Maple Grove saw more building permits for residential housing in August than any other locality in the Twin Cities, a trend that it's maintained throughout 2010.

With 25 permits in August, Maple Grove came in first ahead of Woodbury with 20 and Blaine with 18.

In year-to-date rankings, Maple Grove also tops the list with 185 permits, ahead of Blaine, which has 171, and Shakopee with 136.

Maple Grove's been enjoying a period of continuous growth for the past two decades, said Mike Swanson, division vice president of Rottlund Homes and former president of the Builders Association of the Twin Cities.

"When I moved out there 20 years ago, there was a K-Mart and a Jubilee foods -- none of the restaurants, nothing else that you see there today," said Swanson.

Over the years, Cub and Rainbow Foods moved in, as did a slew of other amenities that have attracted families to the area. But the opening of the $138 million Maple Grove Hospital last year "really leapfrogged them over the other premier suburbs" in terms of growth, even in the face of the recession, Swanson said.

A healthy school system as well as the transitioning of Interstates 494 and 694 from two to three lanes has had an impact as well.

And Maple Grove's location at the northwest corner of the Twin Cities metro area has attracted a swarm of families with cabins in northern Minnesota, Swanson said.

"It's kind of a gateway for going up north," he said.

Given the city's sizeable amount of developable land, there's reason to believe the trend will continue.

"There's a lot of room for future growth up there," Swanson said. "Some of those premier suburbs don't have that ability to keep growing at the level that Maple Grove does."

Most of the permits issued have been for developments that have been approved for some time, said Dick Edwards, Maple Grove's community development director.

The economy has created a drought in the number of new plots being sold, he said.

The ongoing challenge, Swanson and Edwards agreed, is the amount of standing inventory, which reveals itself in the form of the many distressed properties under foreclosure or short sales.

Currently, these properties make up about 30 percent of the Twin Cities market of residences for sale; they've historically comprised only 5 percent, Swanson said.

But the region is still better off than it was two years ago, when distressed properties made up nearly 60 percent of the units on the market, he said.

In any case, it's a good sign that companies are able to get their inventory moving, Edwards said. "You don't want to continue to saturate the market as it is today with more lots," he said, "so cutting through the inventory is a healthy sign that things are moving forward, and we're interested to see it moving along like this."

An August report on the number of planned new units in the Twin Cities, while down 15 percent from 2009, showed a 73 percent increase from the month before, according to the Builders Association.

Tara Bannow is a Minneapolis writer.