Presto on PCH: apartment developer plans to make trailer park disappear

Irvine-based Red Oak Investments’ 354-unit project would replace relic of post-war LA in Harbor City

Red Oak Investments' Alex Wong and A-1 Trailer Park (Google Maps, Red Oak)
Red Oak Investments' Alex Wong and A-1 Trailer Park (Google Maps, Red Oak)

Here’s one sign of a changing neighborhood.

An OC developer wants to build a 354-unit apartment complex on the site of a decades-old trailer park in Harbor City.

Irvine-based Red Oak Investments filed a project application with the City of Los Angeles Planning Department for the project on Thursday. Red Oak intends to demolish the site’s existing structures and put up a mixed-use building that includes 354 units and 1,500 square feet of commercial space. The building’s maximum height would be 80 feet, suggesting it could rise four stories.

The development is located at multiple addresses along the Pacific Coast Highway in Harbor City, a district of the City of Los Angeles neighboring its port complex at San Pedro.

The nearly three-acre site that the proposed complex would replace is the A-1 Trailer Park and was built in the 1940s, amid a housing shortage spurred by the return of millions of service personnel from World War II. It has spaces for 151 units of mobile homes, according to documents, and there is a retail store on site.

The park has been something of a community mainstay along a busy stretch of PCH.

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“At least some things have remained the same in the old neighborhood,” one commenter wrote on Google about the property.

According to a mobile home rental site, available units at the park go for $800 to $1600 per month, although its current occupancy status is unclear. A number listed for the park manager appeared disconnected.

“Rumor has it,” another commenter wrote online about a year ago, “that the park was sold to a developer.”

Red Oak did buy the site more than two years ago, paying $7.6 million, according to documents, which show the deal was made through two LLCs.

Red Oak is a commercial developer that works throughout L.A. County and Orange County. Its projects include a mixed-use conversion of a strip mall in Huntington Beach, a USC student housing development and a 300-unit, four-story apartment building in Little Tokyo.

The project applicant is Alex Wong, a principal at Red Oak. Wong did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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