See The Metro Project Bringing Nearly 1,500 New Housing Units To North Hollywood

The area around the North Hollywood Metro station will look very different in about a decade. Earlier this month, the L.A. City Council approved a nearly 16-acre project with close to 1,500 housing units, a renovated Metro station, and a new bus transit center. The development also plans to bring more open space, restaurants, and shops to the area.

The project, called “District NoHo”, is part of a Metro program where the agency works with private developers to build, maintain, and operate housing and mixed use developments near its transit stations. Metro’s contribution is its public land — it will not pay for any of the project.

The housing details

Marie Sullivan, the Metro project manager overseeing District NoHo, said the number of housing units to be constructed as part of the project has nearly doubled since the original proposal — including 100 more units for low income Angelenos than initially planned. In total, a quarter of the new units will now be set aside for affordable housing.

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Some say that number is not enough, given L.A.’s housing crisis. But Shane Phillips, the Housing Initiative Manager at UCLA’s Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, said market rate units are needed to balance out the cost of affordable housing units.

“The value of [the affordable housing units] relative to what it’s costing to build them is a loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars per unit,” he said. “There is a real risk of, if you say, ‘It has to be 35%, 50%’ — the developer cannot earn a profit at those levels in most cases, or other things would have to be cut that people also want to see.”

What it will look like

A map of the plans for District NoHo, which will surround the North Hollywood Metro Station.

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Trammell Crow Company

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The project will center around the intersection of Lankershim Boulevard and Chandler Boulevard, spanning from Weddington Street to Cumpston Street and Tujunga Avenue to Fair Avenue. Much of the area is currently taken up by parking lots and vacant land. Sullivan said that there aren’t any plans to displace any of the existing businesses in the project area.

The plans will also consolidate the bus services that currently run on either side of Lankershim Boulevard into one expanded transit center, making it so bus riders never have to cross the street for transfers and freeing up the parking lots between Lankershim and Fair Avenue for what Metro is calling a “megablock.”

That megablock will include a majority of the new housing, retail and restaurant space as well as two acres of open space. It will be split by a new extension of Klump Avenue (which currently ends at Cumpston Street) and L.A.’s first “shared street”, District Way — modeled after the Dutch “Woonerf,” where cars are guests, and pedestrians and bicyclists can move freely.

A rendering of District Way, which will be LA’s first “shared street.”

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Trammell Crow Company

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The block south of the new transit center will add an office tower, and the block north of it will hold about 40% of the affordable housing units.

How it will affect the housing market

Phillips has been researching who moves into new market rate housing — and generally, in metropolitan areas around the country, he’s found that most of the people moving into new homes already live in the area.

“So they're going to be leaving behind some home somewhere else that is, in most cases, more affordable than the one they're moving into. People will move into those recently vacated homes, and they also are probably moving up into a nicer home when they're doing so, and they're leaving behind a slightly less expensive home, and so forth,” he said. “This migration chain happens every time you build a new market rate unit. By creating these new homes, you're sort of loosening the tightness in the housing market elsewhere.”

Why Metro is building housing

Metro executive Wells Lawson said the agency has been building housing projects like this for more than two decades. In 2021, Metro committed to building 10,000 housing units in L.A. County — half of which would be low income housing — over the following 10 years. The North Hollywood project, despite being in the works prior to that announcement, will contribute to that goal.

Phillips said that this kind of involvement is common for transit agencies in other countries. “If anything, we should be doing that a lot more here in Los Angeles, California, the whole country, really making the most of these investments,” he said.

And the location of a development is important in maximizing its impact. Phillips points to the E (Expo) Line, which stops in a lot of areas concentrated with single-family homes. “We’ve spent, I don't know, $2 billion on that rail line that is very useful for many people, but many of the stations are just surrounded by a few hundred homeowners whose homes are worth millions of dollars and who are very unlikely to take transit.”

A rendering of District NoHo's new bus transit center (right) from the intersection of Tujuna Ave. and North Chandler Boulevard.

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Trammell Crow Company

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The economic impact

Lawson said the project is estimated to create more than 15,000 jobs during construction and nearly 5,000 permanent jobs.

He also said Metro’s revenue from the project will be reinvested into this and other transit-oriented communities. “And we do expect that number to grow over time with all of our projects. We have four projects under construction right now — all 100% affordable projects. But even those projects deliver some amount of revenue to Metro that we’re able to reinvest.”

The timeline

Metro has been trying to develop this land since 2006, but that project fell through during the 2008 recession. “District NoHo” kicked off in 2015 with focus groups, open houses and surveys of what residents wanted to see in a new development.

Now, with City Council approval, Metro will finish negotiations with the project’s developer, Trammell Crow Company. Sullivan said they’re expecting to present the final agreement to Metro’s Board of Directors next summer — and that construction on the transit center and some of the affordable housing could start later in the year.

“The entire completion of all of the buildings in the project will take about 10 years from that point,” Sullivan said. The new transit center, however, is projected to be completed by 2027 or 2028.