Remodeling in Sunland-Tujunga: What to Know

Most articles about remodeling in the San Fernando Valley quietly assume one set of rules. Sunland-Tujunga breaks that assumption, and it breaks it before you have drawn anything.

The community is City of Los Angeles. Council District 7, North Valley Area Planning Commission, LADBS for permits, with the Van Nuys Development Services Center at 6262 Van Nuys Blvd. as the walk-in counter for this half of the Valley. So far, ordinary.

What is not ordinary is that most of the foothill land here also sits under a specific plan that adds a discretionary planning approval in front of your building permit. Homeowners find out about it at the worst possible moment, which is after the drawings are done.

The extra step almost nobody budgets for

The San Gabriel/Verdugo Mountains Scenic Preservation Specific Plan was adopted by ordinance on December 19, 2003 and took effect February 8, 2004. It covers portions of the Sunland-Tujunga-Lake View Terrace-Shadow Hills-East La Tuna Canyon Community Plan area and the Sun Valley-La Tuna Canyon Community Plan area.

Its operative sentence is short and expensive. The Department of Building and Safety shall not issue a grading, building, or sign permit for a project on a site located in whole or in part within the plan area unless a Project Permit Compliance Review has first been obtained.

That review is not a counter transaction. The application has to include site plans with topography, elevations, and site photographs showing the proposed project as seen from the right-of-way of every scenic highway it might be visible from. Where the plan is stricter than the Municipal Code on grading, building height, landscaping, signage, biological resources or density, the plan supersedes the code.

So the first question on any Sunland or Tujunga project is not what it costs. It is whether it is a Project.

The line between a remodel and a Project

This is the most useful paragraph in the ordinance, and it is the one worth reading twice.

The plan defines a Project as construction, erection, addition to or structural alteration of a building or structure, any grading requiring a grading permit, work on a lot in a designated scenic highway corridor, or certain subdivisions. Then it carves out an exception:

The term project shall not include interior remodeling or exterior remodeling unless the remodeling would result in an increase in building height or floor area, or in required parking spaces.

Read plainly, that means a kitchen gutted and rebuilt inside its existing walls, a bathroom reworked in place, a rewire, a repipe or a re-roof in kind generally are not Projects. Add square footage, raise the roof, or add a bedroom that pushes your parking requirement up, and you are.

There is a second exception with a hard number in it. A single-family home on an existing site smaller than 20,000 square feet, not located even partly in a prominent ridgeline protection area, and not in an equinekeeping district, only has to comply with two narrow provisions of the plan rather than the whole thing. A great many flat Sunland and Tujunga lots qualify. A great many foothill lots do not. This is a parcel-by-parcel question, not a neighborhood-wide one, and it is worth answering on day one rather than day ninety.

Corrective grading, as determined by Building and Safety, is exempt outright.

Ridgelines, and the 25-foot rule

If your lot is anywhere near a designated ridgeline, the geometry of your house is decided before your architect starts.

A prominent ridgeline protection area is defined as the area 60 vertical feet from any point along the long axis of the crest of a designated ridgeline. Inside it, no project may be built except under specific findings. Outside it but still on the same slope, the rules keep working:

• No building may be constructed so that the highest point of its roof, structure or parapet wall is less than 25 vertical feet below the designated ridgeline directly above it.
• Where a protection area is mapped on only one side of a ridge, a building on the unmapped side still may not break the silhouette of the protected ridge.
• No grading or berming may alter the elevation of the crest.
• Graded slopes should be landform graded, should vary in slope ratio, and should not exceed 2:1.
• Native vegetation may not be removed inside a protection area except for driveways, building footprints, required equine pads or stables, brush clearance, trails, or residential landscaping.

Even fire pits and picnic tables are regulated inside the protection area unless they are screened from the scenic highway. The final boundary is determined case by case by the Director of Planning using a topographic survey that you provide. Budget for that survey. It is the document the whole review turns on.

The general hillside economics behind this are the same ones we covered in hillside lots in Los Angeles and their hidden costs — the difference here is that a second layer of review sits on top of them.

Six roads that cap your height at 30 feet

The plan designates scenic highways and protects the view from them. The corridor extends 500 feet on either side of the centerline, which is far enough to catch ordinary residential streets that never feel like a scenic corridor.

The designated roads are Big Tujunga Canyon Road from Oro Vista Avenue to the city limits, Foothill Boulevard from Wentworth Street to Osborne Street, the Foothill 210 Freeway from Osborne Street to the city limits, La Tuna Canyon Road from Sunland Boulevard to the city limits, Sunland Boulevard from La Tuna Canyon Road to the 210, and Wentworth Street from Foothill Boulevard to Sheldon Street.

Inside those corridors, the maximum height of any new building or structure including an addition that is visible from the right-of-way is 30 feet, and in no case more than the underlying height district allows. If you were planning a second story within 500 feet of the 210 or of Foothill Boulevard, that number is the one to design against. Our post on how much square footage you can add to an LA house covers the citywide floor area math; this is the local ceiling that sits on top of it.

Horses, pads and pools

Sunland-Tujunga and Shadow Hills are among the last working equestrian pockets inside the City of Los Angeles, and the plan protects that use with real dimensions.

On lots inside a "K" equinekeeping supplemental use district within the plan area, each lot must contain a level equine pad of at least 2,000 contiguous square feet with a minimum width of 24 feet, plus a stable area of at least 12 by 24 feet. Those areas must be graded to drain, must exclude required side yards, and — this is the part that surprises people — no permanent structures, expressly including swimming pools and tennis courts, may be built within the required equine pad or stable area. A 12-foot vehicular access path is required on the driveway side of the lot, with room to park a horse trailer.

The plan also protects existing use. On a lot in a "K" district where at least one licensed equine was stabled on or after July 25, 2002, the non-conforming equine use is not lost even if no equine is licensed there for three straight years. And in the RE40 zone inside the plan area, keeping equines, bovines, goats, poultry, fowl, rabbits and similar livestock is allowed alongside residential use, so long as it is not commercial.

If you are buying here with a pool in mind, check the equinekeeping overlay before you check the pool contractor's calendar.

Oaks, and a banned plant list

On lots of 20,000 square feet or larger inside the plan area, no coast live oak or valley oak measuring eight inches or more in diameter at four and a half feet above the base may be removed, cut down or moved without prior written approval from the Director of Planning or the Advisory Agency. Where that approval is granted, no further approval from the Board of Public Works is needed — the plan consolidates the process rather than adding to it.

Less well known, and a genuine trap for landscape budgets: the plan carries a list of prohibited plant materials for all new projects. It includes several species that appear on Southern California planting plans every week — Italian cypress, blue gum eucalyptus, California pepper, Brazilian pepper, black locust, tree of heaven, pampas grass, fountain grass, giant reed, Spanish broom and Scotch broom among them. Specify a row of Italian cypress along a new driveway here and it can come back on plan check.

The ground itself

There is a reason the soil scientists named a soil series after this place. The USDA Tujunga series is described as very deep, somewhat excessively drained soil formed in alluvium from granitic sources, sitting on alluvial fans and floodplains, mapped as gravelly loamy sand and in places as bouldery and cobbly sand.

Translated into a bid: cobbles and boulders in every trench. Footings, caissons, pool shells, ADU pads, sewer laterals, gas and electrical runs all get slower and more expensive than the same scope on a flat tract in Van Nuys. The material generally carries load well once a soils engineer has evaluated it, so this is a schedule and excavation problem rather than a structural one — but it is a real one, and it is exactly the kind of thing a contractor bidding from thirty miles away prices wrong. The same logic drives what we wrote about foundation repair costs in Los Angeles: access and material dictate the number.

Fire is not a footnote here

On September 1, 2017, the La Tuna Fire started in the hills above this community and burned roughly 7,194 acres, making it the largest fire by acreage in the history of the City of Los Angeles. Sunland-Tujunga, Burbank and Glendale all saw evacuations.

Sunland and Tujunga fall largely within the Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone, and CAL FIRE released updated recommended hazard zone maps for Southern California, including the City of Los Angeles, on March 24, 2025. A very high designation pulls new construction and substantial exterior work into Chapter 7A of the building code, which governs roofing, vents, siding, glazing and decking, and it drives brush clearance obligations around the structure. We put real numbers to that scope in what Chapter 7A fire hardening costs in Los Angeles.

Design for it early. Chapter 7A is cheap when it is in the drawings and expensive when it is a correction notice.

The houses are older than the rules

Tujunga began as Los Terrenitos, a Little Landers colony, and its 1913 community building, Bolton Hall, was built from granite gathered out of the surrounding hills and set with as little mortar as possible. After the First World War, hundreds of families followed the same instinct and built houses on foundations of local stone and boulders.

Those houses are still here. So are their consequences: unreinforced or lightly reinforced stone foundations and stem walls, additions layered on across a century, knob-and-tube and 60 to 100 amp services behind plaster, and framing that predates every seismic provision now in the code. None of that makes a project impossible. It does mean the pre-construction investigation matters more here than the finish selections do, which is the same lesson as what is behind the walls of a 1950s San Fernando Valley house, pushed back another thirty years.

What to watch

City Planning's own page states that the Sunland-Tujunga-Lake View Terrace-Shadow Hills-East La Tuna Canyon Community Plan was last adopted in 1997. It is among the oldest community plans still in force in Los Angeles, and both it and the neighboring Sun Valley-La Tuna Canyon plan appear on the department's current staff assignment list, with planners named to them. An update is moving.

Separately, the commercial spine of the community has its own overlay. The Foothill Boulevard Corridor Specific Plan, Ordinance No. 170,694, took effect October 27, 1995 and was later amended by Ordinance No. 173,455. It carries its own general provisions, multiple-family residential provisions, commercial and industrial provisions and sign regulations along Foothill and Sunland Boulevards. If you are opening or renovating a storefront or a restaurant on Foothill, that plan, not just the zoning, sets your envelope and your signage — the kind of review timeline we mapped out in our guide to commercial and restaurant buildouts.

The short version

Sunland-Tujunga rewards a contractor who reads the overlay before pricing the job. Find out four things before anything else:

1. Is the parcel inside the specific plan area, and is it inside a prominent ridgeline protection area or an equinekeeping district.
2. Does the scope increase height, floor area or required parking. If not, the plan very likely does not apply to it.
3. Is any part of the lot within 500 feet of a designated scenic highway centerline, which caps visible height at 30 feet.
4. What is the fire hazard designation, and what does Chapter 7A add to the exterior scope.

Answer those four and the rest of the project behaves like an ordinary City of Los Angeles job. Skip them and you will find out about the specific plan the day Building and Safety refuses to issue the permit.

DN Builders Group is a licensed general contractor based in Burbank, CA License #1139710, working across the foothill communities of Greater Los Angeles. Cost figures cited elsewhere on this site reflect typical Los Angeles market ranges and are not a quote. Zoning and code provisions summarized here are current to the date of this post and should be confirmed for your specific parcel with City Planning and LADBS.

Questions

Is Sunland-Tujunga part of the City of Los Angeles?

Yes. Sunland, Tujunga, Lake View Terrace, Shadow Hills and East La Tuna Canyon are all City of Los Angeles neighborhoods in Council District 7, reviewed by the North Valley Area Planning Commission. Building permits go through LADBS, and the Van Nuys Development Services Center at 6262 Van Nuys Blvd. is the walk-in office for this side of the Valley, though LADBS now takes most permit work online. That distinction matters because the community sits directly against La Crescenta, which is unincorporated Los Angeles County, and La Cañada Flintridge, which is its own city with its own building department. Three neighboring foothill communities, three completely different permit paths.

What is the San Gabriel/Verdugo Mountains Scenic Preservation Specific Plan?

It is a 2003 city ordinance, No. 175,736, that layers extra rules on top of normal zoning across much of Sunland-Tujunga, Lake View Terrace, Shadow Hills, East La Tuna Canyon and Sun Valley-La Tuna Canyon. It regulates four things — protection of designated prominent ridgelines from grading and development, protection of oak trees and native plant communities, viewshed standards along designated scenic highways, and standards for equinekeeping districts and equestrian trails. Where the plan is more restrictive than the Municipal Code on grading, height, landscaping, signage, biological resources or density, the plan wins.

Does a kitchen or bathroom remodel trigger a planning review here?

Usually not. The specific plan defines a Project to include construction, additions and structural alterations, but it expressly excludes interior remodeling and exterior remodeling unless the remodel would increase building height, increase floor area, or increase the number of required parking spaces. Reworking a kitchen or a bathroom inside the existing walls normally falls outside that definition. Push a wall out, add a room, raise a roofline or add a second story and you are back inside it. There is also a separate carve-out for a single-family home on an existing lot smaller than 20,000 square feet that is not in a prominent ridgeline protection area and not in an equinekeeping district. Confirm your parcel before you assume either exemption applies.

How tall can I build on a Sunland or Tujunga hillside lot?

Two separate limits can apply on top of your zone. Within a prominent ridgeline protection area, which the plan defines as the area 60 vertical feet from the crest of a designated ridgeline, no project may be built at all except under specific findings, and no building may be constructed so that the highest point of its roof, structure or parapet wall is less than 25 vertical feet below the ridgeline directly above it. Separately, any new building or structure, including an addition, that is visible from the right-of-way of a designated scenic highway is capped at 30 feet, and never above what the height district already allows. Scenic highways here include Big Tujunga Canyon Road, Foothill Boulevard, the 210 Freeway, La Tuna Canyon Road, Sunland Boulevard and Wentworth Street, and the corridor extends 500 feet on either side of the centerline.

Why is excavation more expensive in Sunland and Tujunga?

Because of what is under the yard. This is alluvial fan country built out of material washed down from the San Gabriels, and the USDA soil series that carries the name Tujunga is described as very deep, somewhat excessively drained soil formed in alluvium from granitic sources, mapped as gravelly loamy sand and in places as bouldery and cobbly sand. In practice that means cobbles and boulders in the trench line for footings, pools, ADU pads, sewer laterals and utility runs. It is generally good bearing ground once a soils engineer has looked at it, but it is slow, hard digging, and a bid priced off a flat Valley tract will not survive contact with it. Get a soils report before you commit to an excavation number.