28 Permits in 90004: Los Angeles ZIP Report

Alteration and repair work is the heartbeat of ZIP 90004. The most common permit filed here is for "Bldg-Alter/Repair / 1 or 2 Family Dwelling" — the paperwork a homeowner or contractor pulls before reframing a wall, rewiring a kitchen, replacing a roof, or bringing an older house up to code. That mix says the people active here are renovating what already stands, not breaking new ground.

Across the May 11 – June 9, 2026 reporting window, this pocket of central Los Angeles recorded 28 residential building permits, every one of them a slice of the same sealed snapshot we keep for the wider metro.

Scope: residential building permits (single-family and small multi-family); commercial and sub-trade permits are excluded at ingest. This is not a count of all construction permits issued in each city.

The Short Version

A building permit is the public record a city issues before construction can legally begin, and a sealed snapshot is a point-in-time capture of those records, hashed and stored before any analysis touches it. This post reads one such slice: ZIP 90004 inside Los Angeles, CA, for a single 30-day window.

The angle is small and specific — 28 permits, a median valuation of $7,750, and a top category of alteration work — set against the much larger metro and its busiest ZIP codes. Because comparable historical windows do not yet exist in this series, every figure here is cross-sectional; nothing is described as rising, falling, or trending.

Key Findings

• ZIP 90004 recorded 28 residential building permits in 30 days, per the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety via data.lacity.org (Socrata).

• Alteration and repair work leads the ZIP with 18 permits, per the same Department of Building and Safety records.

• The median permit valuation in 90004 is $7,750, according to the sealed snapshot data.

• Reported valuation in the ZIP totals $0.7M for the window, per the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety records.

• The wider Los Angeles metro logged 4,042 permits over the same window, according to the sealed cross-metro snapshots.

ZIP 90004 filed 28 of the 4,042 residential permits captured across Los Angeles in this window — a small, renovation-heavy corner of a very large market.

How 90004 Sits Among Los Angeles ZIP Codes

The cleanest way to read 90004 is against the rest of the city. The table below places this ZIP beside the busiest residential filers in the Los Angeles snapshot and the metro headline row. The contrast is the story: high-volume hillside and Valley ZIPs run into the hundreds of permits, while 90004 sits far down the list with a modest count and a modest valuation footprint.

Read down the valuation column and the spread is wide. ZIP 90272 alone carries $66.2M against 388 permits, the signature of a high-end enclave where individual jobs are large. By comparison, 90004 reports $0.7M across 28 permits — many small jobs, no megaprojects. Two ZIPs can post the same headline valuation for entirely different reasons: 91367 and 90039 both show $6.0M, yet 90039 reaches it with 67 permits while 91367 needs 90. The count and the dollars have to be read together, never one without the other.

Across these Los Angeles ZIPs, valuation per filing varies sharply — $66.2M behind 388 permits in 90272 versus $0.7M behind 28 in 90004.

For a contractor or supplier, this single table does more work than a city-wide average. It separates the ZIPs where money concentrates from the ZIPs where activity is steady but small-ticket, and 90004 lands firmly in the second group. Our full Los Angeles building permit report carries the metro-wide category and valuation breakdown that frames every ZIP in this set.

What 90004 Is Building

The category mix is where 90004 earns its character. Of the 28 permits in the window, the dominant type is "Bldg-Alter/Repair / 1 or 2 Family Dwelling," labeled here as Alteration & Repair, with 18 permits.

An alteration and repair permit covers work inside or on an existing one- or two-family home: moving or removing walls, structural repairs, electrical and plumbing upgrades, re-roofing, foundation fixes, and code-compliance corrections after damage or deferred maintenance. It is the permit of the remodel and the fix-up, not the ground-up build. When this category dominates a ZIP, it tells you the housing stock is established and owners are investing in what they already have — updating older homes rather than replacing them.

That reading lines up with the valuation profile. A median permit value of $7,750 sits in the range of routine interior and system work — a bathroom or kitchen reconfiguration, a service-panel upgrade, a roof. The metro-wide median of $7,000 is close behind, so 90004's typical job is broadly in line with the citywide middle, not an outlier. The handful of permits outside the alteration category fill out the remaining filings, but they do not change the shape: this is a renovation neighborhood.

For anyone reading the market, the workflow implication is concrete. A remodeling contractor sees 18 alteration permits as 18 households who have already committed to a project and cleared the city. A materials supplier reads the same line as near-term demand for drywall, wiring, fixtures, and roofing rather than framing lumber and concrete for new shells. A listing agent reads a cluster of alteration permits as pre-sale improvements — owners polishing homes that may reach the market. Each of those is a different use of the exact same 18-permit figure.

It also matters what the category mix is not. With alteration work taking 18 of the 28 filings, ground-up construction is a minority concern in 90004 during this window — the dominant signal is investment in existing structures rather than new supply coming online. For a neighborhood with a deep stock of older one- and two-family homes, that pattern is typical: lots are built out, parcels are expensive, and the economically rational move for most owners is to renovate in place rather than demolish and rebuild.

A demolition-and-rebuild ZIP behaves differently, with larger valuations per permit and longer project timelines. ZIP 90004's small-ticket, alteration-heavy profile points the other way, toward shorter jobs and faster turnover of trade work — the kind of steady, repeatable demand a local remodeler or supply house can plan around.

How We Compiled This Slice

Every figure above comes from the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety via data.lacity.org (Socrata), filtered to ZIP 90004 and the May 11 – June 9, 2026 window. ZIP-level numbers are a cut of the same sealed snapshots we keep for the whole metro — not a separate dataset and not a re-query.

All figures are computed directly from US Tech Automations' sealed daily permit snapshots; nothing is estimated, modeled, or extrapolated.

The pipeline is deliberately boring, which is the point of a record people can trust:

1. Collect. Each day we pull the latest residential building-permit records from the Los Angeles open-data portal.

2. Normalize. Fields are standardized — categories, ZIP codes, valuations — so the same job is counted the same way every day.

3. Seal. The day's snapshot is hashed and stored append-only, so the captured records cannot be quietly changed after the fact.

4. Aggregate. Over the 30-day window we sum and slice the sealed snapshots down to a single ZIP, exactly as shown here.

We run this collect-normalize-seal-aggregate loop across 8 metros on the same schedule, which is what lets a single ZIP like 90004 be compared honestly to the rest of Los Angeles. We publish predictions against this method too; the permit prediction ledger records sealed forecasts that are scored against public outcomes later, so the discipline is auditable rather than asserted.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Is 28 the count of every construction permit in 90004?
A: No. The 28 figure counts residential building permits — single-family and small multi-family — only. Commercial and sub-trade permits are excluded at ingest, so this is not a tally of all construction activity in the ZIP.

Q: Why is the median valuation in 90004 only $7,750?
A: Because alteration and repair work dominates the ZIP, with 18 of 28 permits. That category is full of routine remodels, system upgrades, and repairs, which sit in the low-to-mid range. The metro-wide median of $7,000 is close by, so 90004 is near the citywide middle.

Q: How does 90004 compare to the busiest Los Angeles ZIPs?
A: It is far smaller. ZIP 90272 led the snapshot with 388 permits and $66.2M in valuation; 90004 recorded 28 permits and $0.7M. The wider metro logged 4,042 permits worth $201.2M over the same window.

Q: Who actually pulls these permits?
A: Homeowners and the contractors working for them. An alteration and repair permit is typically filed before remodeling or repairing an existing one- or two-family home, so the 18 alteration filings represent households already committed to a project.

Q: Can I see how 90004 fits the rest of the metro?
A: Yes. The Los Angeles building permit report covers all 4,042 metro permits and the full category mix, and a sibling Van Nuys 91411 ZIP report shows how a quieter Los Angeles ZIP compares to the busy names at the top of the table.

Put Permit Data to Work

A single ZIP's permit feed is a working signal once it is monitored continuously instead of read once. Contractors use a stream of 90004 alteration filings to qualify a neighborhood and time outreach to owners with active projects. Suppliers read the same filings to forecast demand for the materials a remodel needs. Lenders and agents treat clustered alteration permits as pre-listing and renovation-finance signals — owners putting money into homes before a sale or refinance.

US Tech Automations turns that raw permit signal into automated workflows: continuous monitoring of new filings, routing of matched records to the right team, and drafted outreach that references the actual permitted work. You can browse the live permit corpus at permits.ustechautomations.com, and the sibling 90036 ZIP report shows the same slice for a nearby Mid-Wilshire ZIP.

If you work 90004 or anywhere in Los Angeles, see how US Tech Automations wires permit data into real-estate workflows on our real-estate AI agents page.

Source: US Tech Automations Research — computed from sealed daily permit snapshots, May 11 – June 9, 2026.