975 S. Manhattan Place Refiles as a 147-Unit, All-Affordable Development in Koreatown

An application filed July 30 would replace a previously approved 120-unit building, which set aside 12 affordable apartments, with 147 units where every home except the manager's unit is income-restricted. The seven-story project sits on a vacant Koreatown lot that already survived two separate CEQA appeals.

A vacant lot just northwest of Olympic Boulevard and Western Avenue has been approved for housing twice, appealed twice, and built zero times. On July 30, 2026, a new application landed with Los Angeles City Planning that changes what the site is supposed to become.

The plans describe a 107,482 square foot, seven-story building standing 95 feet 9 inches tall, with 147 apartments at 975-987 S. Manhattan Place. All but one are income-restricted: 116 Low Income units, 30 Moderate Income units, and a single market-rate manager's unit. DFH Architects is the designer, the same firm behind the earlier version.

The version approved in 2022 was a 120-unit building with 12 apartments reserved for extremely low-income households. The 2026 filing keeps the seven stories and adds 27 homes, then restricts 146 of them.

What Changed on the Site

The earlier approval ran through Transit Oriented Communities, the incentive program that trades increased floor area and reduced yards for a slice of affordable units. The new filing runs through the Affordable Housing Incentive Program instead, which is what a 100 percent affordable project qualifies for. The application is flagged for Housing Element Streamlining.

Under AHIP the project is entitled to five incentives and is requesting four, including reduced side and rear yards. The Findings note the applicant is asking for seven-foot side yards where code requires ten, and a rear yard of 13 feet 4 inches where code requires 19, on the argument that full setbacks would cut unit count and square footage and raise the cost per affordable home.

The unit mix grew up. The 2022 building was studios, one-bedrooms, and two-bedrooms. The 2026 building has no studios at all: 73 one-bedrooms, 51 two-bedrooms, and 23 three-bedrooms. Family-sized affordable apartments are among the scarcest housing types in Los Angeles, and here they are 15.6 percent of the building.

Parking moved the other direction. The 2022 version carried 127 stalls at grade and across two subterranean levels. The new plans provide 99 spaces where code would require 257, using AB 2097, the state law barring parking minimums near major transit. The project also provides 74 long-term and ten short-term bicycle spaces.

The site sits across the R4-1 and C2-1 zones on a 28,158 square foot lot in the Wilshire Community Plan area, in the Country Club Heights tract. The owner of record listed on the plans is Korea Town LP at 3470 Wilshire Boulevard, the address Jamison Services has long operated from. Jamison is the firm that entitled the 2022 version after buying the site from Bastion Development Corporation.

Why It Matters

This lot has been a case study in how long the approved-but-unbuilt pipeline can run. Bastion first proposed a pair of seven-story buildings here called The Heights. Jamison bought in, upsized, and won entitlements in 2022. The Coalition for Equitable Westlake MacArthur Park appealed to the City Planning Commission demanding a full environmental impact report, and lost. SAFER, an affiliate of Laborers International Union of North America Local 270, appealed to the City Council arguing the site might hold endangered species and toxic substances, and lost. Staff rejected both for lack of evidence.

Construction on the 2022 approval was projected to run 34 months beginning in early 2023. It is 2026 and the site is still listed as vacant on the application's own existing conditions page.

What makes this filing worth watching is not the height or the massing, which barely moved. It is the trade. A developer is proposing to take a building that would have delivered 12 affordable apartments and turn it into one that delivers 146, in exchange for the deeper incentives that only a fully affordable project unlocks. Whether that pencils, and whether it finally gets built, is the question this corner of Koreatown has been asking for eight years.

Watch the three-bedroom count, not the unit count. Twenty-three family-sized apartments in a 100 percent affordable building is the rarest thing in this filing, and the number most likely to shrink if the financing gets tight. The rendering everyone has seen is the older, smaller scheme. The elevations in the July filing are the building actually on the table now.

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