The LA housing pipeline: who's permitting, where, and how fast

Every home the City of Los Angeles has permitted since 2020 — traced from application through plan check, permit, groundbreaking and certificate of occupancy — plus permitting across all 88 jurisdictions in LA County.
City of LA data live from LADBS through · County data from state Annual Progress Reports through calendar 2025 and the Census Building Permits Survey through · Built
Net new homes permitted, City of LA
Under construction right now
permitted, broken ground, no certificate of occupancy yet
Median time, application → permit
ground-up new buildings; a quarter wait over

1 · Where the new homes are

Every permit the city issued with net new dwelling units since 2020, placed at its address. Dot area is proportional to the number of homes on that permit — one dot can be a backyard ADU or an 800-unit tower. Click a district to isolate it; hover any dot for the project. District tints are there only to separate neighbours — they carry no meaning.
Permit year
Project size
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Largest projects in view

2 · The pipeline, stage by stage

Homes entering each stage per year. Applications peaked at 22,000 units in 2021–22 and collapsed to in 2025 — the thinnest pipeline entry in the record. Permits issued held up better, then jumped: Palisades rebuilds and a handful of very large projects are doing the lifting.
Units on permits with net new dwelling units. Applied by submission date; permitted by issue date; broke ground by first construction inspection on the permit; completed by certificate of occupancy. Groundbreaking and completion counts only cover permits issued 2020 or later, so the early years of those two series are structurally low.

Where every permitted home stands today

3 · By council district

The 15 districts are near-equal in population (~260,000 each), so raw counts compare fairly. CD 10 (Koreatown / Mid-City) and CD 13 (Hollywood / Echo Park) lead on homes permitted; CD 7 (northeast Valley) trails badly. CD 11's permit count dwarfs everyone — those are Pacific Palisades fire rebuilds, mostly single houses on expedited plan check.

Pick a year to re-rank districts; hover a bar for the full year-by-year breakdown.

How long each stage takes, by district

Median days for permits issued 2020 – . Plan check = application to permit issuance, ground-up new buildings only. Permit → groundbreak = issuance to first construction inspection. Construction = groundbreak to certificate of occupancy, for permits that have finished. The three stages run in sequence, but each median covers a different subset of permits, so they are indicative rather than additive. Districts are sorted by total elapsed time.

District scorecard click headers to sort

Homes and permits: issued Jan 2022 – with net new units. Medians and completion share pool all issuances 2020 onward for sample size. Completion share is naturally lower where permits are recent or projects are large. "50+ unit projects" counts permits since 2022.

4 · How long the city takes

Plan check is the long pole, and the median hides how long the tail is: half of new buildings clear in under , but one in ten waits more than and one in twenty more than . The apparent 2025–26 collapse in plan-check time is almost entirely Palisades: strip CD 11 out and the improvement is real but far smaller.

Plan check by permit year, new buildings

Median days from application to issuance for ground-up new buildings, by the year the permit was issued.

The full distribution

Homes permitted per month, City of LA

Bars are single months; the line is a trailing 12-month average on the same scale. Monthly counts are spiky because a single tower can carry 500 homes, so the moving average is the honest trend: permitting bottomed out in mid-2025 and has roughly doubled since.

5 · What actually gets built

Los Angeles permits a great many small projects and a few enormous ones. Single-unit permits are of all permits but only of the homes; projects of 100+ units are of permits and of the homes. Backyard ADUs are a growing slice of the small end.

Permits vs. homes, by project size

All permits with net new units issued 2020 – , grouped by how many homes the permit adds.

Certificates of occupancy per year

From LADBS's certificate of occupancy file — includes buildings permitted long before 2020. Small projects finaled without a CofO document aren't counted here, so this understates completions.

6 · All 88 jurisdictions in LA County

Outside the City of LA, the only comparable records are the Housing Element Annual Progress Reports every city files with the state, now complete through calendar 2025, and the Census Building Permits Survey, which is monthly and current through . They disagree in level — APRs capture ADUs the Census survey misses — but agree on direction.

The county, mapped

Shade by

Highest

County-wide, by year

Units reported by all LA County jurisdictions in their Annual Progress Reports, counted in the year the entitlement, building permit or certificate of occupancy was issued. Entitlements ran well ahead of permits in 2025 — a pipeline filling faster than it empties.

the freshest county-wide read

The Census Building Permits Survey is the only source that covers every jurisdiction on a monthly lag. Through , LA County jurisdictions have permitted homes against in the same of 2025 — . Almost all of the increase is the City of LA, where Palisades reconstruction is running through plan check at speed.

Most homes permitted this RHNA cycle, excluding the City of LA

Every jurisdiction click headers to sort

† Cumulative units permitted from the start of the 6th RHNA cycle (Oct 15, 2021) through each jurisdiction's most recent filing, per HCD's progress file. VLI/LI = deed-restricted very-low and low-income homes. 2018–2025 columns are from APR Table A2, counted by the year each permit was issued. The final column is the Census survey, 2026 year to date. Blank is not zero. Pomona filed Annual Progress Reports through 2021 and nothing since, which is why its 6th-cycle total reads zero even though the Census survey recorded homes permitted there in 2025. Lawndale keeps entitling projects but has reported almost no permits since 2021. Industry and Vernon have almost no residents and file nothing at all.

7 · Method, caveats & sources

  • Everything about the City of LA is computed from one record-level extract of LADBS's permit file — permits carrying net new homes, issued Jan 2020 through . The funnel, the district table, the medians and the map all come from that same extract, so they cannot disagree with each other.
  • Net, not gross. "Units" means net dwelling-unit change on the permit, so a project that demolishes four homes and builds twenty counts as sixteen. The city's official APR filings report gross units and run 30–70% higher (2025: ). Year-over-year direction tracks; absolute levels depend on which basis you use. The county section is entirely gross.
  • Groundbreaking is inferred, not published: it is the first foundation or excavation inspection recorded against the permit in LADBS's inspection file, falling back to the first inspection of any kind. About of permits since 2020 have one. Permits with no inspection are treated as not yet started, which will slightly overstate the "not started" bucket for projects whose inspections predate the file.
  • Cohort bias. Recently issued permits have not had time to finish, so completion shares and construction durations for recent years select for fast projects. Medians shown pool all issuances since 2020.
  • Partial years. 2026 covers Jan 1 – for the City of LA and Jan– for the Census county figures. Nothing on this page annualises a partial year.
  • County figures come from jurisdictions' self-reported Annual Progress Reports (Table A2), downloaded from HCD. A project is carried forward into later filings, so counting every row would double-count roughly a quarter of all building permits; a unit is counted here in the year its own permit date falls, which reproduces the City of LA's published APR totals to within about 1%. Reporting quality varies, and a jurisdiction that simply stops filing shows up as zero rather than as missing — see the table note.
  • Geocoding. of permits carry no usable coordinate and are absent from the map but present in every count. LADBS geocodes to the building where it can and to the address or parcel centroid otherwise, so a large project's dot marks its site, not its footprint.
  • What "efficiently" means here: only of permitted homes ever die (expired, closed, revoked) — once a project pulls its building permit it almost always gets built. The bottleneck is upstream: the median ground-up building spends in plan check, and the collapse in applications since 2022 is happening before LADBS ever sees a project.
Sources: LADBS permits issued · permits submitted · certificates of occupancy · building inspections · HCD Annual Progress Report Table A2 · HCD RHNA progress (6th cycle) · Census Building Permits Survey · boundaries from LA County GIS. Regenerate with scripts/fetch_*.py then scripts/build_data.py and scripts/build_report.py.