Affordable housing is the industry darling. This is where it should go.
Dense, zero parked (with no apologies) affordable housing. Every service, food, transit, and form of entertainment at your tenants’ doorstep. The Ventura View Development Site’s potential truly embodies Los Angeles’s (and the San Fernando Valley’s) transition to a proper urban metropolis.
In this brochure we systematically unpack the new by-right land use capabilities of the site. Notably, an audit of CHIP’s allocation of bonus incentives and how these incentives will enable for the timely execution of density despite the site’s location within the Ventura Blvd./Cahuenga Boulevard Corridor Specific Plan. CHIP (Citywide Housing Incentive Program) policies have dramatically unlocked the potential of this rare piece of Ventura Blvd. real estate by superseding the specific plan’s counterintuitive standards along the Valley’s most iconic thoroughfare – the location where the housing creation should be incentivized– not squelched. Finally, the City of Los Angeles got something right!
We focus herein primarily on the execution of 100% affordable housing (circa 80% AMI) leveraging AHIP (stacked with ED-1 to enable for a ministerial traversal of the Specific Plan) as we believe deed restricted housing affords certain advantages (e.g., the welfare tax exemption) when coupled with smaller format units and economical construction (no parking). This genre of multifamily execution becomes an enticing business plan for certain well-located properties where the fully amenitized market rate alternative is priced substantially higher (in this case +/- 25% higher). This disparity hedges occupancy risk despite the deliverance of a less amenitized, non-parked, and smaller rental product.
Ventura View is not the dreaded and ill-conceived “South LA ED-1” project so many now connotate as the “ED-1 project”. Ventura View represents an elevated application scenario for the policy. This is where it works. This is where the City wants it to happen. In rare instances there is a meeting of the minds between economic realities and City policy…this could be such an example of that phenomena.