ADUs & Additions in West Covina

City of West Covina Community Development Department, Building Division. Building permits come from the Building Division of the Community Development Department, which takes applications, plans and supporting documents through its One Stop Building Permit Center portal. Grading needs its own permit from the City Engineer, and that permit does not cover retaining walls, which carry separate permits and fees. Municipal Code Section 26-46 sets pools and spas at least five feet from interior side and rear property lines, measured to the back of the bond beam, and keeps pool equipment five feet from side and rear lines, out of the front yard and screened from public right-of-way views. ADUs that meet the code's standards are approved ministerially, without a public hearing, through a Second Unit Review, and still need a building permit. We prepare the drawings, make the submittal and handle plan-check corrections ourselves, so you are not the one chasing plan check.

The zoning code sets single-family minimum lot areas from 6,000 square feet under the R-1-6,000 designation up to 40,000 square feet under R-1-40,000, and caps total building coverage and floor area on a sliding scale tied to lot size. The Hillside Overlay, which the General Plan places in the San Jose Hills on the city's southeast side and describes as mostly developed, allows one home per gross acre. Subdivisions generally along Hillside Drive in the 1970s and 1980s used its density transfer, clustering homes on lots of at least 20,000 square feet and creating city-owned Landscape Maintenance District open space, generally steep slopes and valleys, that totals 207 acres in the San Jose Hills. One local condition that shapes the work: In the Hillside Overlay, Section 26-59 requires any substantial area of slope steeper than 45 percent to stay essentially natural and ungraded and calls for minimal grading above 35 percent wherever possible. Lots there with graded pads must keep a substantially flat strip at least ten feet deep between the back of the house and the slope for pedestrian and emergency access, where a one-story open patio cover is allowed.

All of it, including South Hills and Woodside Village. Our crews run every job out of our Cahuenga Pass base in Los Angeles, with our own people on site.

Detached ADU: generally $150,000 to $400,000+ across Southern California. What moves it is square footage, finish level, utility runs, and site access; garage conversions typically run well below a ground-up detached build. We give line-item pricing after seeing the site rather than quoting a number over the phone.

Plan a realistic year. Design and engineering typically take one to three months, city plan check and corrections add several more, and construction usually runs four to eight months depending on size and site access.

Usually yes, and often substantially, because the foundation, walls and roof already exist. The trade-offs are that you lose the garage, and older slabs and framing sometimes need upgrading to meet current code.

California ADU law is designed to allow long-term rental, and an ADU is one of the few ways to add rentable square footage to a single-family lot. Short-term rental rules vary by city, so confirm your local ordinance before counting on that income.

Yes. Plans, engineering, Title 24 and the city submittal are all handled in-house, including responding to plan-check corrections. That is a service we sell on its own, so it is not something we hand off.