Los Angeles Building Permit Project

Los Angeles County Building Permit Analysis March 2018

1. Introduction & Objectives

County of Los Angeles is experiencing one of the biggest construction boom in decades, both in residential and in commercial properties. In 2017 alone, the city has issued close to 170,000 various building permits, with total valuation of about $9.25 billion. While some of notable buildings include entertainment venues such as the new Rams and Chargers Stadium in Inglewood, mixed use structures such as Wilshire Grand Tower in Downtown, and public-private partnership infrastructure such as LAX World Airports, there are numerous small- and medium-sized buildings throughout the county.

With this in mind, SoDAVi Group was tasked to evaluate the characteristics of single family residential buildings and commercial buildings in the county through analyzing publically available data.

2. Approach

Building and Safety Permit Data was retrieved from LA Open Data (751,548 permits as retrieved on February 1, 2018), which includes such attributes as permit type, permit issue date, location, valuation, and brief description. The earliest permit issue date was from 2013 and the latest the present date.

Moderate amount of data cleaning was done through Microsoft Excel, such as combining delimited texts to form complete addresses, filtering and adjusting noise values, and separating the data into single family residential buildings and commercial buildings.

Exploratory data analysis was done through Microsoft Excel as well, where key indicators such as average valuation per square foot of housing unit and total valuation of commercial buildings by ZIP codes were gauged for any anomaly before visualization. Visualization was performed via Microsoft Power BI.

3. Observations – Single Family Housing

From January 2013 to January 2018, a total of 14,968 single family housing permits were issued in the county of Los Angeles, with a total valuation of $3.89 billion. Among them, 9,674 buildings were valued between $100,000 and $1 million, whereas 489 buildings were valued more than $1 million. For simplicity of analysis, these buildings of valuation more than $1 million (“high-value housings”) were used for further investigation. The analysis indicated that Beverly Hills, Hollywood Hills, and Brentwood featured the most amount of high-value housings, consistent with popular expectations. Further, most of these high-valued housings were along the hills north of the I-10 Freeway, as shown in Figure 1. Outside of the familiar regions aforementioned, notable anomalous regions that were Sherman Oaks and Palos Verdes area with a few high-value housings.

Figure 1: Single Family Housing Permit Valuation Larger than $1M
(size by valuation, color by permit issue year)

In order to normalize few high-value housings, further analysis was conducted to show average valuation of single family housings. Average valuation of single family housings was shown in Figure 2. The analysis indicated that La Crescenta (ZIP Code 91214) featured the highest average valuation with $651,326, which is more than double the global average of $311,307. La Crescenta was 38% higher than UCLA/Westwood area near Beverly Hills (ZIP Code 90024) that featured average valuation of $471,600. Notably high area is Koreatown north of Wilshire Blvd. (ZIP Code 90020), of which average valuation was $601,319. This is explainable from the amount of residential development and redevelopment happening in the area.

Figure 2: Heat Map of Average Valuation of Single Family Housing, Grouped by ZIP Code

4. Observations – Commercial Buildings

From January 2013 to January 2018, a total of 196,145 commercial building permits were issued in the county of Los Angeles. Of these, 169,834 permits were unique building permits, with a total valuation of $20.0 billion. The analysis indicated that Downtown Los Angeles outperformed any other regions of Los Angeles by both volume and count, as can be seen in Figure 3. This is agreeable to the currently ongoing construction ubiquitous in the area. Besides Downtown, areas that featured large volume of commercial building construction work were Hollywood, Century City, Playa Vista, and Koreatown. This is also agreeable to the amount of development observed in the respective areas, corresponding to growing economy in entertainment, finance, tech, and retail industry around the county. Other notable areas that featured large volume of commercial construction were USC that has experienced rapid student housing development and LAX that has experienced ongoing expansion and reorganization.

Figure 3: Commercial Property Permit Valuation
(size by valuation, color by ZIP code)

In order to compare construction volume by ZIP Code, further analysis was done, grouping total valuation by ZIP Code. The areas that featured the most amount of commercial development was Inglewood area (ZIP Code 90045) with $2.1 billion of total valuation, most of which is a direct result from construction at LAX. Downtown area (ZIP Codes 90015 and 90017) were also significantly high, with $1.7 billion and $2.0 billion of total valuation, respectively. Other notably significant region was Hollywood area (ZIP Code 90028), with $1.8 billion of total valuation.

Figure 4: Heat Map of Commercial Property Permit Total Valuation, Grouped by ZIP Code

5. Conclusion
Most of the analysis and visualization presented results that were intuitively agreeable to what are observable in present day Los Angeles county cityscape. Particular insights were drawn in high single family housing valuation in La Crescenta area and Koreatown area. Also notable was the number of commercial buildings that have risen in the period of 5 years, most prominent of which being Downtown Los Angeles. This again reaffirms the strength of the economy and subsequent boom in real estate development.

Useful Links

• Interactive Visualization of Single Family Housing Permit Data
• Interactive Visualization of Commercial Property Permit Data