Nearly a decade after the first blue-sky visions were floated, the dirt lot where Long Beach’s old City Hall once stood is suddenly back in play. Developers have revived a plan for twin eight-story apartment towers on the 4.6-acre site, this time squeezing in 729 apartments while sharply cutting retail space and moving parking above ground to keep the budget in check. The fresh filing hit City Hall this week and is headed to the Planning Commission on Thursday, marking the first real action on the property since demolition wrapped in 2022.
New design packs in more units, trims retail and parking
Under the revamped proposal, the two towers would hold 729 apartments overall, from 499-square-foot studios up to 1,211-square-foot townhomes, with just 2,650 square feet of retail space carved into the north building, according to the Long Beach Post. The developer has scaled back parking to 817 stalls from an earlier plan for 885 and is proposing 365 bike spaces. Average unit sizes were trimmed in the redesign, with studios shrinking by about 50 square feet and two-bedroom units cut by roughly 300 square feet.
Exterior finishes also got a value-engineering treatment. The latest plans strip down the look to a primarily stucco facade, with lobbies finished in porcelain tile and wood composite. The changes are pitched as cost-saving moves that still keep the project in the “nice enough to lease” category.
Project history and the long-empty site
The corner of Ocean Boulevard and Chestnut Avenue has technically been in motion for years, even if it has looked frozen in time. The parcel has been in escrow with the project company since 2016 and was cleared after demolition, according to City of Long Beach records. Those council documents trace the broader civic-center deal back to a 2015 public-private agreement with Plenary Properties that envisioned handing off the midblock lot for workforce housing.
By 2022, planning photos and press coverage were documenting crews finishing demolition and walking off, leaving behind a conspicuously empty patch of prime downtown real estate. The lot has sat unused since, a reminder of the complicated deal-making behind the civic-center overhaul while the development team reworked its plans.
Affordability trade-offs in the new plan
The latest filing sets aside 11 studios and 62 one-bedroom units as affordable and asks the city to stick with a 2016 agreement that would treat 10% of the homes as moderate-income, as reported by the Long Beach Post. That request sidesteps current local rules, which typically require projects of this scale to reserve 12% of units for low- or very-low-income households, a threshold this proposal does not hit.
City planners, for their part, have flagged a gap in moderate-income housing, noting the city is sitting at roughly 6.2% of its entitlement target. The developer’s paperwork argues that the project would help Long Beach inch closer to the share of moderate-income homes state housing officials expect the city to produce by 2029.
What happens next
The reworked application is slated for the Planning Commission agenda this Thursday, with all the supporting materials posted on the city’s planning portal. The city planning documents include fresh renderings, detailed unit counts, and notes from the developer explaining how the design tweaks are supposed to shore up financial viability.
If commissioners grant preliminary approval, the project will still need additional entitlements and environmental clearance before any shovels hit the ground. In the meantime, downtown residents and housing advocates are likely to focus on whether the bump in total homes outweighs the cuts to retail and the lack of deeper affordability, especially given that this parcel has long been billed as a centerpiece of the civic-center remake. The Planning Commission’s call this week will decide whether this incarnation of the plan finally becomes the long-promised residential anchor on the old City Hall site or just another chapter in its ongoing saga.
