Metro to seek builder for housing at Crenshaw site
METRO’S VACANT LOT between Lorraine and Crenshaw Boulevards on Wilshire Boulevard is zoned for multi.
“Map data @ 2024 Google”
Community supports needed apartments
Beginning in the late 1980s, the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro) began assembling approximately 10 parcels of land on the southwest corner of Wilshire Boulevard, between Lorraine and Crenshaw boulevards. Metro ultimately used this land to create a staging area for contractors working on the “D“ (formerly Purple) Line subway extension from the existing Western Avenue subway station all the way to Brentwood. Specifically, this corner has been used for staging equipment used by the firms working at Western and La Brea avenues.
Now that construction at those two subway stations is winding down, with the La Brea and Fairfax stations due to open for service in 2025, Metro staff overseeing the transit agency’s Joint Development Program is preparing for Metro to offer the vacant land to developers specializing in the construction of much-needed affordable and permanent supportive housing.
METRO PROPERTY is subject to Park Mile Specific Plan zoning rules.
As Metro has noted in its written materials, this land is subject to the rules of the Park Mile Specific Plan, the City of Los Angeles zoning ordinance that has governed real estate development along Wilshire, between Wilton Place and Highland Avenue, for more than 40 years. The parcels in question are zoned CR(PkM)-1 and R3-1-HPOZ, which zoning allows multi-family development. An example is the five-story (in part), multi-family condominium project just across the street, on the southeast corner of Wilshire and Crenshaw.
John Gresham, a resident of Wilshire Park and secretary of the Wilshire Homeowners’ Alliance that has monitored Park Mile development since the 1980s, wrote of Metro’s plans for its property, “Our communities always have supported the construction of housing in the Park Mile, which allows both office buildings and residential buildings. Nearly 85 percent of the approximately 35 parcels that were vacant at the time of the Park Mile Specific Plan’s adoption in 1979 have now been developed with new buildings that conform to the rules of the Specific Plan.
METRO MULTI-FAMILY NEIGHBOR on the southeast corner of Wilshire and Crenshaw.
“About half of those new buildings are residential, and more Park Mile-compliant residential units are welcome and encouraged. It will be greatly in the public interest if Metro can make its soon-to-be-surplus land available to a developer at a low enough land cost that the developer can construct affordable or, even, permanent supportive, multi-family housing, which is so greatly needed in our city. That is something we neighbors have long anticipated and support, so long as the rules of the adopted Specific Plan ordinance are followed by any new developer, just as those rules have been followed by every other developer for the past four decades.”
WILSHIRE PARK HPOZ is behind Metro multi-family neighbor on the southeast corner of Wilshire and Crenshaw. DTLA is in far background.
Metro has indicated that, in the coming months, it will be drafting for selected qualified developers a Request for Proposals to develop these parcels with housing.
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