Median Permit in 90042: $9,000 on 71 Filings — June 2026

Follow the dollars first. In the 30 days from May 11 – June 9, 2026, the residential permits pulled inside ZIP 90042 in Los Angeles carried $2.0M of declared work. That is not a headline number — it is a working figure, the kind a contractor, supplier, or listing agent can plan a quarter around. Every figure on this page is a slice of the metro's sealed daily snapshot, cut down to this one postal code, and nothing here is estimated or modeled.

That $2.0M was spread across 71 permits, which puts the average job size squarely in the small-to-mid residential band rather than the ground-up territory. The shape of the money matters more than the sum: when a ZIP this size posts a couple million dollars of permitted work in a month and the typical job is modest, you are looking at a neighborhood of owners improving what they already have — not a wave of teardowns. The rest of this report reads that distribution, names the work behind it, and places 90042 against the other ZIPs in the Los Angeles snapshot.

A building permit is the public record a city creates when an owner is legally cleared to build, alter, or add to a structure — which makes the permit file the earliest paper trail of money that is about to be spent on a property. Our research desk seals that trail daily, so the counts below are a frozen, auditable cut of one window rather than a live feed that shifts under you.

Key Findings

• $2.0M in declared residential work was permitted in ZIP 90042 over the window, according to the sealed permit snapshots behind this report.

• 71 residential permits were pulled in the ZIP across the same 30 days, per the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety via data.lacity.org (Socrata).

• The median permit valuation in 90042 was $9,000, a figure that frames most of the activity as routine improvement work.

• Alteration & Repair was the dominant category with 52 permits, the clear majority of the ZIP's filings.

• Across the full metro, Los Angeles recorded 4,042 residential permits worth $201.2M in the same window — 90042 is one slice of that whole.

ZIP 90042 produced 71 residential permits worth $2.0M between May 11 – June 9, 2026, with a median valuation of $9,000 — a portrait of a neighborhood improving its existing housing stock rather than rebuilding it.

Reading the $2.0M, Permit by Permit

Start with the gap between the total and the median. The ZIP carried $2.0M of work, but the median permit valuation was just $9,000. When the typical job is that small and the total still climbs into the millions, the arithmetic tells you the activity is dominated by many modest filings, with a handful of larger jobs pulling the sum upward. This is the signature of a stable, owner-occupied neighborhood doing maintenance and incremental upgrades — re-roofs, kitchen and bath remodels, electrical and plumbing corrections, seismic retrofits — rather than a development zone churning new units.

For anyone who works this market, the read is practical. A median of $9,000 means the bulk of the addressable work is repair-and-improvement contracting, not new construction. Suppliers stocking for 90042 should be thinking fixtures, finishes, roofing material, and replacement systems rather than framing packages at scale. Agents reading the same file see something else: each of these 71 permits is a homeowner who has decided to invest in their property, and pre-sale improvement is one of the most reliable early signals that a listing may follow.

The metro's own valuation distribution puts the ZIP's median in context:

Across the metro, a quarter of valued permits came in at or under $2,500 and three quarters at or under $35,000. ZIP 90042's median of $9,000 sits above the citywide median of $7,000 — still small jobs, but slightly heavier ones than the metro norm, consistent with substantive remodels rather than minimal repairs.

ZIP 90042 Permit Activity, May 11 – June 9, 2026

The headline figures for the ZIP, pulled straight from the sealed snapshot:

The valuation column reflects only permits that carried a declared value at ingest; the median is the midpoint of that distribution, not an average, which is why it resists distortion from the largest jobs.

What Is Getting Built in 90042

The ZIP's leading permit type is logged in the source as Bldg-Alter/Repair / 1 or 2 Family Dwelling, which we label in plain English as Alteration & Repair. It accounted for 52 of the ZIP's permits — the dominant share of all activity in the window.

In the Los Angeles jurisdiction, an alteration-and-repair permit on a one- or two-family dwelling covers a wide band of work that changes or restores an existing structure without adding to its footprint. That includes interior remodels, kitchen and bathroom reconfigurations, electrical and plumbing upgrades, window and roof replacement, foundation and seismic repair, and the conversion of existing space. What unites them is that the building already stands — the owner is improving, modernizing, or fixing it, not extending or replacing it.

Alteration & Repair drove 52 of the 71 permits in ZIP 90042 — the work here is overwhelmingly about upgrading existing homes, not building new ones.

That concentration is the most actionable fact on this page. A neighborhood whose permit mix is this heavily weighted toward alteration and repair is a neighborhood of owners who intend to stay and improve, or who are improving ahead of a sale. For a remodeling contractor, that is a qualified demand pool sized at dozens of active projects. For a kitchen-and-bath supplier, it is an inventory signal.

For a listing agent, an alteration permit is a quiet flag that a property is being readied — sometimes to enjoy, sometimes to list. The permit cannot tell you which, but it tells you the conversation is worth having, and it tells you which addresses to have it at.

The smaller share of the ZIP's filings — the permits beyond the 52 alteration-and-repair jobs — sits in adjacent residential categories. We do not break those out at the ZIP level here because the counts are thin and a single category should not be inflated past what the sealed snapshot supports. The honest read is that 90042 is an alteration-and-repair market with a modest tail.

How 90042 Compares in Los Angeles

A ZIP's numbers only mean something next to its neighbors. The table below places 90042 against the other top-permitting ZIPs in the Los Angeles snapshot and the metro headline row, all drawn from the same sealed window:

Two things stand out. First, the spread between ZIPs is enormous: 90272 alone carried $66.2M of work — a different universe from 90042's $2.0M — which tells you Los Angeles is not one market but dozens, each with its own valuation profile. A blanket city-wide strategy would miss that entirely.

Second, 90042 sits mid-pack on permit volume, close to 91604's 72 and 90039's 67, but its total valuation runs lighter than several ZIPs with comparable counts. ZIP 90039, for instance, posted $6.0M on 67 permits — fewer jobs, far more dollars — which points to larger average project sizes there. The contrast underlines the same point the median made: 90042 is a high-volume, low-ticket repair market, and the right play in it is breadth of small jobs, not a hunt for one big contract.

If you work multiple Los Angeles neighborhoods, the sibling reports make the comparison concrete. The ZIP 91367 report covers a Woodland Hills postal code that posted 90 permits worth $6.0M, and the ZIP 91335 report covers a Reseda ZIP at 83 permits and $4.3M — both heavier on the dollar side than 90042.

The ZIP 90039 report tells the opposite story — fewer permits, more dollars — and the full metro picture, including every category and the citywide percentiles, lives in the Los Angeles June report.

Methodology

This report is built from data published by the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety via data.lacity.org (Socrata). Every figure for ZIP 90042 is a ZIP-level cut of the same sealed daily permit snapshots that produce our metro reports — the same source, the same window, narrowed to one postal code.

Scope statement. 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.

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

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

1. Collect. Each day, we pull the latest residential permit records published to the Los Angeles open-data portal and store the raw rows exactly as the city issues them.

2. Normalize. Permits are mapped to a common schema — category label, declared valuation, postal code, issue date — so that every metro speaks the same fields.

3. Seal. The day's normalized records are content-hashed and written to an append-only store, so the snapshot for any past day cannot be quietly changed after the fact.

4. Slice and aggregate. To build this page, we filter the sealed records to ZIP 90042 and the May 11 – June 9, 2026 window, then count permits, sum declared valuation, and take the median across the jobs that carried a value.

Because the work is cross-sectional, this report makes no claims about trends, growth, or change over time. It is a single sealed window, read on its own terms.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Is this every construction permit issued in 90042?
A: No. The snapshot is limited to residential building permits — single-family and small multi-family. Commercial permits and standalone sub-trade permits are excluded at ingest, so the 71 count covers residential building activity, not all construction in the ZIP.

Q: Why is the median valuation only $9,000 when the total is $2.0M?
A: Because the activity is dominated by many small jobs with a few larger ones. The median of $9,000 is the midpoint of the distribution; the $2.0M total is the sum. Together they describe a repair-and-improvement market, not a new-construction one.

Q: What does the Alteration & Repair category actually cover?
A: In Los Angeles, the source label is Bldg-Alter/Repair / 1 or 2 Family Dwelling. It spans remodels, system upgrades, roof and window replacement, seismic and foundation repair, and similar work on a home that already stands. It led 90042 with 52 permits.

Q: How does 90042 stack up against other Los Angeles ZIPs?
A: It sits mid-pack on volume with 71 permits, near 91604 at 72 and 90039 at 67, but lighter on dollars at $2.0M. Higher-ticket ZIPs like 90272 ($66.2M) sit in a different range entirely.

Q: Who pulls these permits, and who uses this data?
A: Owners and their contractors pull the permits. Contractors use the file to find live demand, suppliers to time inventory, lenders to read renovation activity, and agents to spot homes being improved — sometimes ahead of a sale.

Q: How current is the window?
A: Every figure covers May 11 – June 9, 2026, drawn from sealed daily snapshots. The data is frozen for that window, which is what makes the counts auditable rather than a moving target.

Put Permit Data to Work

A permit file is the earliest concrete signal that money is about to move on a property, and 90042's 52 Alteration & Repair filings are exactly the kind of signal that is valuable while it is still fresh. The same record means different things to different operators. A remodeling contractor sees a list of homeowners who have already committed to a project. A supplier sees demand to stock against. A lender sees renovation activity to underwrite. A listing agent sees properties quietly being readied — and a reason to start a conversation before the sign goes up.

The hard part is never the data; it is acting on it before it goes stale. US Tech Automations turns sealed permit snapshots like this one into automated workflows — monitoring new filings as they post, routing matched permits to the right person, and drafting first-touch outreach so a lead does not sit untouched for days. The raw, queryable feed behind these reports lives at permits.ustechautomations.com, and you can see how we wire permit signals into real-estate workflows on our real-estate AI agents page.

If you also work neighboring postal codes, the ZIP 91604 report is the natural next read, and the metro-wide permit prediction ledger shows how we score sealed predictions against public outcomes over time.

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