YIMBY LA Housing Report Card - Q4 2025
February 17, 2026
By Christopher Russell (Strategic Communications, Yimby LA); Samuel Maury-Holmes (Founder, Zenith Economics)The final quarter of 2025 represented a pivotal moment for the Los Angeles housing market.
By Christopher Russell (Strategic Communications, Yimby LA); Samuel Maury-Holmes (Founder, Zenith Economics)
The final quarter of 2025 represented a pivotal moment for the Los Angeles housing market. While the LA City Council finalized some pro-housing regulatory reforms, like the Codification of ED1 and citywide expansion of the Adaptive Reuse Ordinance, the permitting of housing remained at a near-decade low. The City and State are generally building a legal framework for future density, but the City is still currently failing to meet its RHNA (Regional Housing Needs Assessment) production target of 456k total units for the 2021-2029 RHNA cycle.
Looking ahead, 2026 will be another opportunity to expand housing production in the City of Los Angeles. Over the past few years, efforts have been made by state and local policy makers (with SB-79 as a recent, prominent example) to expand housing production through the use of planning and zoning reforms. Now the City must address the uncompetitive cost of local construction (RAND) and local production hurdles like the lingering ULA gap (LAist) to ensure new ordinances and state laws translate into actual building permits, certificates of occupancy, and ultimately keys in hands.
Citywide Permitting Trends: Historically Weak Production
According to the January 2026 Hilgard Economics Report, residential permitting in Los Angeles for the full year of 2025 was "historically weak" with permit volume reaching 8,714 new residential units. The 2025 permitting volume is on par with the 8,702 units permitted in 2024, and it remains significantly below the annual average of 13,000 units seen between 2015 and 2022. The 8,714 units permitted in 2025 represent less than 16% of the 57,000+ units the city needs to permit annually to meet its state-mandated housing production goals.
Local Pro-Housing Policy Progress in Q4 2025
Despite the permitting lag, the City moved forward on several pro-housing legislative items in Q4-25:
- Adaptive Reuse Expansion: In December 2025, the City Council . This allows developers across the City of Los Angeles to convert commercial buildings as recent as 15 years old into housing "by-right," removing the previous 1974 cutoff.
