A developer wants to demolish four existing homes on a Kingsley Drive lot in East Hollywood to make way for a five-story building with 76 apartments, and the plans call for nearly tripling the site's allowed height limit to make it happen. Property owner Shahar Gil is seeking city approval for the project at 1058 N. Kingsley Drive, which would rise to nearly 80 feet with no on-site parking.
According to Urbanize LA, the property last sold in 2022 for $1.6 million and is now slated to be cleared for the new complex. Architecture firm Emilson, Inc. is attached to the project, according to the filing, and all but one of the 76 apartments would be reserved as affordable units, with the remaining unit set aside as a mandatory manager's apartment. The plans, filed with the Los Angeles Department of City Planning, describe a building composed of prefabricated modular units topped with a rooftop amenity deck.
A 164% Height Increase Under City Rules
City filings reviewed by the Los Angeles City Planning Department show Gil is requesting what's known as an off-menu incentive to boost the building's height by 164%, from a base limit of 30 feet up to 79.07 feet. That kind of dramatic height allowance is available to developers building 100% affordable projects under the city's density bonus rules. The application also seeks on-menu setback reductions of 29% for side yards, shrinking them to 6 feet 5 inches from the standard 9 feet, and 19% for rear yards, down to 12 feet 3 inches from 15 feet, along with modified open space calculations tied to landscape design requirements.
The application for the Kingsley Drive site was formally submitted on August 6, then assigned case number EAR-2026-4091-AH-HCA under staff planner Jane Choi the following day, per city planning department records. George Khodaverdian of Emilson, Inc. is listed as the developer's official representative managing the entitlement filings with city staff.
Built on a Program Barely a Year Old
The entitlements rely on the Affordable Housing Incentive Program, part of the city's Citywide Housing Incentive Program ordinance that the Los Angeles City Council passed in February 2025 and which took effect February 11 of that year. Affordable units created under the program come with steep strings attached: they must be secured by deed restrictions requiring 99-year affordability covenants, according to the Los Angeles City Planning Department, a measure designed to prevent the city's affordable housing stock from evaporating after a few decades.
The program has proven popular with developers citywide. In its first year of operation through early 2026, CHIP spurred proposals for roughly 28,500 housing units across 242 development filings, with 38% designated as covenanted affordable units, according to DTLA Weekly, which reported that Mayor Karen Bass highlighted those figures during a 2026 progress report.
Part of a Growing East Hollywood Cluster
The Kingsley Drive site sits within Council District 13, represented by Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez, who won election in 2022 and campaigned for reelection this year on a platform of expanding affordable housing and strengthening tenant displacement protections, per Patch. Soto-Martínez represents both East Hollywood and Hollywood.
The proposal joins a wave of similar projects reshaping the neighborhood. Just blocks away, Metro and the Little Tokyo Service Center opened the 185-unit Santa Monica Vermont Apartments in April, located directly next to the Vermont/Santa Monica B Line station. Around the same time, another Los Angeles developer used the identical AHIP ordinance to propose 114 affordable homes on a Westlake parking lot near MacArthur Park, showing developers across the city are turning to the same municipal code pathway to squeeze high-density affordable housing onto small or underused parcels.
Several questions remain unanswered in the current filing, including the exact income tiers the 75 restricted units will target, a timeline for the modular construction, and whether residents currently living in the four homes on the lot would qualify for relocation benefits under the city's Resident Protections Ordinance. How neighbors will react to an 80-foot building with no on-site parking also remains to be seen as the case moves through city review.
