Finding · updated October 21, 2026
The most common building LA breaks ground on is a backyard home
Of 2,009 ground-up building permits in LA, 847 are for backyard ADUs — more than single-family houses. But 73 apartment permits carry 5,404 homes: 75% of the housing in 4% of the permits.
Between May 7 and October 17, 2026, the LA Department of Building and Safety issued 2,009 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. 847 of those permits — 42% — are for accessory dwelling units, more than for single-family houses (711), and 11× the number of apartment buildings (73).
| new building | permits | share | homes permitted |
|---|---|---|---|
| Accessory dwelling unit (ADU) | 847 | 42% | ≈847* |
| Single-family house | 711 | 35% | 710 |
| Duplex | 113 | 6% | 226 |
| Apartment building | 73 | 4% | 5,404 |
| Everything else (garages, patio covers, commercial…) | 265 | 13% | — |
But permits are not homes, and the fourth column is the counterweight. The 73 apartment permits — just 4% of ground-up permits — carry 5,404 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 2,295 ADU permits, about 14 a day, every day. 1,448 of them work on an existing structure rather than starting from dirt (785 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 91335 | Reseda | 93 | 1 |
| 91344 | Granada Hills | 83 | — |
| 90272 | Pacific Palisades | 80 | 76 |
| 91331 | Pacoima | 67 | — |
| 91306 | Winnetka | 55 | — |
| 91352 | Sun Valley | 55 | — |
| 91342 | Sylmar | 49 | — |
| 91605 | North Hollywood | 48 | — |
How this was computed
LADBS permits issued May 7–Oct 17, 2026 (the feed arrives in one weekly batch, on Tuesdays, covering permits issued through the previous Saturday), 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 546 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.