‘A Very, Very Sad Day’: West Hollywood Planning Commission Approves Hayworth Project Over Affordability Objections

The West Hollywood Planning Commission approved a six-story, 12-unit apartment building at 946-948 Hayworth Avenue Thursday night. The vote was 5-2. In what has become a norm of these proceedings: a contentious vote that left many wondering why even have a vote. One thing is certain, this commission is having a bit of an existential crisis: what is its purpose anymore? To rubber-stamp what Sacramento dictates? To go through the motions of local democracy while state law quietly hollows it out from the inside? To some, the Hayworth Avenue project laid bare once again that the votes may be counted, but they no longer count.

Before that vote, a resident walked into the meeting with the project’s own blueprints and asked a question nobody on the dais could fully answer. In fact, it took three hours to not answer it.

“It is a blatant slap in the face to the state law. It is in no way achieving the intent of the law.”

That was Commissioner Lynn Hoopingarner, and she wasn’t talking about the project in the abstract. She was talking about six storage rooms on the building’s top two floors, rooms with balconies, rooms with views, rooms that in an earlier set of the developer’s own drawings had bathrooms and bedrooms and kitchens in the same footprint. Rooms that, under current state law, could one day be converted into full dwelling units without the City of West Hollywood being able to demand a single one of them be affordable.

She voted no. A couple of others who voted yes weren’t thrilled about it either.

The Building 

The site at 946-948 Hayworth Avenue is a narrow lot, 45 feet wide and 6,821 square feet total, on the east side of Hayworth just south of Romaine Street. Directly across the street is Laurel Cinematic Arts Creative Tech Magnet School. Two hundred and eighty K-8 students. The lot sits in R3C zoning, medium density residential, and currently has three small buildings on it, the oldest from 1922, with four rent-stabilized units total.

The developer, Blackacre I LLC, wants to replace all of it with a six-story, 23,577-square-foot building. Twelve units. Twenty-four bedrooms. A rooftop deck. One level of subterranean parking with just three spaces.

To get there, the project leans on California’s State Density Bonus Law, specifically Assembly Bill 1287, which allows a 100 percent density bonus when a developer deed-restricts one very low-income unit and one moderate-income unit. Without the bonus the lot supports six units. With it, 12. In exchange for those two affordable units, the City is required under state law to grant the density bonus and, critically, cannot deny waivers of development standards that would physically prevent the project from being built at that density.

That’s how a 45-foot-wide lot in a four-story zone ends up with a six-story building. State law says it has to.

Staff reviewed the project and recommended approval. The Housing Accountability Act sets a high bar for denial. To push back, the City has to find a specific, quantifiable adverse impact on public health or safety. Staff found neither. Twelve waivers and two concessions later, the project was before the commission Thursday night.

What it wasn’t ready for was Anita Goswami.

What the Plans Showed 

Goswami, a West Hollywood resident, came to the meeting having gone through the full project plan set, and what she found was a discrepancy that the Design Review Subcommittee had actually flagged back in December and that had landed on page 7 of the Staff report and apparently gone no further.

The landscape drawings of the submittal package, showed five residential units on each of the building’s top two floors. The architectural floor plans showed two residential units on each of those same floors. Three spaces on each level, labeled 601, 602, and 603, were designated storage. Those storage rooms have balconies. They have fifth and sixth floor views. In the landscape plan version, the same footprint showed bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens and living areas.

Goswami was not arguing the building secretly has 15 or 18 units today. She was asking what those rooms were really designed to become, and whether the City was about to hand a developer the height and density approvals it needed to build them while leaving the door open to convert them later without any affordability requirement attached.

It was a fair question. Nobody gave her a straight answer. Because they couldn’t.

The Legal Trap

Commissioner Hoopingarner took Goswami’s question into deliberations and pushed it as far as the law would let her, which turned out to be not far at all.

Her line of questioning with City legal counsel Isaac Rosen was classic Hoopingarner — methodical. She wanted to know whether the commission could condition the approval to require affordable housing in the event those storage rooms are converted to dwelling units. Rosen said no, there is no mechanism to prevent it.

Hoopingarner sat with that for a moment and then laid out what it actually meant. The project as approved sits at roughly 16 percent affordable, two deed-restricted units out of 12. If those six storage rooms convert to dwelling units under state law, which Rosen had just confirmed the City couldn’t stop or condition, the affordable percentage drops toward 13. West Hollywood has a stated goal of 20 percent affordable housing in new development. “We have a 20 percent affordable housing standard that has never, not once, been achieved since the state took over,” she said. “And now we’re approving something that starts at 16 and could go lower.”

She pressed City Associate Planner Kasey Conley on the question directly. Conley said the storage rooms would need to be built and inspected as storage at certificate of occupancy, not as habitable units. Then Hoopingarner asked the million dollar question. “So they can’t have any stubouts for plumbing?” she asked. Conley’s answer: there’s nothing in the ordinance that dictates where plumbing can go. Last time we checked, a storage room with plumbing stubouts is not really a storage room. It’s not rocket science to see what’s going on here. After all, it’s in the plans. But, the law is the law and Staff and the commission can only address the resolution and plans right in front of them. Hall of mirrors be damned. 

Three Parking Spaces. Twenty-Four Bedrooms. Nineteen Spots on the Street.

Set aside the storage question for a moment and look at what this project is actually asking of the neighborhood around it.

Three parking spaces. That’s what a 24-bedroom building on Hayworth Avenue will have when it opens. The project qualifies for reduced parking under AB 2097 because it sits within a half mile of a major transit stop at Fairfax and Santa Monica Boulevard. That drops the minimum parking requirement from 24 spaces to zero. The developer is providing three, voluntarily, because the subterranean garage can’t fit more without a full reconfiguration that would cost units.

The applicant also asked for a concession allowing future tenants to apply for overnight parking permits in the surrounding permit parking district. West Hollywood has a standing policy prohibiting residents of newly built multi-family buildings from getting those permits. The policy exists precisely to prevent developers from underproviding parking and then offloading the overflow onto neighborhood streets. The applicant argued that requiring additional subterranean parking would increase construction costs enough to threaten the affordable units. More parking, less affordable housing. The commission granted the concession.

What that means in practice is this. Hayworth Avenue in that stretch already has 19 on-street parking spaces. School parking restrictions run 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekdays, which compresses available street parking during hours that overlap with morning drop-offs, school pickups, and the beginning of the evening when people are getting home from work. A building with 24 bedrooms and three garage spaces, whose residents are now permitted to apply for overnight street permits, is going to add real pressure to 19 spots that are already contested.

Resident David Hallstetter raised it during public comment. He didn’t need a traffic study to explain it. Anyone who has tried to park on that block on a weekday afternoon already understands the math. Commissioners and commenters both talked about driving for 90 min to an hour looking for parking in some neighborhoods. Hayworth is sure to be no different. 

The harder question is what this building asks of the families the City says it wants to attract. West Hollywood has spent years talking about family-friendly housing, about keeping middle-income residents in a City where rents have made it harder and harder to stay. A two-bedroom unit in a building with three parking spaces, on a street where overnight permits are now in play for a building full of new tenants, is a real ask. Families with kids enrolled at a nearby school, families with two cars, families who work shifts that don’t align with transit schedules, they’re doing math that the commission didn’t fully reckon with Thursday night. 

Commissioner Andrew Solomon pushed back on the parking concession from a different angle. He argued that access to public street parking isn’t the same category of development standard as a setback or a height limit, and that treating it as one creates an inequitable result. Public streets are public assets. Restricting access to them, he said, isn’t a legitimate development standard under Title 19 to begin with. He voted yes on the project but made clear he thought the concession itself was on shaky legal ground.

The Vote

Commissioner Rogerio Carvalheiro voted no alongside Hoopingarner. He said he had genuine appreciation for the design work but he couldn’t make the findings. The building was too much for the lot. He put it simply. He was trying, he said, to put the glass slipper on the wrong person.

The other five voted yes, some with versions of reluctance attached.

Vice Chair Stacey Jones was the most direct about what she was actually doing when she cast her vote. She said she has a lot of feelings about state housing law and what it has done to local discretion over decisions like this one. Then she said those feelings don’t get a vote. The law does. She knew the room didn’t want to hear that. She said she didn’t really like saying it.

Chair David Gregoire said he wasn’t going to vote no just to be the hero and push the decision to the City Council on appeal. In his reading of the law, approval was compelled. He voted yes without enthusiasm and said so.

Commissioner Jesi Harris cited housing supply data, rents in WeHo have dropped between 1.8 and 2.9 percent year over year in part because inventory has increased, and said she supported the project on balance while wishing the approval included stronger parking demand management, shared vehicle programs, transit passes for tenants, more bicycle parking.

Commissioner Mark Edwards said he was comfortable making the required findings despite his reservations about the building’s size. He acknowledged the tension between minimal parking and the City’s climate and transportation commitments but said the variables the commission was working within were created by state law, not by anything the commission could change.

Solomon voted yes and meant it in a way the others didn’t quite. He has made the filtering argument at this commission before and made it again Thursday. Luxury housing today becomes middle-income housing in a generation. The market does that work over time. He voted yes because he believes it, not because the law left him no other option.

What Comes Next

The project approval carries a 10-day appeal window. Any party can file with the City Clerk, which would send the decision to the City Council.

Whether anyone does is one open question. The storage rooms are the other, and that one doesn’t have an appeal window. What Thursday’s meeting made clear is that under the current legal framework, West Hollywood may not have a mechanism to answer it even if it wanted to.

Hoopingarner summed it up pretty plainly. The commission was being asked to approve a project that started below the City’s own affordability standard and could go lower. The law said approve it anyway. “Here we are looking at a project that is asking us to bend the state law into a pretzel. To facilitate every exception possible, every loophole possible to not build affordable housing. And that is a very, very sad day.”

The Planning Commission has been wrestling with its diminishing role in housing decisions for sometime now. This project is just the latest example of why that frustration isn’t going away, and why the question raised at the top of nearly every planning meeting now hangs over this commission like a dark cloud: what exactly are we here to do? They have the votes, but they don’t seem to count anymore. 

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