RENOLOGY/permittimelines

Garage-Conversion and ADU Building Permit Timelines for Four U.S. Cities

64,427 residential garage-to-ADU and garage-to-habitable-room conversion permit applications for Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, and Seattle, with measured application-to-issuance waits, application-year cohort completion rates, and small-cell-suppressed timeline aggregates.

Every number is reproducible from the committed, dependency-free build script in the source repository, which fetches directly from each city's official open-data portal. No number is typed by hand. Version 2026.1, retrieved 2026-08-24.

Record coverage follows each city's published history (San Francisco from 1980, Seattle from 2000, San Diego from 2001); Los Angeles begins in 2020 by design, because its application dataset starts there.

Also available as an R package: pak::pak("asafichaki/permittimelines").

Files

File	Rows	What
permit-records.csv.gz	64,427	One row per unique application: city, public permit id, applied/issued dates, days to issue, project (adu / habitable-room), review track, permit type group
permit-cohorts.csv	43	Per city × application year: submitted, issued, resolved share, publishable flag
permit-timelines.csv	72	Per city × dimension × group: n, p25/median/p75/p90 days, within-30/60/90/180/365 shares, suppression flag

Method

1. Cohorts are formed on the application year, never the issue year.
2. Records are deduplicated on the permit number first.
3. Review tracks are never pooled into one median.
4. Any aggregate cell under 30 records is suppressed.
5. Only cohorts with roughly 75% of applications resolved enter the aggregates; younger cohorts are censored toward fast permits.

Interpretation caveats

• The measured wait is the homeowner's calendar wait, not a statutory compliance measure: California Government Code 66317 runs its 60-day ADU clock from a completed application and tolls on applicant delay; these records carry only the submission date.
• An application with an empty issued_date had no issued permit when the records were retrieved. That may be a stalled review or an abandoned project; the records do not distinguish the two, and none are marked denied.
• Cross-city level comparison is not apples-to-apples; the trend within a city is sound.

Privacy

No names, addresses, coordinates, or free-text work descriptions. Only public permit identifiers, dates, and categorical fields.

Sources and citation

DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.22079794 (Zenodo, all versions)

Original sources, all public record: LADBS (applications), San Diego DSD, San Francisco DBI, Seattle SDCI.

Prepared version: Renology permit timeline data page (downloadable CSV and JSON), with an interactive explorer. No city endorses this preparation. Cite the city agencies as the original sources and Renology as the prepared version.