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By Jenna Chandler for Curbed Los Angeles | Read the original article here

Development battles in Santa Monica have largely fizzled out. Now, two City Councilmembers seeking reelection say they want to end the building wars for good.

A measure on the November 6 ballot would require developers to get the approval of a “supermajority” of the Santa Monica City Council to deviate from the city’s building height and density limits.

If Measure SM passes, for the next 10 years, developers wanting to build taller or denser would need a “yes” vote from five of seven members of the City Council. Right now, the threshold is four votes.

That’s an important distinction, says Kevin McKeown, who co-sponsored the measure with Sue Himmelrich. Both councilmembers are seeking reelection.

Historically, votes on some of the biggest, most high-profile development projects in Santa Monica have been split, McKeown says.

“Measure SM eliminates those squeakers that previously got through on the barest majority vote,” he says. “It is significantly more difficult for a developer to earn that fifth vote to go beyond our adopted plans.”

Councilmembers Gleam Davis and Terry O’Day oppose Measure SM. They argue it would actually incite more fights over development.

“I was so looking forward to having an election on the ballot where we would not have development wars,” Davis said in June, when the council discussed it. “Now we are voluntarily inviting election wars.”

“The circus is coming to town again,” O’Day said. “Here’s the sideshow for development fighting.”

Two years ago, a far more extreme proposal to curtail building heights in Santa Monica appeared on the ballot. Measure LV would have subjected any new construction taller than 32 feet—the equivalent of two stories—to voter approval.

That measure was defeated at the ballot box, with more than 56 percent of residents voting against it.

But McKeown says it would be a “mistake” to ignore the 44 percent of residents who voted in favor of Measure LV.

If developers want “to exceed our limits in any way, they’d better come to us with a truly spectacular project,” he says.

Measure SM has an exemption for housing projects that are 100 percent affordable and projects on school district property. And, according to the Santa Monica Lookout, the measure wouldn’t affect development projects that have already been proposed.

The measure was placed on the November 6 ballot measure on June 26 on a 4-2 vote of the City Council.

“The premise of this supermajority provision is that if something is a really good idea, it will get five votes,” Davis said at the time. This measure “isn’t getting five votes tonight.”

“By its own definition, it might not be a very good idea,” she said.

By Elijah Chiland for Curbed Los Angeles | Read the original article here

Tunneling is officially underway on Metro’s Purple Line subway extension to the Westside of Los Angeles.

The first round of tunneling started Tuesday beneath the intersection of Wilshire Boulevard and La Brea Avenue.

Twin 450-foot-long tunnel boring machines (dubbed Elsie and Soyeon) will carve out about 60 feet of tunnel daily for the next two years, en route to the Wilshire/Western station, where Purple Line trains now turn back for Downtown Los Angeles.

The first phase of the Purple Line extension broke ground in 2014 and is expected to open in 2023. The $2.82 billion project will add a little under 4 miles of track to the subway route, bringing it to the intersection of Wilshire and La Cienega boulevards.

Eventually, the extension will bring the train all the way to the VA hospital, just west of the 405 on the border of Westwood and Brentwood. The project is being constructed in three segments.

Phase two will run between La Cienega and Constellation Boulevard in Century City. The third phase will add a stop near UCLA en route to the VA.

Altogether, the extension will add roughly 9 miles to the Purple Line and is expected to carry nearly 60,000 riders daily.

But the project isn’t popular with Beverly Hills residents and school officials who have sued repeatedly to block the second leg of the project, arguing that tunneling work beneath the Beverly Hills High School campus could pose a threat to the safety of students. Metro officials have steadfastly denied these claims.

Last week, students, teachers, and school administrators in the city gathered at Will Rogers Memorial Park to protest the subway project.

Tunneling work hasn’t started yet on the second phase of the project, and Metro spokesperson Dave Sotero told Curbed last week that the agency selected a route that travels beneath the high school because that route “provides the greatest benefits with fewest impacts.” Another proposed route along Santa Monica Boulevard would have intersected with an earthquake fault.

Sotero says Metro will continue to look for unmapped oil wells beneath Beverly Hills out of “an abundance of caution.”

Protests and legal challenges notwithstanding, Metro expects all three phases of the project to be complete by 2026.

By Bianca Barragan for Curbed Los Angeles | Read the original article here

Netflix is doubling down on Hollywood. Today, developers of EPIC, a 13-story office development on Sunset Boulevard, announced that the streaming company has signed a lease for the entire building.

“EPIC is part of our continuing investment in LA and Hollywood,” Netflix’s chief financial officer David Wells said in a statement. “We’re thrilled to be able to continue to grow our team there.”

EPIC is designed by Gensler, and will feature floor-to-ceiling windows, terraces, fire pits, and a rooftop deck. The building will also be outfitted with electric-car-charging stations, bike lockers, and showers.

Developed by Hudson Pacific Properties, EPIC is due to be complete in 2020. Netflix will move into the building in phases that same year. The company’s lease at EPIC expires in 2031.

Netflix has already rented the entirety of the 14-story ICON tower and almost 92,000 square in the five-story office building CUE. The company has extended its leases at both building for an additional five years.

Both ICON and CUE are located across the street from EPIC, on the Sunset Bronson Studios lot, and are also owned by Hudson Pacific Properties.

By Bianca Barragan for Curbed Los Angeles | Read the original article here

Two years ago, Google started leasing a massive airplane hangar in Playa Vista. On Tuesday, the tech giant moved in, says Playa Vista’s corporate blog.

In terms of size, the new location is an indisputable upgrade. The Spruce Goose hangar—which once housed Howard Hughes’s Hughes H-4 Hercules—is three times the size of the company’s Frank Gehry-designed offices in Venice, where Google has held offices since 2011.

The move to Playa Vista has been a long time coming. Google leased the 319,000-square-foot, seven-story-tall space in 2016.

At the time, the company planned to build structures inside the hangar, creating three stories and a mezzanine, the Los Angeles Times reported. That was expected to result in 525,000 square feet of office space inside the hangar.

Google’s new home was owned by The Ratkovich Company until 2016, when it was sold, reportedly to Japanese investors, who paid more than $300 million for the hangar and three adjacent buildings. At the time, all four buildings were already leased to Google for a 16-year period.

Google also spent $120 million in 2014 to purchase 12 acres of vacant land right next to the hangar.

The Spruce Goose hangar was built in 1943 to house the H-4 Hercules, aka the Spruce Goose, an enormous flying boat designed by Hughes’ company during World War II. (It flew once, for one minute, in 1947.)

The Spruce Goose now resides in a aviation museum in Oregon.

By Jenna Chandler for Curbed Los Angeles | Read the original article here

Plans to build an apartment complex on a Hollywood strip mall that houses an Out of the Closet thrift shop breezed through the city’s planning commission on Thursday.

The seven-story building would bring 270 apartments to Sunset Boulevard and El Centro, plus new street-level shops and restaurants and parking for 361 cars in an underground garage.

Sidewalks will be widened and the building’s architecture will feature “different textures, colors, [and] materials,” making this pocket of Hollywood more walkable, city planning staffers wrote in a report to the commission.

“The project will support Hollywood’s identity as an area of commerce, while bringing much-needed housing,” the report says.

The complex would wipe out the existing strip mall, located at 6200 Sunset, which also holds a pharmacy and Discount Tire Centers.

It’ll rise immediately to the west of Gower Gulch, and it will face the historic Palladium, which is poised to undergo a restoration and redevelopment with the addition of two 28-story towers.

Plans for 6200 Sunset now head to the Planning and Land Use Management Committee.

By Elijah Chiland for Curbed Los Angeles | Read the original article here

Los Angeles is known for its charming residential streets, lined with grassy parkways and dotted with single-family homes.

There are condo towers and courtyard apartments—but for better or for worse, LA’s image is a city of ranch homes and Craftsman bungalows.

It’s an image that was cemented by decisions that city planners and elected officials made in the decades following LA’s early 20th century boom years, when the city was growing most quickly.

Last month, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson blamed LA’s affordable housing crisis on its abundance of single-family neighborhoods.

Today, close to half of all developable land in the city is still set aside for single-family homes, not apartments or other forms of housing that could hold more people.

Just under two thirds of land in the city of Los Angeles is now zoned to allow residential construction, according to the Department of City Planning. Of that total, more than 75 percent is reserved for single-family homes or duplexes.

Other U.S. cities dedicate similarly large portions of land to single-family housing, but LA’s suburban-style streets stand in stark contrast to the density of big cities such as New York and Chicago.

But that wasn’t always the case.

In 1920, the city introduced its first zoning code, which put LA’s available land into five categories of land use, including single-family home construction. Though this was by far the most popular form of housing in LA’s sprawling urban environment, few parts of the city were off limits to larger projects.

As Andrew Whittemore, professor of land use and environmental planning at the University of North Carolina, points out in his essay “Zoning Los Angeles: a brief history of four regimes,” in 1933, less than 5 percent of the city’s zoned land was exclusively restricted to single-family homes.

Most residential properties at that time fell under a more flexible zoning designation that allowed for many different types of construction—including the bungalow courts and small multifamily buildings that can still be found alongside single-family homes in older neighborhoods like Silver Lake, Hollywood, and Venice.

But LA’s zoning rules became much more restrictive in the following decades.

By 1970, almost half the city was zoned for single-family use only, according to Greg Morrow, director of UC Berkeley’s Real Estate and Design program.

What happened?

In 1934, Congress passed the National Housing Act, creating the Federal Housing Administration. The new government agency promoted homeownership by guaranteeing home loans with long repayment periods that lenders might have otherwise been unwilling to give (prior to this time, buyers usually had to pay off home loans within five years, meaning that monthly mortgage payments were quite high).

Since taxpayers would be on the hook if buyers failed to pay back these government-backed mortgages, the FHA went to great lengths to minimize the risk of the loans.

Part of that, as Whittemore explains an article published in the Journal of Urban History,meant shying away from loans in neighborhoods that weren’t deemed “safe investment areas.”

To the agency, safe areas for investment were often those where residents were almost entirely white, as redlining maps from the era clearly illustrate. But racial demographics weren’t the only determining factor.

The FHA (now part of Carson’s own department) also at this time discouraged loans in areas where commercial buildings and apartment complexes abutted single-family homes—the idea being that a mix of building types made the neighborhood more susceptible to changes that could negatively affect property values.

In response to these lending policies, city planners across the United States sought to make urban neighborhoods more homogenous, clearly separating building types and creating lot size and setback requirements to make single-family neighborhoods as safe for investment as possible.

The effects of this were particularly felt in cities like Los Angeles, where plenty of land was still available for new developments.

In 1946, when Los Angeles updated its zoning code (creating the system still in use today), the city’s single-family zones were more fully defined—with nearly three pages of restrictions and regulations. Separate classifications were also created for duplexes and “suburban zones,” with similar parking and yard-size requirements.

These zoning rules helped to create the neatly arranged residential communities Angelenos today know and love, but they also severely limited available space for new development. That’s become a pressing concern as LA deals with a severe shortage of affordable housing.

“We’re clinging to this model—the old version of the American Dream,” housing advocate Mark Vallianatos tells Curbed. “It doesn’t make sense to reserve large portions of any city for only one home with a yard and just one family.”

Compounding the housing shortage is the legacy of plans for the city’s development made in the 1970s, when residents and local leaders sought to slow LA’s growth by limiting the amount of housing that developers could build.

As Morrow points out, Los Angeles was zoned to hold up to 10 million residents in 1960. By 1990, the city had capacity for just 3.9 million residents.

Today, that number has increased slightly but so has LA’s population—the city is home to roughly 4 million people. As of 2010, it was zoned to hold just 4.3 million residents.

To accommodate future residents, Vallianatos says single-family neighborhoods could be “sensitively densified.” Planners could allow property owners in these areas to build triplexes and fourplexes there—buildings that allow more people to live in these communities without sacrificing their low-slung character.

But that would likely garner strong resistance from homeowners, who fought hard to preserve, and even expand, LA’s single-family zones when the city introduced its community plans in the 1970s.

Likewise, Los Angeles planners are probably keenly aware of the political risk of tampering with zoning rules in single-family areas.

In the 1980s, the city of Long Beach eased restrictions in these areas to spur construction of affordable housing. Capitalizing on loopholes in this policy, developers replaced historic bungalows with hastily constructed apartment buildings, which critics derisively referred to as “crackerboxes.”

Discussing the city’s new Land Use Element, which will regulate future development, Long Beach planning bureau manager Linda Tatum said in March that allowing these apartments was “absolutely a mistake on the city’s part.”

In Land Use Element maps approved by the Long Beach City Council earlier this year, not a single one of the city’s single-family neighborhoods was altered in any way.

LA officials have shown some willingness to tamper with single-family zoning in areas near transit. In July, the Los Angeles City Council unanimously approved a plan to adjust the zoning of several single-family blocks near stops on Metro’s Expo Line.

The new zoning rules will allow “neighborhood-scale mixed-use development that creates ground-floor commercial activity” with the “capacity for multifamily housing.”

Vallianatos says that Los Angeles and other nearby cities need to start thinking more seriously about “upzoning,” that is, allowing more dense forms of housing, in order to bring down skyrocketing home prices and reverse the discriminatory policies that kept low-income and non-white residents out of neighborhoods favored by the FHA.

“If you change the zoning a bit, you can keep some of the feel of the neighborhood,” he says. “But you open it up to a much wider diversity of people and ways to live.”

By Bianca Barragan for Curbed Los Angeles | Read the original article here

A 35-story tower at the Shoreline Gateway project is due to break ground in 60 days, earning the title of Long Beach’s tallest building, says Long Beach Mayor Robert Garcia. But the high-rise won’t hold that title for long.

Garcia unveiled on Tuesday plans for a new development in the city’s downtown that would include a 40-story tower—tall enough to unseat the Shoreline Gateway as the city’s highest, when complete.

Developed by Maple Multifamily Land, a subsidiary of Trammell Crow Residential, the project would rise on a large parking lot directly north of the World Trade Center in Long Beach, near Broadway and Magnolia.

Renderings show the building as a glassy high-rise shaped a bit like a prism standing on end. Architecture for project, called the West Gateway, is by Long Beach-based Studio One Eleven. The firm did not respond to a request for comment.

Flanking the tower would be a handful of shorter buildings of a variety of uses, Garcia said. The project would 694 residential units to Long Beach’s downtown, which continues to experience a boom in residential building.

The project was only recently proposed and is working its way through the planning process.

By Elijah Chiland for Curbed Los Angeles | Read the original article here

The Los Angeles housing market is not a hospitable one for first-time buyers.

Less than 30 percent of all LA residents can afford a median-priced home, according the California Association of Realtors. It can be even harder for first-time buyers, who don’t have a property they can sell to cover the cost of a down payment.

But plenty of programs exist at the local, state, and federal level to help buyers purchase their first homes—and many of them provide borrowers with help to make those costly down payments.

Home shoppers are probably already aware of resources like the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s FHA loans program, or the VA loans available to U.S. service members and veterans.

But those aren’t the only options. Below is breakdown of five options available specifically to buyers in the LA area.

To take advantage these programs, buyers must also obtain loans from private lenders, so credit limits or other financial restrictions may come into play. But it’s worth investigating these options if homeownership seems just out of reach.

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California’s first mortgage programs

The California Housing Finance Agency’s first mortgage program is available to most first-time buyers in California who meet the income limits where they live. In Los Angeles County, borrowers must make under $116,280 (for a one or two-person household) to qualify.

Through the CalPlus and MyHome programs, which are generally paired, buyers who receive conventional home loans from qualified private lenders can then obtain smaller loans from the state agency. These are available to cover closing costs and up to 3.5 percent of a home’s price in down payment assistance.

The smaller loans aren’t factored into monthly mortgage payments; instead, buyers repay them in a lump sum when selling or refinancing their home—or after paying off the entire mortgage.

The maximum price for properties purchased using these loans is $705,000, meaning buyers can get up to $24,675 in down payment assistance.

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Los Angeles County’s first home mortgage program

Administered through the Southern California Home Financing Authority, a partnership between Los Angeles and Orange counties, this program is somewhat similar to those offered by the state’s Housing Finance Agency in that borrowers can get financial assistance that goes toward the cost of a down payment.

It’s available to buyers in nearly every part of both counties, with one major exception: the entire city of Los Angeles. That’s bound to be frustrating for many prospective buyers, but hey, there are plenty of nice areas to explore outside the city limits.

To qualify for the program, participants must earn under $116,280 for a one or two-person household, or under $135,660 for a three-person household. Purchases are also capped at $625,764, except in targeted areas where at least 70 percent of residents are considered low-income earners by statewide standards. In these areas, buyers can pay up to $764,823.

The first-time buyer requirement is also lifted in targeted areas, meaning that homeowners in those regions could take advantage of the program to trade up for a larger or more amenity-rich property.

Program participants work with participating lenders to obtain a home loan, which comes with a grant that can be used for down payment and closing costs. The grant, which buyers do not have to pay back, can be up to 4 percent of the total value of the loan.

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Los Angeles County homeownership program

This program also provides financial assistance for down payment and closing costs, but the money comes out of a pool of grant funding from the federal government. That means there’s a limit to how many people can participate in the program. The county is accepting just 39 applications between now and March 2019.

Participants, who must earn under $62,000 per year (for a two-person household), can obtain loans up to $75,000 through the program. Interest isn’t charged on those loans and they don’t need to be repaid until after the buyer sells the home or pays off the mortgage.

This program also excludes the city of Los Angeles, along with many of the county’s other large cities. A list of places where participating homebuyers should focus their searches can be found here.

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City of Los Angeles homebuyer assistance

The city of Los Angeles has two very similar programs for first-time buyers. One is for low-income buyers making under $62,000 per year (for a two-person household). The other is for moderate-income buyers earning under $116,300 (also for a two-person household).

Both programs offer loans up to $60,000 that can be used to cover down payment and closing costs. The low-income loans can only be used on purchases up to $498,750 for single-family homes and $404,700 for condos. There isn't a maximum purchase price for the moderate income program.

The loans don’t have to be paid off until buyers sell the home or pay off the mortgage, at which time the city will also collect a percentage of the home’s appreciated value, which varies depending on the size of the loan (if the loan amounts to 10 percent of the purchase price, you’ll have to pay back 10 percent of the home’s appreciated value).

The bad news is that loans are only being offered right now to low-income buyers, as the moderate income program is out of funds. Fortunately, the City Council approved an additional $2.3 million for the program in August, which is not yet available but is expected to fund an additional 33 loans to middle-income buyers.

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Inglewood homebuyer assistance

The city of Inglewood has also set aside a limited amount of money to help first-time buyers. In August, the city approved $2 million in funding for a program that will provide borrowers with up to $350,000 in financial assistance.

Not only will loans from the city cover a buyer’s down payment, they’ll also significantly lower monthly mortgage costs, making homes significantly more affordable to participating residents (to qualify for the program, participants must have lived in Inglewood for three of the last five years).

The program’s benefits are enticing, but get in line soon—the city estimates that only five or six buyers will be able to get assistance through the program.