51 Permits in 91042: Los Angeles ZIP Report — June 2026

Tucked into the hills of northeast Los Angeles, the 91042 ZIP — the Tujunga and Shadow Hills side of the city — turned in a quietly busy month. Across the May 11 – June 9, 2026 window, this single ZIP accounted for 51 residential building permits, every one of them pulled from the same sealed snapshots we use for the rest of the metro.

That headline of 51 is worth pausing on before any table appears. It is a mid-pack volume for Los Angeles ZIPs — not a teardown-and-rebuild hotspot, but far from dormant. It is the kind of steady, owner-driven activity that rarely makes the news yet keeps a neighborhood's contractors, suppliers, and listing agents genuinely busy. Read the rest of this report as one ZIP-level cut of the city's larger record.

Every figure below is a slice of the Los Angeles metro's sealed snapshot for the same window. 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, in plain terms, is the city's written authorization to do a specific piece of construction work to a code standard — and this report counts only the residential ones.

What the 91042 Numbers Say

The story of this ZIP is not its total — it is the shape of the work behind that total. A volume of 51 permits paired with a typical job valued near the low thousands tells you this is a renovation neighborhood, not a ground-up development corridor. People are improving the homes they already own.

ZIP 91042 recorded 51 residential building permits across the May 11 – June 9, 2026 window, drawn from our sealed daily permit snapshots.

• 51 residential permits were filed in ZIP 91042 during the 30-day window, according to the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety via data.lacity.org (Socrata).

• The ZIP reported roughly $1.2M in total declared valuation for the window, per our sealed permit snapshots.

• The median permit in 91042 carried a declared value near $3,800, a figure that sits well below the metro median.

• The leading work type was Alteration & Repair, with 27 permits in this ZIP, according to our sealed snapshots.

That median of $3,800 is the single most revealing number on this page. When the typical job is valued in the low thousands, the permit file is dominated by re-roofs, electrical panel swaps, plumbing rough-ins, and small structural fixes — not additions or new construction. It signals a settled, owner-occupied housing stock being maintained rather than transformed.

How ZIP 91042 Permit Activity Breaks Down

The table below isolates the ZIP-level slice from the same sealed snapshot that produces our citywide figures. We publish the total and the median together on purpose: the gap between them is where the read lives.

A roughly $1.2M total spread across 51 permits, with a median near $3,800, confirms a long tail of small jobs rather than a handful of giant ones. For anyone working this neighborhood, the implication is concrete: the opportunity here is volume of modest projects, not the occasional luxury build. That is a different sales motion than a high-median ZIP demands.

What Is Getting Built in 91042

More than half of this ZIP's recorded activity sits under a single source label: Bldg-Alter/Repair / 1 or 2 Family Dwelling, which we present in plain English as Alteration & Repair. With 27 permits under that one heading, it is the unmistakable center of gravity for 91042.

So what does an Alteration & Repair permit on a one- or two-family dwelling actually cover in Los Angeles? It is the workhorse residential permit — the file you open to modify, fix, or upgrade an existing home without expanding its footprint. A homeowner re-roofing after storm damage, a contractor replacing failing galvanized plumbing, an electrician upgrading a service panel, a crew reinforcing a foundation or retrofitting for seismic safety: those jobs all land in this category. It is maintenance and improvement, not expansion.

The Alteration & Repair category led ZIP 91042 with 27 permits in the window, the clearest single signal of what this neighborhood is working on.

The table below shows where that leading category sits relative to the ZIP's overall permit count, so the concentration is easy to see at a glance.

Reading the category mix this way matters because the label tells you the trade. A ZIP dominated by Alteration & Repair is a market for roofers, electricians, plumbers, and general remodelers — the trades that keep existing homes livable. It is far less a market for ground-up homebuilders or large-scale developers. For a supplier deciding which SKUs to stock near Tujunga, that distinction is the difference between shelves of framing lumber and shelves of roofing and electrical supply.

The hillside character of 91042 reinforces the pattern. Older homes on sloped lots tend to need ongoing structural and drainage attention, and seismic considerations make retrofit work a recurring line item rather than a one-time event. The permit record here reads like a neighborhood maintaining and quietly modernizing an established housing stock, one small job at a time.

How 91042 Stacks Up Against Other Los Angeles ZIPs

A single ZIP only means something next to its neighbors. The table below places 91042 against the metro's most active ZIPs in the same window, then against the citywide headline. Use it to calibrate where this neighborhood actually falls.

Two things jump out. First, the citywide totals dwarf any single ZIP — Los Angeles ranks #1 among the metros we track on both permit volume and total valuation, and one ZIP is always a thin slice of that. Second, 91042's valuation profile is modest even relative to ZIPs with similar permit counts: a neighbor like 90039 posts a comparable count but a far larger total, which tells you 90039 carries bigger-ticket jobs while 91042 stays small and steady.

For a deeper read on the citywide distribution, see our Los Angeles building permit report. For sibling-ZIP context, the 90041 report covers an adjacent northeast-LA neighborhood.

Across the whole metro, declared valuations span an enormous range — from $2,500 at the lower quartile up to $35,000 at the upper quartile, with a citywide median of $7,000. ZIP 91042's median near $3,800 sits toward the lower end of that band, another sign that its permit file leans heavily toward small repair and maintenance work rather than the large additions that pull a median upward.

How We Built These Numbers

Source: 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.

The ZIP-level view is a straightforward cut of the same sealed records. We do not maintain a separate 91042 dataset — we filter the metro snapshot down to this ZIP and aggregate over the window. That means the methodology, the scope rules, and the honesty constraints that govern the citywide report apply identically here. If a permit is missing a declared valuation in the source, it still counts toward the permit total but contributes nothing to the valuation total; across the metro, valuation coverage runs at 93.5%, with 3,779 of the city's records carrying a valuation figure.

This edition is cross-sectional. It describes one 30-day window and makes no claims about trends, growth, or change over time, because comparable historical windows do not yet exist in this series. When you read "51 permits," read it as a count for this window only.

Here is how a figure on this page comes to exist:

1. Collect. We pull the day's residential permit records from the Socrata endpoint at data.lacity.org, capturing the raw fields as the city published them.

2. Normalize. We map categories to consistent labels and attach the ZIP to each record, discarding nothing and inventing nothing.

3. Seal. Each daily snapshot is content-hashed and stored append-only, so the underlying records cannot be quietly edited after the fact.

4. Aggregate. At report time, we filter the sealed snapshots to ZIP 91042 and sum across the May 11 – June 9, 2026 window to produce the counts and valuations above.

That sealing step is what separates this from a one-off database query. The 51 you see here is reproducible from a fixed, hashed record set — not a number that shifts the next time the source updates. Our prediction ledger explains how we hold ourselves to that same standard when we score forward-looking claims.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Is 51 the total number of permits in 91042?
A: It is the count of residential building permits — single-family and small multi-family — for the May 11 – June 9, 2026 window. Commercial and sub-trade permits are excluded at ingest, so this is not every permit the city issued in the ZIP.

Q: Why is the median permit value in 91042 only around $3,800?
A: Because most of the activity is small repair and maintenance work. With Alteration & Repair leading at 27 permits, the file is full of re-roofs, panel upgrades, and plumbing fixes rather than large additions, which pulls the median down toward the low thousands.

Q: Who actually pulls these permits?
A: Typically the homeowner or, more often, the licensed contractor doing the work on their behalf — roofers, electricians, plumbers, and general remodelers. The dominance of the Alteration & Repair category in 91042 points squarely at the existing-home maintenance trades.

Q: How does 91042 compare to the rest of Los Angeles?
A: It is a mid-volume ZIP. The city as a whole recorded 4,042 residential permits and ranks #1 among the eight metros we track. With 51 permits and roughly $1.2M in declared valuation, 91042 is a small, steady slice of that citywide total.

Q: Can I trust that these numbers will not change later?
A: Each daily snapshot is hashed and stored append-only, so the 51-permit count is computed from a fixed record set. That is the point of sealing — the figure is reproducible rather than a moving target.

Put 91042 Permit Data to Work

A permit record is an early, public signal of intent, and ZIP 91042 is a good example of how to read one. The 27 Alteration & Repair permits here are 27 homes where work is already authorized — a contractor can use that to qualify the neighborhood for re-roof or retrofit demand, a building-supply distributor can time inventory to the trades the mix implies, and a real estate agent can read steady improvement activity as a pre-listing tempo worth watching.

This is where automation earns its place. We at US Tech Automations build agentic workflows that monitor sealed permit feeds, route new records to the right person, and draft the first outreach — so a small but steady ZIP like 91042 does not slip through the cracks between bigger neighborhoods. The same sealed snapshots behind this report power those workflows; you can browse the underlying permit data at permits.ustechautomations.com.

If you work northeast Los Angeles and want permit signals turned into a working pipeline rather than a spreadsheet, our real estate AI agents are built for exactly that handoff — from raw record to qualified, routed lead.

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