UCLA

The City of Los Angeles’s Historic Preservation Overlay Zone (HPOZ) program adds discretionary review, additional design requirements, and up to 79 days to the entitlement process of new residential projects. Discretion and process-based regulation generally discourages housing construction. Does HPOZ designation meaningfully affect where and how much new housing construction occurs? Permit data from the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety from 1996 to 2025, suggests little construction occurred in HPOZs neighborhoods before designation. This trend continued following designation. HPOZ designation does not affect residential construction within or in surrounding zones in a statistically meaningful way. Policies such as Community Planning, the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), and corridor-based zoning likely disincentivized housing construction in historic neighborhoods more than HPOZ designation.