A single-family house that has stood on North Heliotrope Drive for more than a century is slated to come down to make way for four new townhomes in East Hollywood. The applicant behind the project wants to split the roughly 6,700-square-foot lot into four separate parcels, with one home built on each.
The proposed development, first reported by Urbanize LA, would replace the existing dwelling at 1155 N. Heliotrope Drive, which the outlet describes per the planning application as a more than century-old single-family home. The applicant, 1155 North Heliotrope Drive, LLC, is based in Irvine, and city records cited by Urbanize LA show the property last sold in 2020 for approximately $800,000.
Each of the four planned homes would be a three-story structure with three bedrooms, a roof deck and a two-car garage on the ground floor. Parsargad Design, LLC is the architect attached to the project, and plans show the homes arranged as a row of contemporary structures built around a shared common driveway, according to the same report.
Leaning on New State Streamlining Laws
The project is being pursued under provisions of SB 1123 and SB 684, state laws that Urbanize LA's report says have streamlined approval of townhome-style developments like this one. California's legislative record describes SB 684 as legislation covering “land use: streamlined approval processes: development projects of 10 or fewer residential units on urban lots under 5 acres,” according to the California Legislature's official bill text.
Los Angeles City Planning frames the related Starter Home Revitalization Act as an effort to expand homeownership options by making it easier to subdivide property, according to the city's planning department. Under the department's description, the law streamlines subdivision approval for projects that create up to 10 new parcels or dwelling units — a category the four-lot Heliotrope proposal would fall well within.
Part of a Busier Stretch Near the Metro Line
The Heliotrope site sits near Metro's Vermont/Santa Monica Station, an area that the same East Hollywood report notes has seen larger mixed-use and multifamily developments reshape the nearby stretches of Santa Monica and Vermont. One nearby example is the project at 1141 N. Vermont Avenue, just north of the station, where an approved plan calls for a seven-story building with 290 studio, one-, two-, and three-bedroom apartments, the outlet's coverage of that project notes. That development was entitled using the streamlining provisions of Executive Directive 1, per the same report.
Another nearby project, the Santa Monica & Vermont Apartments from Little Tokyo Service Center, brings 187 affordable units and ground-floor commercial space serving the community to the area around the Metro station, according to Little Tokyo Service Center. All of those units are designated for extremely low- and very low-income households, with at least half set aside as permanent supportive housing, the organization says, and the building includes on-site supportive services, community space, retail space prioritizing local businesses, and a federally qualified health center.
Together, the two projects illustrate the range of housing now converging on this corner of East Hollywood, from large-scale affordable and market-rate apartment buildings to smaller infill projects like the one proposed for Heliotrope Drive. The Heliotrope proposal remains a far smaller undertaking by comparison, swapping a single aging house for four individually owned homes rather than adding dozens or hundreds of rental units.
