A developer has filed plans for a 12-story, 32-unit apartment tower near the 17th Street/Santa Monica College Metro station, marking the second project submitted under the state's new transit-density law.
Applicant Bruce Adler filed the preliminary application for the project at 1517 15th St. on Aug. 14, submitting it under the state Housing Crisis Act, or SB 330, which allows developers to lock in local rules in effect at the time of filing. The parcel, zoned for two-family residential use, currently holds a single-family home that has sat unoccupied, according to the filing, which states no tenants would be displaced by the project.
The proposal calls for demolishing that home — which is more than 40 years old and would require a demolition permit — and replacing it with a 12-story, 100% residential building topped out at roughly 138 feet. The design features a one-story concrete podium supporting an 11-story mass-timber tower above, with a footprint of 40 feet by 140 feet and a total gross floor area of 67,200 square feet on the 7,500-square-foot lot — a floor-area ratio of 8.96.
The building would include 32 one- and two-bedroom units, 26 of them market-rate and six deed-restricted as affordable: one for very low-income households, two for low-income households and three for moderate-income households. The affordable units would be satisfied on-site rather than through an in-lieu fee. The application lists an estimated construction cost of $36.1 million.
The project includes no state-mandated vehicle parking, taking advantage of SB 79's parking exemption for developments within a transit-priority zone, though the applicant intends to include four to eight optional spaces accessed from the rear alley. To accommodate the tower's scale within the site's base zoning, Adler is seeking a lengthy list of waivers and incentives under the state's Density Bonus Law, including increases to allowable height, floor-area ratio and lot coverage; reductions to required front, side and rear setbacks; and the elimination of standard requirements for upper-story stepbacks, open space and landscaping. The filing states the applicant reserves the right to modify that list as the review process continues.
Construction would require removing several trees on the private portion of the lot, including a lemon tree, a fig tree and two ornamental juniper shrubs, according to the application. A mature magnolia tree in the public sidewalk parkway in front of the property is not slated for removal, but the filing notes the building's zero front-yard setback could bring the structure into contact with the tree's canopy, an issue the applicant says will be coordinated with the city's Public Landscape Division.
The tower proposal follows closely on the heels of the city's first SB 79 filing, submitted the same month near the Bergamot Station. That project, known as "Delaware House," calls for demolishing a 1,051-square-foot single-family home built in 1949 at 2904 Delaware Ave. to make way for five three-story, three-bedroom townhomes totaling nearly 9,916 square feet. The applicant, Ficus Forest LLC, led by Eric Silverberg of Miami Beach, worked with designer Open Office on the plan, which includes one at-grade parking space per unit and satisfies its affordable-housing requirement through an in-lieu fee. The project is structured as a five-unit airspace condominium tract.
The two filings arrive amid a broader debate over SB 79 in Santa Monica. The law, authored by state Sen. Scott Wiener and signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, overrides local zoning to allow denser housing near qualifying transit stops in eight urban counties, including Los Angeles. Depending on a site's proximity to a qualifying stop, cities cannot cap density below 80 to 120 units per acre or height below 55 to 75 feet, with an added "adjacency intensifier" that can push limits even higher.
Santa Monica initially embraced the law, with the City Council voting 6-1 to formally endorse SB 79 with Councilwoman Lana Negrete casting the lone “no” vote. Despite being one of just a handful of cities to support the law, the council unanimously adopted a "phased implementation" approach voting to temporarily exclude five of its seven qualifying transit zones — plus downtown bus stops — from the law's requirements until the city adopts its next housing element or 2030, whichever comes first.
The Expo/Bundy station, whose half-mile radius extends into the Pico neighborhood, initially fell short of qualifying for that exclusion because too few nearby parcels met the density threshold. In response, the council voted to pursue upzoning single-family parcels — rather than the multifamily upzoning initially recommended by staff — in order to bring the zone into compliance. On Sept. 8, the council held a first-reading public hearing on a plan to upzone the 89 single-family parcels and reiterated its plan to cluster the new development standards into the R1 zones.