OTC Alterations Dominates 94116, San Francisco — June 2026

In ZIP 94116 — Parkside and the southern avenues of San Francisco's west side — the residential permit record for May 11 – June 9, 2026 is very nearly a single-category story. Of the 95 residential building permits issued in the ZIP during the window, 94 fall under the otc alterations permit category: San Francisco's over-the-counter track for renovation work that does not require full plan review. All but one permit in the neighborhood took the fast lane.

This report is a ZIP-level slice of the sealed San Francisco snapshot from US Tech Automations Research. 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. Every figure is read from sealed daily snapshots, never estimated.

Key Findings

• ZIP 94116 logged 95 residential building permits in the 30-day window, per sealed snapshots of San Francisco Department of Building Inspection data via data.sfgov.org (Socrata).

• 94 of those permits carry the otc alterations permit label, according to the same sealed snapshot record.

• Total declared valuation in 94116 reached $4.8M for the window, per the sealed snapshots.

• The median 94116 permit is valued at $17,000, below the citywide median of $19,395, per the Department of Building Inspection feed.

• Only 94122, with 99 permits, posted a higher count among San Francisco ZIPs in the sealed top-ZIP table for this edition.

ZIP 94116 Permit Activity, May 11 – June 9, 2026

Before the table, the shape of the data is worth stating plainly. A neighborhood where nearly every permit is an over-the-counter alteration is a maintenance-and-remodel market, not a development market. The $17,000 median says the typical job is a modest one — a kitchen, a bathroom, a run of dry-rot repair — and the $4.8M total says the volume comes from many such jobs rather than a few large ones.

That median also sits comfortably inside the citywide picture. San Francisco's interquartile band runs from $8,700 at the low end to $48,018 at the high end, and 94116's $17,000 median lands in the lower half of that band: smaller-than-typical jobs, in a city already defined by small permits.

94 of ZIP 94116's 95 residential permits in the May 11 – June 9, 2026 window are otc alterations permits, with $4.8M in total declared valuation.

Every figure above is a slice of the same sealed metro snapshot that produced the citywide San Francisco numbers — the ZIP cut is filtered, not separately collected, so the neighborhood and the city are directly comparable.

What Is Getting Built in 94116

The dominant label deserves a plain-English translation. An otc alterations permit — OTC Alterations, in friendly form — is San Francisco's over-the-counter permit for alteration work that conforms to code without complex structural review. The Department of Building Inspection reviews these applications at the counter or through its electronic equivalent, and qualifying projects can be approved without the long plan-check queue that ground-up construction or major structural work requires.

What kind of job rides that track? In practice: kitchen and bathroom remodels, in-kind window replacement, re-roofing, dry-rot and stucco repair, interior finish work, and similar renovation-scale projects within an existing building envelope. It is the permit of record for keeping an existing house sound and current — not for adding units or building new ones. Sub-trade permits (standalone electrical and plumbing) are a separate stream and are excluded from these figures at ingest.

That profile fits the housing stock. ZIP 94116 covers Parkside and the neighboring blocks of the outer avenues — long rows of attached stucco homes on narrow lots, most built out in the interwar and postwar decades by merchant builders working at speed. The housing is dense, uniform, and aging, and the ocean-side climate works on it constantly: fog, salt air, and wind are hard on stucco, window frames, and roofs. Envelope maintenance in this part of the city is not optional, and it shows up in the permit record as a steady stream of over-the-counter alteration work.

The neighborhood is, in other words, a concentrated version of the citywide pattern. The otc alterations permit category accounts for 883 of San Francisco's 952 permits this window, and 94116 pushes that skew further still — the category covers all but a single permit in the ZIP. For a category-level view of how this permit type behaves across the whole city, see the San Francisco OTC alterations report.

Who pulls these permits? Mostly small general contractors and specialty remodelers, alongside owner-builders handling their own renovations. The work is frequent and modest in scale, which means the contractor base serving 94116 skews toward high-volume renovation trades — kitchen-and-bath crews, window installers, roofers, stucco and dry-rot specialists — rather than the larger firms that chase new construction.

How 94116 Compares in San Francisco

Set against the city's other high-volume ZIPs, 94116 sits near the top of the table. Only one ZIP recorded more permits this window, and the leaders cluster on the west side of the city.

ZIP 94122 leads San Francisco with 99 permits; 94116 follows at 95 — the western avenues anchor the city's residential permit volume this window.

The table rewards a close read. ZIP 94122, directly north in the Sunset, edges out 94116 on count — 99 permits to 95 — yet 94116's $4.8M declared total comes in above 94122's $4.6M, so the Parkside side of the avenues is carrying slightly larger jobs. ZIP 94110 in the Mission district follows at 84 permits and $3.5M, and 94112 in the Excelsior matches 94116's $4.8M total on 81 permits.

The opposite pattern shows up east and north of the avenues. ZIP 94118, around the Inner Richmond, recorded 63 permits — far fewer than 94116 — but $9.7M in declared valuation, the largest total among the ZIPs in this table. ZIP 94114, around the Castro and Noe Valley, pairs 63 permits with $7.2M. Fewer, larger projects in the city's pricier central neighborhoods; many, smaller projects out where the fog rolls in. The data is cross-sectional, but the geography of job size is unmistakable.

For context, the city itself is a heavyweight this edition: San Francisco's 952 permits rank #2 by count among the 8 metros tracked, with 100% valuation coverage — every permit in the window carries a declared value. The full citywide picture, including the cross-metro comparison, is in the San Francisco building permit report.

Methodology

Source: San Francisco Department of Building Inspection via data.sfgov.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 sealed snapshots behind the citywide San Francisco report — the 94116 figures are filtered from the metro record, not collected separately, which is what makes the neighborhood-to-city comparisons above legitimate. Scope is 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.

This edition is also cross-sectional: it reports the May 11 – June 9, 2026 window on its own terms and makes no claims about prior periods, because the sealed history needed to support trend statements does not yet exist.

The pipeline behind these figures:

1. Collect. Pull the residential permit feed from the Department of Building Inspection dataset on data.sfgov.org every day.

2. Normalize. Map each record to a common schema — permit identifier, issue date, declared valuation, category label, ZIP code — excluding commercial and sub-trade permit types at ingest.

3. Seal daily. Hash each day's normalized snapshot and append it to a content-addressed store, so no figure can be silently revised after capture.

4. Aggregate and slice. Compute window totals, medians, and ZIP-level cuts directly from the sealed snapshots over the May 11 – June 9, 2026 window — no interpolation, no modeling.

The same sealing discipline underpins the permit prediction ledger, where predictions are committed to the record before outcomes can be observed. Sealing first is the point: a reader can hold these numbers to account because they were fixed at capture.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How many residential building permits were issued in ZIP 94116 in the latest window?
A: 95 residential building permits between May 11 – June 9, 2026, according to San Francisco Department of Building Inspection data via data.sfgov.org (Socrata), captured in sealed daily snapshots. The count covers single-family and small multi-family work only.

Q: What is an OTC alterations permit?
A: It is San Francisco's over-the-counter alteration permit — reviewed at the counter or electronically rather than through full plan check — covering renovation-scale work such as kitchen and bath remodels, in-kind window replacement, re-roofing, and dry-rot repair. In 94116, 94 of the ZIP's 95 permits this window carry the otc alterations permit label.

Q: Does this report cover all construction in 94116?
A: No. Scope is 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, so these figures should not be compared against raw citywide permit feeds from other sources.

Q: Why is the 94116 median valuation $17,000?
A: Because the ZIP's permit flow is dominated by modest over-the-counter alteration jobs. The $17,000 median sits below San Francisco's citywide median of $19,395 and within the citywide interquartile band of $8,700 to $48,018 — typical neighborhood maintenance and remodel work rather than large projects.

Q: Which San Francisco ZIP issued the most residential permits this window?
A: ZIP 94122 leads the sealed top-ZIP table with 99 permits; 94116 follows with 95. By declared dollars, ZIP 94118 posts the largest total among those ZIPs at $9.7M on just 63 permits — fewer but larger jobs than the west-side avenues.

Q: Where do these numbers come from?
A: From sealed daily snapshots of the San Francisco Department of Building Inspection feed on data.sfgov.org. Each day's normalized data is hashed and appended to a content-addressed store; the ZIP figures are a filtered slice of that same record. Nothing is estimated, modeled, or extrapolated.

Put Permit Data to Work

A ZIP like 94116 rewards trades that operate on volume. Renovation contractors can read 95 permits in a 30-day window — nearly all of them over-the-counter alterations — as evidence of a neighborhood in constant maintenance mode, worth a sustained local presence rather than a one-off campaign. Window, roofing, and stucco specialists are looking at their core market. Building-product suppliers can time inventory and counter staffing to a steady renovation cadence. And real estate agents watch alteration permits as a pre-listing signal: owners often invest in kitchens, baths, and envelopes shortly before a sale.

US Tech Automations turns these permit signals into automated workflows — monitoring new permits as they land in the jurisdiction feed, routing qualified records to the right territory or crew, and drafting outreach grounded in sealed, verifiable data. Explore the underlying permit corpus at permits.ustechautomations.com, or contact us to scope a monitoring or lead-routing workflow built around the neighborhoods you work.

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