A $1 billion mixed-use project is planned for North Hollywood’s Arts District – one that experts believe will anchor the community and aid in reshaping the scope of the area.
District NoHo, which is being developed by Trammell Crow Co. and its affiliate High Street Residential, as appointed by the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, will span nearly 16 acres of land at the intersection of Lankershim and Chandler Boulevards, atop Metro’s already existing North Hollywood station.
“Metro is continually expanding their services to connect all of Los Angeles, making it increasingly advantageous to live and work on transit, and for developers to build there to meet that demand,” Greg Ames, senior managing director of Trammell Crow’s Southern California offices, said.
In total, the project will consist of 1,481 multifamily units – 366 of which will be income-restricted – plus 450,000 square feet of office space, 60,000 square feet of retail space, approximately 3,000 parking stalls and two acres of open space.
“It’s our largest assemblage to date of Metro-owned property around a station,” Wells Lawson, deputy executive office of joint development at Metro, said. “And it’s obviously a major station. It’s the third busiest in the Metro system.”
Dallas-based architecture firm HKS is the master planner of the project, overseeing its design as well as the other attached firms, including Culver City-based KFA Architecture, which is designing the affordable housing component, and San Francisco-based Gensler, which is designing the office space.
“The key to it has to do with collaboration,” said Greg Verabian, a partner and regional practice director of commercial and mixed-use projects at HKS Los Angeles. “It’s hard sometimes when you work with a bunch of designers. We all have our egos because design can be quite personal. But I think what was nice about this one is that everybody had space to develop something that they wanted to develop.”
Live, work and play
Built to stand on its own, District NoHo is intended to encapsulate all demands of life, where everything you need can theoretically exist in one place.
“The project itself is contemplated as a district,” Ames said. “There are architectural and design standards and an enhanced landscaping plan that really stitch this community together without creating any perceived barriers from the rest of the community. It’s very open and outwardly facing.”
Yet deeper within the district, broken down into eight blocks, each segment boasts a mixture of uses – from residential to office to retail and a plethora of restaurants.
“Each block could be independently built and could park itself and service itself without having to rely on other blocks providing any support for that,” Verabian said. “It becomes like filling in the voids of a neighborhood in a sense.”
One design element that Scott Baker, president and founder of RELM, the landscape architecture and urban design firm for the project, is particularly excited about is that District NoHo will bring the first ever shared street to Los Angeles.
“District Way (the street’s name) will be a very egalitarian, democratic street with no curbs where pedestrians and bikes and cars all can coexist,” Baker said, noting that cars will be “essentially put into a tertiary priority.”
“Looking at how we bring best practices to the district – how do we make it a pedestrian precinct specifically that accommodates bikes and reconciles bike movement – and connecting both pedestrians and bikes to transit, those have been key guiding strategies through the whole (landscaping) process,” he said.
Baker and his team are working to prioritize access to public space while ensuring sustainable initiatives are met, emphasizing strategies like shade equity and urban tree canopy.
North Hollywood evolution
The neighborhood of North Hollywood has been in the spotlight of transformation over the last few decades, spurred by the additions of the Red and Orange Lines.
“When the Red Line extension happened back in 1999, I had been living in North Hollywood and I could understand why North Hollywood is north of Hollywood because I can be in Hollywood in like six minutes,” Karen Swift, director of community relations at Metro, said. “All of a sudden it was this game changer.”
A project nine years in the making, District NoHo is expected to build upon the already established North Hollywood Metro station as part of an ongoing effort by Metro to build more transit-oriented communities.
“Transit brings communities together,” Lawson said, highlighting that one of the biggest pros of public transit is improving access to opportunities.
“Part of what you’re doing in providing transit is serving disproportionately low-income communities of color with more limited mobility options, but giving them vast mobility to this region,” Lawson said.
The project is intended to boost economic development by creating an estimated 10,000 jobs during construction and an additional 2,500 jobs through operations.
New York-based insurance service provider MetLife Investment Management is providing the exclusive capital means for the project and will be its owner upon completion.
Project impact
As Metro already owns the land, no businesses or residential units are expected to be displaced as a result of the new development. Instead, much of the project’s impact is measured in environmental and community concerns.
According to an environmental impact report analyzed by Los Angeles City Planning, the project would result in a number of significant and unavoidable project-level impacts, related to “air quality, historic resources, on-site construction noise, off-site construction noise, on-site construction vibration and off-site construction vibration.”
All other potential impacts would be less than significant or mitigated to less-than-significant levels, reads the report.
“The people who complain about revitalizing an area don’t want any change,” Stuart Waldman, president of the Valley Industry Commerce Association, said. “Improving an area that was downtrodden is a good thing. And the people that don’t think that, you’re never going to make them happy.”
The project received unanimous initial approval by city council members in December and is anticipating concurrence from the city attorney’s office.
If all goes well, construction is expected to begin mid-next year and will be developed over the course of 10 years, with assets opening in up to six phases. Affordable housing units will be built with priority, with the district’s first mixed-income project expected to follow in 2026.
“I think it’s going to help reshape our city because it’s going to prove that developing and putting density at transit is the right thing to do,” Verabian said. “And that density and active public spaces aren’t something we should fear, but we should strive for.”