How do you figure out zoning when evaluating a parcel in LA?

[Joseph Commisso]

Question for LA developers and investors — when you’re evaluating a new parcel, how do you currently figure out the zoning? Do you use ZIMAS, hire a consultant, call the city planning department? Trying to understand how people handle this workflow. Genuinely curious.

[Zhongyuan Luo]

Quote from @Joseph Commisso:

@Zhongyuan Luo Really appreciate that Zhongyuan — yes I'm familiar with both ZIMAS and the county GIS. The issue I keep hearing from developers is that those tools show the raw zoning data but don't actually tell you what you can build there in plain English — especially when you factor in overlays, FAR calculations, and state ADU laws all at once. As someone who's a realtor, architect, and contractor — is that a pain point you run into with clients?

Hi, each project is a bit different. From years of practice, there's really no reliable tool to consolidate everything and give us a clear answer as what can or cannot be built. Zimas only gives you zoning map, flood map, etc, but building height, setback, you need to find them from city/county's zoning ordinance. Let's say for a property, you want to build an ADU. You figured out the front setback is 20', side and rear are 5', 30' height limit, FAR 45%, and a 1,200 sqft ADU is allowed. Everything looks very promising until you do a survey, and found out the fire access is not wide enough (20' min), or your property doesn't have two means of access to freeway, so either you can't build an ADU if it's in high fire, or it needs to be capped at 800 sqft. I haven't mentioned other variables like zoning variance, etc. Simply put, without an accurate survey/site plan, information from Zimas/zoning ordinance/planner are really more of a guideline. You need to prove that those information are applicable for your property, and this is the hard part. A really useful tool would ideally generate an accurate property survey (which is impossible for now), not plat/plot map, and then analyze the property based on local zoning ordinance. Hope it helps.