Finding · updated July 23, 2026
The most common building LA breaks ground on is a backyard home
Of 870 ground-up building permits in LA, 375 are for backyard ADUs — more than single-family houses. But 24 apartment permits carry 1,735 homes: 69% of the housing in 3% of the permits.
Between May 7 and July 18, 2026, the LA Department of Building and Safety issued 870 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. 375 of those permits — 43% — are for accessory dwelling units, more than for single-family houses (308), and 15× the number of apartment buildings (24).
| new building | permits | share | homes permitted |
|---|---|---|---|
| Accessory dwelling unit (ADU) | 375 | 43% | ≈375* |
| Single-family house | 308 | 35% | 308 |
| Duplex | 45 | 5% | 90 |
| Apartment building | 24 | 3% | 1,735 |
| Everything else (garages, patio covers, commercial…) | 118 | 14% | — |
But permits are not homes, and the fourth column is the counterweight. The 24 apartment permits — just 3% of ground-up permits — carry 1,735 homes by the city's own unit count, 69% of every home in this window's ground-up permits. The single biggest is a 395-unit building in Canoga Park — more homes on one permit than every duplex and half the ADUs in the city put together. 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 1,050 ADU permits, about 14 a day, every day. 675 of them work on an existing structure rather than starting from dirt (355 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 51% 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 90272 | Pacific Palisades | 39 | 35 |
| 91335 | Reseda | 38 | — |
| 91344 | Granada Hills | 38 | — |
| 91331 | Pacoima | 28 | — |
| 91306 | Winnetka | 26 | — |
| 91342 | Sylmar | 25 | — |
| 91367 | Woodland Hills | 24 | — |
| 90011 | Central-Alameda | 23 | — |
The top ZIP is the asterisk that proves the column matters: 35 of Pacific Palisades's 39 ADU permits are explicitly marked as rebuilds — homes lost to the January 2025 fires coming back, not new backyard supply.
How this was computed
LADBS permits issued May 7–Jul 18, 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 259 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.