City of Los Angeles · public view · no addresses
Each hexagon below counts homeowners who have paid for plans for a second home in their backyard and are waiting on the city for a permit. There are 3,968 of them right now. This page shows only the counts; the paid map shows builders the individual homes.
A hexagon holding fewer than three homes is dropped entirely, because a lone hexagon with one home in it points at a house. That removes 743 hexagons and the 1,063 homes inside them from this public view. They are still counted in the totals above, and they are still on the paid map, where a builder who has bought that ZIP code is allowed to see them.
Counts only — the same thing a builder sees before they subscribe. Ten of the top fifteen are in the San Fernando Valley.
| ZIP | Homes waiting |
|---|
Applications, issued permits and certificates of occupancy, cleaned into map points in the right coordinate system. Each home keeps the date we first saw it, which is what the three-day head start is measured from.
Plan check → corrections → ready to issue → issued → certificate of occupancy, with the days spent in each. A state machine and SQL, deliberately no AI: the status field is already structured, and a rule gives the same answer twice.
Only the work description says whether a garage becomes the unit, whether it sits in an apartment block, and whether the filing is just paperwork correcting an earlier permit. That last one matters: a re-filing must never appear to a builder as a fresh lead.
Los Angeles names a contractor only on a certificate of occupancy, which exists once the work is finished — so for a home still waiting, no contractor field exists anywhere. An agent reads the parcel's other records and says what it can support.
A permit description is written by a clerk in capitals and abbreviations — “EPLAN: CONVERT (E) ATT. GARAGE TO ADU PER GCS 66323(a)(1)”. Two readers extract the same checked facts from it, and they are scored against 200 hand-labelled permits drawn so the hard cases are over-represented.
| What it has to get right | Rules only | Claude Haiku |
|---|---|---|
| Which of five ADU types | 90.5% | not yet run |
| Is a garage becoming the unit | 96.5% | not yet run |
| House or apartment building | 99.0% | not yet run |
| Is it only paperwork | 100% | not yet run |
| Size in square feet | 95.5% | not yet run |
The rules are not a straw man: they read the statute the permit cites, and the statute gives the type by law — 66323(a)(2) is a detached ADU. That is the number the model has to beat, and the comparison is the point. Labels are agent-written and awaiting a human check, so these are agreement, not accuracy.
“Does this parcel have a licensed contractor?” is one line of SQL, and it is wrong. The licence usually belongs to an older, unrelated job — a re-roof, a pool, a solar install — and calling that home taken throws away a job worth about $139,000 to the builder paying us.
| Contractor licence on finished ADUs since 2022 | Certificates |
|---|---|
| No licence — filed owner-builder | 8,359 |
| B, General Building — a real builder | 4,792 |
| Anything else (pools, landscaping, electrical…) | 27 |
So a trade licence on the ADU itself is vanishingly rare, but a trade licence somewhere on the parcel is common — which is exactly what a careless reader turns into a false “taken”. The agent is graded on 50 cases labelled by the city's own certificates, with each case's certificate withheld from it, and twelve of those fifty are that trap.
Everything above comes from public City of Los Angeles permit records. The only thing this product adds is arrangement: which homes, which stage, and how long they have waited.