Finding · updated September 6, 2026
The most common building LA breaks ground on is a backyard home
Of 1,408 ground-up building permits in LA, 581 are for backyard ADUs — more than single-family houses. But 52 apartment permits carry 3,839 homes: 75% of the housing in 4% of the permits.
Between May 7 and August 29, 2026, the LA Department of Building and Safety issued 1,408 permits to put up a brand-new building — ground-up construction, from garden sheds to apartment towers. Ask what Los Angeles actually breaks ground on, and the city's own labels give a striking answer: the single most common new building in Los Angeles is now a backyard home. 581 of those permits — 41% — are for accessory dwelling units, more than for single-family houses (498), and 11× the number of apartment buildings (52).
| new building | permits | share | homes permitted |
|---|---|---|---|
| Accessory dwelling unit (ADU) | 581 | 41% | ≈581* |
| Single-family house | 498 | 35% | 497 |
| Duplex | 85 | 6% | 170 |
| Apartment building | 52 | 4% | 3,839 |
| Everything else (garages, patio covers, commercial…) | 192 | 14% | — |
But permits are not homes, and the fourth column is the counterweight. The 52 apartment permits — just 4% of ground-up permits — carry 3,839 homes by the city's own unit count, 75% of every home in this window's ground-up permits. The single biggest is a 395-unit building in Canoga Park. Los Angeles adds housing two ways at once: one backyard at a time, almost everywhere — and by the hundreds, on a handful of lots.
The ground-up count actually understates the ADU wave. Counting every permit type — conversions of garages and existing structures, additions, and some remodels of existing units — the window holds 1,622 ADU permits, about 14 a day, every day. 1,041 of them work on an existing structure rather than starting from dirt (549 mention a garage), which is the quiet genius of the whole program: the parking LA built by mandate in the 20th century is being converted into the housing it mandates in the 21st.
Where the backyard homes are: about 52% of all ADU permits land in the San Fernando Valley and its neighbors — the flat, lot-rich single-family belt.
| ZIP | neighborhood | ADU permits | marked fire rebuilds |
|---|---|---|---|
| 91335 | Reseda | 66 | — |
| 91344 | Granada Hills | 62 | — |
| 90272 | Pacific Palisades | 54 | 50 |
| 91331 | Pacoima | 43 | — |
| 91306 | Winnetka | 39 | — |
| 91342 | Sylmar | 37 | — |
| 91352 | Sun Valley | 37 | — |
| 91605 | North Hollywood | 36 | — |
How this was computed
LADBS permits issued May 7–Aug 29, 2026 (the feed lags issuance by about two weeks), straight from data.lacity.org, using the city's ownuse_desc labels; “ADU” pools accessory and junior accessory dwelling units. Supplemental permits are excluded everywhere — the 406 administrative amendments (fee collection, contractor changes, revisions) the city labels “Supplemental” in these cohorts, which would otherwise inflate the ADU totals by roughly a third. “Homes permitted” is the city's dwelling-unit-change field, near-complete in this window for apartments, houses, and duplexes (verified every run; the finding unpublishes if that slips); the field is sparse on ADU rows, so ADUs are counted one home per permit (*an assumption — where the city did fill it in, it averages almost exactly one). A permit is permission, not a building: some of these will never break ground. Fire-rebuild counts are permits whose work description mentions a wildfire or rebuild — a floor, since not every rebuild says so.