Elat Properties Pitches Affordable Housing in Mid-City

A group of bungalows in Mid-City is slated for demolition and replacement with a multifamily residential building.

Mansfield Developments, an affiliate of Elat Properties, filed an application with the Los Angeles Department of City Planning to erect a five-story building with 81 one- and two-bedroom apartments at 1418 South Mansfield Avenue, Urbanize Los Angeles reported. Aviel Golbari of office landlord Elat Properties is listed as the project applicant.

All of the apartments at the site, except for one, would be designated for rent by low- and moderate-income households, according to documents filed with the city cited by Urbanize. One market-rate unit would presumably be set aside as a manager’s unit. In pitching a 100 percent affordable development, the applicant would be able to benefit from Executive Directive 1, which speeds approvals for such projects through the bureaucratic pipeline and allows developers to bypass City Council votes and the public hearings process.

The development would become the latest income-restricted residences in the area. The property at 5050 Pico Boulevard was recently purchased and converted to affordable housing, according to Urbanize.

Developers are increasingly opting to build affordable housing, rather than market-rate, in Los Angeles thanks to city laws incentivizing income-restricted development, which could help offset rising construction costs. The enacting of Executive Directive 1 in late 2022 has helped spur more interest in affordable housing construction. Since ED1’s implementation, developers have submitted proposals for more than 40,000 units as of last fall, far outdoing the number of affordable housing submissions from 2020 to 2022 and the 17,556 total housing units approved in L.A. in the last fiscal year.

Los Angeles ranks among the top cities in the country building affordable housing, with nearly a quarter of new units built between 2020 and 2024 being income-restricted residences, according to a recent RentCafe report.

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