City of Los Angeles Buys Landmark Affordable Housing Project

The City of Los Angeles has acquired one of the first affordable housing projects completed under its Executive Directive 1.

The Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles purchased Sands Off Sawtelle, a 44-unit apartment building at 11418 Missouri Avenue in Sawtelle, for $16.7 million, L.A. Business First reported. Developers Generation Real Estate Partners and Eris Development sold the four-story property in a deal working out to $378,400 per unit.

The Sands Off Sawtelle development was completed in 2025 and was one of the first projects to begin construction under ED1, implemented in late 2022. HACLA purchased the property to preserve the affordable housing in the West Los Angeles neighborhood, an agency spokesperson told L.A. Business FIrst.

Of the 44 units, 17 will be reserved for households earning up to 50 percent of the area median income, and 26 units would be reserved for residents earning up to 80 percent of the area median income; the remaining residence is set aside for an on-site property manager.

Zoning changes under ED1 made it financially feasible for Generation Real Estate Partners to build low-income housing in a high-resource area without government subsidies, Generation co-founder Steven Schiebe said.

“The new zoning law lifted traditional design constraints on height, floor area ratio, density and more, which had stood in the way of helping address the city’s housing shortage in West Los Angeles,” Schiebe said.

ED1 streamlines approvals for 100 percent affordable developments by slashing city review timelines and allowing projects to skip public hearings. As of last summer, developers had submitted proposals for 35,000 ED1-backed units and secured approvals for approximately 29,000, CoStar reported.

“Market-rate housing [construction] has been essentially canceled at this point,” Chris Aiello, founding partner at Six Peak Capital, told CoStar. “Virtually no land makes sense from an investment perspective to build market rate.”

Los Angeles now ranks among the nation’s top markets building affordable housing, according to a RentCafe report earlier this year. About 21 percent of all apartments completed in the L.A. metro area between 2020 and 2024 were affordable units. The more than 9,400 units built represent a 79.5 percent increase compared to the previous five-year period between 2015 and 2019.

— Chris Malone Méndez