Four new buildings will provide 188 apartments downtown and in Mid-City, including 40 designated for low-income seniors and 30 for other low-income households.
1514 7th St. and 1445-1453 10th St. will be entirely affordable, while 1235 5th St. and 1543 7th St. will be mixed-use buildings with 23 and 100 units, respectively. The Architectural Review Board gave initial feedback on three of the buildings on Monday.
Non-profit EAH Housing, Inc. is planning to build a four-story building, Magnolia Villas, with 40 affordable one-bedroom units and 10 parking spaces at 1445-1453 10th Street by February 2020. Seniors with incomes at 60 percent or less of the median income will be able to apply for a unit.
The site is across the street from Kaiser Permanente and near UCLA Medical Center, as well as numerous bus routes and the Expo Line. It is made up of two adjoining lots, one of which is a parking lot for a car dealership and the other a single-family home that was most recently used as an office, said Steven Spielberg, EAH Housing’s director of new business development for Southern California.
EAH Housing acquired the property last September for $5,250,000. The City of Santa Monica provided the developer with a $6,585,000 loan to cover acquisition, predevelopment and demolition costs of existing structures on the property. The company is the first new affordable developer to work with the City in several years.
The Santa Monica architecture firm DE Architects is designing the project, which will feature a courtyard with a community garden, a meeting room and fitness rooms. Renderings submitted to the Architectural Review Board show a white and gray façade comprised of projecting, receding, and overlapping cubes.
1235 5th St. is a five-story building with about 1,800 square feet of commercial space on its ground floor, 23 apartments, five of which will be affordable and 20 parking spaces. Two of the units will be studios, 13 will be one-bedrooms, five will be two-bedrooms and three will be three-bedrooms.
The project from West Coast Investors will rise on a vacant lot between two other mixed-use buildings. It will be more colorful than its neighbors, however, sporting a façade made up of red, orange, yellow and brown panels. There will be four small balconies above its glass-fronted ground floor, and the top two levels will be stepped back to allow for balconies spanning the entire façade.
The largest building, at 1543 7th St., will be eight stories tall with a smooth gray and white façade and contain 100 market-rate apartments, almost 4,500 square feet of ground-floor commercial space and 85 non-required parking spaces. 65 units will be one-bedrooms, 20 will be two-bedrooms and 15 will be three-bedrooms. The development will replace a four-story apartment building built in 1990.
Margot Shekhter, the wife of prolific developer Neil Shekhter, is the agent of the company behind the project, NMS15437, LLC. The company will build a separate 25-unit building at 1514 7th St., a vacant lot across the street from Vons, to fulfill its affordable housing requirement. Plans for that building have not yet been submitted.
madeleine@smdp.com
