The Boyle Heights Neighborhood Council’s Planning and Land Use Committee will discuss and potentially take action Thursday night on three separate multifamily developments, the biggest being a 95-unit apartment project proposed for the campus of the Sakura Gardens senior living community by developer Pacifica Companies. The committee’s agenda for its 6:30 p.m. meeting also includes an 85-unit mixed-use proposal for 1016-1030 N. State St. by Hamid Yousefian of the Yousefian Family Trust and a 60-unit affordable housing project at Mariachi Plaza being steered by the East LA Community Corporation.
Submitted in August, Pacifica Companies’ plans for the 4.96-acre property that holds Sakura Gardens involve two multifamily buildings. Building A is the conversion of the community’s 90-bed intermediate care facility into a five-story, 45-unit multifamily building with 16 studios, 23 one-bedrooms, and two studios. In addition, a new four-story Building B is slated to include 50 units — 38 one-bedrooms and 12 two-bedrooms — in ground-up construction at the site of a recreational field on the retirement community’s campus. Plans also call for a two-story open parking garage adjacent to Building A and 196 parking spaces, with amenities between the two buildings including hot tubs, roof-top gardens, and a media room.
Pacifica Companies purchased the approximately five-acre campus for $9.1 million in 2016, according to county records. The San Diego-based company has real estate ventures across the U.S. and in Mexico and India.
The Boyle Heights Neighborhood Council committee will also discuss the Yousefian-proposed project for North State Street, a six-story, 85-unit project designed by architectural firm SSPStudio Architecture & Urban Design and located a block south of the LA County + USC Medical Center. First submitted last January, plans are for a 68-foot-tall mixed-use building to rise at the currently vacant property. The project would contain 65 one-bedrooms and 20 two-bedrooms, along with 6,554 square feet of ground-floor retail and two levels of basement parking.
Discussion of 1016 N. State St. will be followed by a presentation and discussion on ELACC’s plans for Mariachi Plaza. Current plans are for a five-story, 60-unit affordable apartment building along with over 6,300 square feet of street-level retail along Mariachi Plaza, a 6,000-square-foot community garden, and an approximately 2,000-square-foot Mariachi Cultural Center.
ELACC was selected by the Metro Board in 2018 to be the developer of the transit-oriented site, receiving a one-year extension of its exclusive negotiating agreement last summer. As with the other Boyle Heights projects on the neighborhood committee’s agenda Thursday evening, the Mariachi project still must obtain entitlements from the city after winning neighborhood support.
