Los Angeles’s pool party may be coming to a close
(Image generated with MidJourney)
Over the past few years, Los Angeles pool builders couldn’t dig a hole fast enough. A pandemic-fueled frenzy prompted homeowners who were stuck inside during lockdown to go all in on backyard pools.
In 2022, the city of Los Angeles permitted 3,041 pools, an all-time record. More recently, though, the pace has slackened. In the first half of the year, there were 1,147 pool projects given the greenlight, down 25% from the same period in 2022.
Now, a series of factors could reduce that further. A decade ago, a basic backyard pool could be put in for around $50,000. Today, that price can easily be north of $100,000 and may be about to rise even more. Immigration raids are sweeping up many who work in construction, making it harder to staff jobs, and tariffs are adding 10-15% to the price of equipment like pool pumps.
A backyard pool is one of the defining amenities of Southern California living. A look at more than 20 years of pool permits tells its own story about the city.
The foreclosure crisis, which began around 2007 and cratered home values for the next several years, put a dent in construction. But that was followed by a nearly decade-long rebound, a brief pause for COVID in 2020, leading to the pool-building peak of 2022.
Pools are one metric for judging the gaping disparities across Los Angeles. In Watts, only five pools were installed in the past 20 years, with the most recent one in 2012. In that time, Sherman Oaks, at the top of the list, received 3,244 permits.
Deeper dive
Most people who have a pool have just one pool. Some houses, though, have multiple. In fact, one single-family house in Bel Air has received 17 pool permits in the past five and a half years.
That doesn’t mean the house has 17 pools. Some of those permits were to expand or change the shape of an existing pool. But the house does have no fewer than eight bodies of water that require a pool permit. This includes the main pool, a smaller pool, a reflecting pool, a plunge pool and at least two Jacuzzis.
How we did it: Crosstown analyzed 20 years of building permit data from the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety.
Have questions about our data? Write to us at askus@xtown.la
