37 Permits, $5,751 Median: ZIP 90034 — June 2026

Zoom into a single Los Angeles ZIP and the texture of the market sharpens. In 90034 — the Palms and Mid-City West stretch on the city's Westside — the sealed snapshot for May 11 – June 9, 2026 holds 37 residential permits with a median valuation of $5,751. That pairing is the whole story: enough filings to call the neighborhood active, but a median small enough to tell you almost nobody here is tearing down and rebuilding.

Every figure on this page is a slice of the larger Los Angeles sealed snapshot, cut to this ZIP. 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.

A building permit is the public record a city issues before legal construction work may begin, and a sealed snapshot is a point-in-time capture of those records, hashed and stored before any analysis runs. So this post answers a narrow, verifiable question: in one Westside ZIP, over one 30-day window, who filed to build, and how big were the jobs?

Frequently Asked Questions

We are leading with the questions because, for a single ZIP, the answers carry more weight than another paragraph of framing. These are derived only from the sealed snapshot for 90034 and its parent Los Angeles window.

Q: Is 37 permits a lot for one ZIP?
A: It depends on what you compare it to. Against the busiest Los Angeles ZIPs in this window — 90272 at 388 permits, 90049 at 130 — the 37 in 90034 is modest. But it sits inside a metro that recorded 4,042 residential permits total, so 90034 is a steady, mid-tier pocket of activity rather than a hotspot or a dead zone.

Q: Why does the median permit look so small?
A: The median valuation in 90034 is $5,751, which means the typical filing is a small job — a repair, a minor alteration, a single-trade scope of work. A low median tells you the neighborhood is being maintained and upgraded in place, not redeveloped. It is a renovation market, not a teardown market.

Q: What is the most common permit type here?
A: Alteration and repair work. The top category in 90034 is Bldg-Alter/Repair / 1 or 2 Family Dwelling, with 27 of the ZIP's 37 permits. That is the bulk of activity sitting in one bucket: existing homes being altered or repaired rather than newly built.

Q: Does this count every construction project in 90034?
A: No. The feed is residential only — single-family and small multi-family. Commercial buildings and standalone sub-trade permits are filtered out before the data is sealed. Read 37 as the residential permit count for this ZIP in the window, not a census of all construction.

Q: Who actually pulls these permits?
A: Homeowners and the licensed contractors working for them, plus the occasional small developer or investor. For an alteration-and-repair-heavy ZIP like 90034, expect general contractors, remodelers, and specialty trades — the people doing kitchen, bath, and structural work on homes that already stand.

Q: Can I trust the dollar figures?
A: The valuations are what applicants declared on their filings, not independent appraisals. We seal them verbatim from the public record. They are a reliable read on reported job size and a useful relative signal across ZIPs, but they are self-reported, so treat the median as a description of declared scope rather than market value.

Key Findings

• ZIP 90034 recorded 37 residential permits in the window, according to our sealed permit snapshots.

• The median permit valuation in 90034 is $5,751, per the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety via data.lacity.org (Socrata).

• Alteration and repair leads the ZIP with 27 permits, per the same Department of Building and Safety records.

• Reported valuation in 90034 totals $2.4M for the window, according to the sealed snapshot data.

• 90034 sits inside a metro that logged 4,042 permits, according to the sealed Los Angeles snapshot.

ZIP 90034 recorded 37 residential permits at a median valuation of $5,751 in the May 11 – June 9, 2026 window.

ZIP 90034 Permit Activity, May 11 – June 9, 2026

The headline numbers for this ZIP are compact, which is exactly what makes them readable. There is no long tail of mega-projects hiding the typical job here — the median and the count tell most of the story on their own.

The relationship between these two lines is the point. A median of $5,751 across 37 filings describes a neighborhood where the routine project is a few-thousand-dollar job. When the median is that low, the distribution is almost certainly bottom-heavy: a cluster of small permits, maybe one or two larger ones, and not much in between.

The typical residential permit in 90034 is a small job — a $5,751 median across 37 filings points to repairs and minor alterations, not new construction.

For context on the parent market, the Los Angeles metro median in this window is $7,000, with a lower quartile of $2,500 and an upper quartile of $35,000. The 90034 median of $5,751 lands between the metro's lower quartile and its overall median — a sign this ZIP skews toward the smaller, more routine end of the citywide spread. You can read the full metro picture in our Los Angeles building permit report.

What Is Getting Built in 90034

The dominant permit type here is Bldg-Alter/Repair / 1 or 2 Family Dwelling — what we label Alteration & Repair — accounting for 27 of the ZIP's 37 permits.

An alteration-and-repair permit in Los Angeles covers work that changes or restores an existing one- or two-family home without adding a whole new structure. In practice that is a broad bucket: re-roofing, foundation and seismic retrofits, electrical and plumbing upgrades bundled into a remodel, interior reconfiguration, window and door replacement, deck and stair repairs, and the structural side of a kitchen or bathroom renovation. It is the permit a homeowner pulls to make a standing house better, safer, or larger inside its existing footprint.

That this category carries 27 of 37 filings says something concrete about 90034. This is an established, built-out residential area — Palms and its neighbors are dense with older single-family homes and small multi-family buildings — so the construction that happens is overwhelmingly improvement to existing stock. There is little vacant land to put new houses on, so the permits that do get pulled are the maintenance-and-upgrade kind. For anyone reading the neighborhood, that is a stable, owner-occupied-renovation signal rather than a speculative-development one.

The handful of permits outside the alteration-and-repair bucket round out the picture, but they do not change it. When one category holds the clear majority of a ZIP's filings, that category effectively defines the local construction economy. Here, the economy is remodels and repairs — work that keeps general contractors, roofers, electricians, plumbers, and remodelers busy on homes that already exist. Compare the category mix in a neighboring Westside ZIP report to see how consistent this Alteration & Repair pattern is across the area.

How 90034 Compares in Los Angeles

A single ZIP only means something against its neighbors. The table below places 90034 among the busiest Los Angeles ZIPs in this window and against the metro headline row, so you can see where it falls on the volume curve.

Two things stand out. First, volume across these ZIPs varies enormously: 90272 alone carries 388 permits, far above every other ZIP on the list, while 90034 sits near the quieter end with 37. Second, permit count and total valuation do not move together. 91344 also reports a $2.4M total, the same compact figure as 90034, but it does so across 95 permits — meaning its jobs are, on average, smaller still. Meanwhile 90039 reaches $6.0M on just 67 permits, a sign of a few larger projects pulling the total up.

Across Los Angeles ZIPs in this window, permit count and reported valuation diverge sharply — 90272 carries 388 permits while 90034 carries 37, yet both are slices of the same $201,163,491 metro total.

This is why a single headline number rarely tells you what is happening on the ground. The metro logged 4,042 permits worth $201,163,491, but that aggregate dissolves into very different neighborhoods: a few high-volume, high-value pockets and a long list of steadier ZIPs like 90034 doing routine maintenance. For a side-by-side with another moderate-volume Westside neighborhood, see our adjacent ZIP report.

Methodology

Every figure here is a ZIP-level cut of the same sealed daily permit snapshots we compute the metro report from. Nothing about 90034 is gathered separately; it is the Los Angeles snapshot, filtered to one ZIP and aggregated over the window.

The source is the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety via data.lacity.org (Socrata). All figures are computed directly from US Tech Automations' sealed daily permit snapshots; nothing is estimated, modeled, or extrapolated. This edition is cross-sectional — it describes one 30-day window and makes no trend, growth, or comparison-to-past claims, because no comparable prior window exists yet in this series.

Here is how a ZIP figure on this page is produced:

1. Collect. Each day, we pull the latest residential permit records from the Los Angeles open-data feed for the reporting window.

2. Normalize. Records are filtered to residential single-family and small multi-family scopes, with commercial and sub-trade permits dropped, and fields are standardized.

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

4. Slice and aggregate. We filter the sealed window to ZIP 90034 and total the permits, compute the median valuation, and rank the top category.

Because valuations are self-reported on the filings and not every permit carries one, ZIP-level totals should be read as a floor for declared value rather than a complete accounting. The discipline that makes these numbers checkable — content-hashing each day before analysis — is the same one behind our permit prediction ledger, where sealed predictions are scored against public outcomes later.

Put Permit Data to Work

A ZIP-level read like this one is operational, not academic. For a contractor or remodeler, 90034's profile — 37 permits, 27 of them alteration-and-repair, a $5,751 median — is a precise description of demand: a steady stream of small-to-mid renovation jobs on existing homes. That tells you which trades to staff and which neighborhoods to canvass. Suppliers can time inventory of remodeling materials to where the alteration-and-repair work actually concentrates. Agents reading pre-listing signals can flag homes pulling improvement permits as likely future inventory.

The bottleneck is never the public record — it is open at permits.ustechautomations.com — it is turning a daily feed into a workflow. We build automations that monitor sealed permit snapshots ZIP by ZIP, route new filings to the right person, and draft the first outreach, so a remodeler working 90034 hears about a fresh alteration-and-repair permit instead of finding it weeks later. The sealed-snapshot discipline is what makes those signals trustworthy enough to act on.

If you want permit signals wired into your own pipeline — monitoring, lead routing, and outreach drafting tuned to a specific ZIP — that is exactly what our team builds. See how it fits a real-estate workflow with our real estate AI agents.

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