furniture building, signals a city in the middle of a building wave not seen in years. For a market where federal data continues to track median listing prices and active inventory month by month, the pace of new permits last year stands out as a clear marker of how much has changed.
