Woodland Hills Neighbors Clash With City Over 71-Unit Senior Facility Near Taft High

A four-bedroom house on Del Moreno Drive in Woodland Hills, sitting directly across from Taft High School, is on track to become a 71-unit senior living facility after the Los Angeles City Planning Commission approved most of the variances developer Akhilesh Jha sought to override local height, density and parking rules. The hearing drew furious pushback from neighbors who say the project will upend a residential block sitting inside an LAFD fire zone.

According to FOX 11 Los Angeles, Jha and his wife Janet Jha plan to convert the four-bedroom, three-bath house at 5353 North Del Moreno Drive into the 71-unit facility, which would include a cafeteria and a medical office. City planning documents reviewed for the August 27 commission meeting describe a 41,567-square-foot, three-story Residential Care Facility for the Elderly, with eight of the 71 rooms reserved for very low-income seniors, according to the City of Los Angeles Department of City Planning. Jha told the station the low-income units are what unlocks his path around the city's usual density limits, a strategy state law explicitly allows developers to use.

How a Single-Family Lot Became a Legal Battleground

The Del Moreno Drive site was originally zoned for single-family use, and city planners initially refused to even process a multi-unit application there. That refusal triggered a lawsuit: Jha and the advocacy group YIMBY Law filed a petition for writ of mandate against the city in November 2021 under case number 21STCP03883, according to the LA City Clerk. In January 2023, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge James C. Chalfant ruled against the city, ordering planners to evaluate the project under the higher multi-family density allowed by the General Plan's Limited Commercial designation rather than the site's single-family zoning code.

That designation permits up to one unit per 400 square feet of lot area on the 20,000-square-foot parcel. The ruling leaned on California's Housing Accountability Act, which the state legislature amended in 2018 to require cities to judge housing proposals against the maximum density in their own General Plans, even when local zoning codes say otherwise, per YIMBY Law's account of the statute. Two more state laws have since widened Jha's options: Assembly Bill 2694, signed in September 2024, extended density bonus law to cover licensed Residential Care Facilities for the Elderly, and Assembly Bill 2097, in effect since January 2023, bars agencies from imposing minimum parking requirements near major transit stops.

Neighbors Say the Project Will Gut the Block

City planning commissioners said at the hearing that state housing laws let developers who include low-income units bypass local parking, density and other zoning restrictions, a rationale that did little to calm the room. Woodland Hills neighbors told FOX 11 that Jha is using the law to destroy the neighborhood for profit, and residents vowed to keep fighting the project even after commissioners approved most of the requested variances.

The Del Moreno fight is not an isolated case for Jha. On November 6, 2025, the planning commission approved another of his proposals, a four-story, 40-unit eldercare facility at 13916 West Polk Street in Sylmar, also with zero required parking, after courts overturned the city's prior rejections, according to Urbanize LA. Jha, an immigrant from Bihar, India, holds a PhD in engineering from Virginia Tech and spent 20 years in the aerospace industry before turning to real estate development specifically to challenge restrictive local zoning using state housing statutes, according to YIMBY Law.

What Comes Next

Jha told FOX 11 he still faces at least a couple more years of hearings and permitting before the Del Moreno Drive project could break ground. The dispute lands amid a broader surge in fast-tracked senior and affordable housing across the San Fernando Valley; Mayor Karen Bass announced in July that the city's fast-tracked housing initiative had pushed the citywide affordable pipeline to nearly 47,000 units, citing major Woodland Hills senior projects including the 3,192-unit Viva L.A. development at Warner Center, as previously reported by Hoodline. For now, the house across from Taft High School still stands, but its fate rests on a permitting process residents say they intend to keep contesting at every step.