The Los Angeles City Council voted 14-0 on Tuesday, November 10, 2026, to approve a motion aimed at freeing up pending accessory dwelling unit and home addition projects that got stuck under outdated stormwater permitting rules. The motion, introduced by Councilwoman Monica Rodriguez in May, directs city staff to draft a fix for homeowners caught in a bureaucratic gap created when Los Angeles changed its drainage requirements back in 2024.
According to mynewsla.com, the council directed the city attorney, working with the Bureau of Sanitation, to prepare an amendment that would create an administrative relief process for pending projects involving between 500 and 2,499 square feet of added impervious area. That's a narrow but meaningful band of projects — ones that were submitted before the city's 2024 rule change and got left behind under the older, stricter standard even after the rules eased for everyone else.
Los Angeles updated its low-impact development requirements in April 2024, eliminating the need for costly, complex stormwater-infiltration systems on larger developments. A city report filed with the City Clerk states that Ordinance No. 188125 took effect April 2, 2024, and revised the city's LID applicability thresholds to align with state permit requirements, according to the City of Los Angeles. But projects submitted before that change remained subject to the earlier, tougher requirements — meaning some homeowners have effectively been stuck complying with rules the city itself no longer enforces on new applicants.
A Threshold That Had Been Stricter Than the Regional Standard
The roots of the mismatch go back to 2011, when the city lowered its low-impact development compliance threshold to 500 square feet of added impervious area, well below the broader regional standard of 2,500 square feet set under its municipal separate storm sewer system permit, per the same mynewsla.com report. That lower bar meant small residential projects — additions, garages, backyard units — got swept into stormwater rules originally designed for commercial and large-scale development, city officials said.
City officials said those stormwater-infiltration requirements on small private parcels could cause flooding, mosquito breeding and structural effects on nearby foundations. Officials also said the rules layered financial and administrative barriers onto housing production at a moment when the city has been trying to encourage more ADU construction, not less.
The city's own report states that small private projects proved less efficient at meeting citywide stormwater goals than regional infrastructure financed through Measure W, also known as the Safe, Clean Water Program. That finding helped justify returning the city's threshold to the regional standard of 2,500 square feet in April 2024 — but it didn't retroactively help the homeowners whose applications were already in the pipeline under the old rules.
Rodriguez: 'An Industrial-Grade Engineering Project'
“A simple home addition or backyard ADU shouldn't require an industrial-grade engineering project,” Rodriguez said. She said homeowners remained trapped in administrative gridlock under mandates the city no longer imposed on anyone else, and argued her measure would provide a pathway to clear the backlog, remove unnecessary costs and refocus city resources.
The city report filed with the City Clerk notes that under current rules, the 2,500-square-foot threshold now applies mainly to projects in environmentally sensitive areas, and that most small-scale projects, including most ADUs, are no longer subject to LID requirements at all. The same report shows the toll the old rules took on the system: compared with the 2020–2023 baseline, the number of LID plan-check projects cleared in 2025 dropped by roughly 59%, while the total stormwater volume mitigated through constructed LID projects fell by about 15%.
ADU Demand Keeps Climbing Countywide
The stakes extend well beyond City Hall paperwork. Across 81 Los Angeles County jurisdictions, 16,008 ADU permits were issued in 2024, up about 2% from the 15,717 issued the year before, according to data from PermitPathLA. The City of Los Angeles alone accounted for 9,849 of those permits — roughly 62% of every ADU permit issued countywide that year, by far the most of any jurisdiction in the region.
PermitPathLA's tracker also notes that its 2025 figures remain incomplete: as of a May 17, 2026 data pull, 66 of the county's 85 jurisdictions had filed numbers, while the City of Los Angeles had not yet reported its own 2025 total. With the council's vote now directing staff to draft the amendment, the next step will be whether the proposed administrative relief process makes it into a final ordinance — and how many stalled projects it ultimately unsticks.
