31 Permits in 91040: Los Angeles ZIP Report — June 2026

Thirty-one filings. That is what the foothill ZIP of 91040 — the Sunland-Tujunga edge of Los Angeles where the city meets the San Gabriel foothills — produced over the May 11 – June 9, 2026 reporting window. It is a quiet number next to the city as a whole, and that quiet is exactly the signal worth reading.

Every figure here is a slice of the metro's sealed daily permit snapshot, cut to one 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. No month-over-month framing — this is a single, cross-sectional read.

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

What the 91040 Snapshot Says in One Read

Here is the whole story before the tables: 91040 saw 31 permits in the window, the median job came in at $10,000, and 22 of those filings were alteration and repair work on one- or two-family homes. That mix — modest volume, a small median, one category doing most of the lifting — describes a settled residential pocket where people improve the homes they already own rather than tear down and rebuild. Read on for the category breakdown, how this ZIP sits against the Los Angeles leaders, and how a contractor or supplier would actually use a number like this.

Key Findings

• ZIP 91040 recorded 31 permits in the window, according to US Tech Automations' sealed permit snapshots.

• The median job was valued at $10,000, per the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety via data.lacity.org (Socrata).

• 22 permits fell under alteration and repair of one- or two-family dwellings — the dominant work type in this ZIP.

• Total reported valuation came to $0.8M across the filings captured in this window.

• Metro-wide, Los Angeles logged 4,042 permits and ranked #1 for permit volume across the edition's metros.

ZIP 91040 logged 31 residential permits over the May 11 – June 9, 2026 window, with a median job valued at $10,000.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Is this every construction permit pulled in 91040?
A: No. The snapshot covers residential building permits — single-family and small multi-family. Commercial and sub-trade permits (electrical, plumbing, mechanical filed on their own) are excluded at ingest. So the 31 permits here describe home building and home improvement, not the full construction picture for the ZIP.

Q: Why is the median job only $10,000?
A: A median of $10,000 means half the filings sat at or below that figure. In a settled foothill neighborhood, most permits are repairs, re-roofs, and modest alterations rather than ground-up builds. The low median tells you the typical job here is maintenance-scale, not a teardown.

Q: What does the top category actually cover?
A: The leading label is Bldg-Alter/Repair / 1 or 2 Family Dwelling, which we describe in plain English as Alteration & Repair. It covers reconfiguring, repairing, or upgrading an existing house — a kitchen redo, a bathroom rebuild, structural repair, or a re-roof. It is the permit a homeowner pulls to change a home they already live in.

Q: Who pulls permits like these?
A: Mostly homeowners and the general contractors working for them, plus specialty remodelers. With 22 of the 31 filings being alteration and repair work, the people active in 91040 this window are renovation contractors, not large developers.

Q: How does 91040 compare to busier Los Angeles ZIPs?
A: It is far quieter. The metro's top ZIP, 90272, logged 388 permits against this ZIP's 31. That gap is the point — 91040 is a low-volume, improvement-driven pocket, not a development hotspot.

Q: Can I trust these numbers?
A: Every figure is computed directly from sealed daily snapshots of the public Los Angeles permit record; nothing is estimated or modeled. The snapshot is hashed and stored before analysis, so the count you see is the count that existed on those days.

ZIP 91040 Permit Activity, May 11 – June 9, 2026

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

The shape here is consistent: a small count, a small median, and most of the activity concentrated in one work type. For a foothill neighborhood of established single-family homes, that is the expected texture — steady upkeep rather than a wave of new construction.

Of 91040's 31 permits, 22 were alteration and repair work on one- or two-family homes.

What Is Getting Built in 91040

The dominant work type, captured under the raw source label Bldg-Alter/Repair / 1 or 2 Family Dwelling — what our pipeline labels Alteration & Repair — accounted for 22 of the ZIP's filings:

An alteration and repair permit in Los Angeles is what a homeowner pulls when they change an existing dwelling without adding to its footprint in a major way: a kitchen or bathroom remodel, replacing structural members, a re-roof, foundation repair, window or wall reconfiguration, or post-damage restoration. It is the workhorse permit of any mature neighborhood — the paperwork behind keeping aging housing stock livable and current.

That 22 of 31 filings cluster here tells a clear story about 91040. This is not a ZIP where land is being assembled and homes are rising from dirt. It is a ZIP where people who already own foothill homes are investing back into them. For a trades business, that distinction changes everything: the addressable work is remodels and repairs, the buyers are existing owners, and the sales motion is reaching households mid-project rather than chasing new builders.

The remaining filings — a handful beyond the alteration-and-repair group — round out a small, maintenance-leaning month. With a median job at $10,000, the typical permit here funds a focused upgrade, not a gut renovation. A few larger jobs likely sit above that median, but the center of gravity is firmly in the improve-what-you-have band.

The foothill geography matters to this read. Sunland-Tujunga sits where the hillside terrain, older housing, and wildfire exposure all push owners toward defensive, condition-driven work: re-roofs, structural reinforcement, deck and retaining-wall repair, and post-weather restoration. Those jobs route through exactly the alteration-and-repair permit that dominates this ZIP. A contractor reading the snapshot should expect durable, recurring demand for hardening and upkeep work rather than the cosmetic-flip volume that shows up in flatter, faster-turning parts of the city.

For anyone selling into this neighborhood, the practical takeaway is about cadence. A low monthly count does not mean a dead market — it means the work is steady and relationship-driven, won household by household over time. The owner who pulls a repair permit this month is the same owner who will plan a larger upgrade next year. Tracking these filings as they appear is how a local remodeler stays in front of that sequence instead of arriving after a competitor has already booked the job.

How 91040 Sits Against the Los Angeles Leaders

The cleanest way to size 91040 is against the busiest ZIPs in the same sealed snapshot, plus the metro line. The contrast is stark and useful:

91040 is a small tributary feeding a very large river. The metro logged 4,042 permits against this ZIP's 31, and the leading ZIP, 90272, carried $66.2M in valuation where 91040 carried $0.8M. None of that makes 91040 unimportant — it makes it a different kind of market. Low-volume, improvement-driven ZIPs are where renovation specialists, roofers, and local suppliers win on relationships and repeat work, not on chasing the next big development.

The valuation gap is worth dwelling on. A ZIP like 90272 carries tens of millions in reported value because it includes high-end rebuilds and large additions; 91040's total reflects a stack of modest repair and alteration jobs. Neither figure is better — they describe different businesses. A firm built to mobilize crews for a teardown will starve in 91040, while a remodeler tuned for steady single-home upgrades will find a reliable, lower-competition base of work. Matching your business model to a ZIP's distribution is the entire point of reading permits at this granularity rather than at the metro level.

The flip side is competitive cost. Big-valuation ZIPs draw heavy marketing spend from contractors chasing the same large jobs. A quieter foothill ZIP like 91040 sees far less of that noise, which means a local operator who simply shows up consistently — and reaches owners as their permits post — can own the neighborhood without outbidding anyone. The smaller number is, in that sense, an opportunity rather than a warning.

For the citywide context behind this slice, see our Los Angeles building permit report for June 2026.

For neighboring Valley pockets with a similar improvement-led texture, our companion reports on a North Hollywood ZIP and a Northridge ZIP make for a clean side-by-side.

Methodology

Source attribution: 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. Every number on this page is a ZIP-level cut of the same Los Angeles sealed snapshot that feeds our metro report — we filter the metro dataset to 91040 and aggregate, applying no separate adjustment.

The reporting window is the 30 days ending June 9, 2026. Metro-wide, the snapshot covered 4,042 permits with a valuation coverage of 93.5%, meaning most filings carry a reported job value while a minority do not. Because some permits land in the record without a valuation, the ZIP totals describe reported value only — they are a floor, never an inflated estimate. We publish exactly what the public record holds.

How a snapshot becomes a ZIP report:

1. Collect. Pull the day's residential permit records from the Los Angeles Socrata endpoint, the city's own open-data feed.

2. Normalize. Standardize category labels, valuations, and ZIP fields into one schema so every metro reads the same way.

3. Seal. Hash and store each daily snapshot before any analysis runs, so the figures are content-addressed and reproducible.

4. Aggregate. Filter the sealed metro snapshot to 91040 and roll the window up into the counts, medians, and category mix shown above.

We also keep a sealed permit prediction ledger — predictions hashed before outcomes are known and scored later against public records, the same discipline applied to a different question.

Put Permit Data to Work

A ZIP-level permit read like 91040 is a working tool, not a curiosity. Renovation contractors use it to confirm a neighborhood is filing the kind of alteration-and-repair work they specialize in before they spend on local marketing. Suppliers and roofers time inventory and crews to where home-improvement permits are actually landing. Lenders and agents read a steady stream of improvement filings as a sign owners are investing in — and staying in — their homes, a pre-listing and home-equity signal worth tracking.

The catch is that the public record updates daily and rewards whoever reaches a household first. US Tech Automations turns these sealed permit snapshots into automated workflows: monitoring new filings by ZIP and category, routing fresh leads to the right rep, and drafting first-touch outreach the moment a permit appears — so a remodeler working 91040 hears about a job while it is still on the table. The underlying data lives at permits.ustechautomations.com, refreshed from the same sealed pipeline behind this report.

If you want permit signals wired into your own pipeline, see how our real-estate AI agents put this data to work.

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