Renderings courtesy of Gensler

For more than 40 years, the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health and the Workforce Development, Aging, and Community Services have aided L.A. residents in need by offering assistance with employment placement, adult protective services, elderly care, human resource development, and more. But the departments’ long-standing headquarters in the city’s Koreatown neighborhood that has served so many community members was in dire need of a face-lift.

The county put out a request for proposal for a new headquarters, looking for a plan that would give the blighted office building a quick, cost-effective revamp. The winning idea from Dallas-based Trammell Crow Co. not only provides the government entities with a new building, but also turns the three-site city block into a hub for transit, community services, retail offerings, and affordable housing to help address a number of needs for the entities' clientele and the community as a whole.

“This development is the anchor project on a very prominent corridor in Koreatown and is providing [all of these elements] within footsteps of transit, which will serve the community extremely well,” says Greg Ames, managing director with Trammell Crow’s SoCal–Los Angeles Business Unit.

Renderings courtesy of Gensler

Easy as 1, 2, 3
The project—slated to break ground at the end of summer—is broken down into three sites. First, Trammell Crow will build a new 21-story, 468,000-square-foot headquarters for the county's social service agencies on Site 1. Anticipated to achieve LEED Silver certification, the building will include 7,500 square feet of ground-floor retail, fitness facilities, an outdoor terrace, and large indoor-outdoor conference spaces.

Once the new headquarters is complete, the two agencies will relocate from the existing 12-story office building on Site 2. Trammell Crow’s subsidiary, High Street Residential, will then adapt that space into 172 market-rate residential units; it will also feature 4,700 square feet of ground-floor retail space.

In the third and final phase, Los Angeles–based Meta Housing Corp. will develop 72 100% affordable senior housing units across the street from the other two developments. The third site will also include a 13,000-square-foot community center that will be operated by the YMCA.

Renderings courtesy of Gensler

Smart Strategies
The project’s Koreatown location, within one block of the Metro Red and Purple subway lines, will make it easy for clients to access the services they need via public transportation, says Ames.

“We are focusing on transit-oriented, mixed-use development because we really think that at a macro level, that’s what the Los Angeles area needs most right now,” he says. “The more development we can put close to transit here the better, because it gives us an opportunity to fight L.A.’s traffic problem.”

Tackling so many aspects in one project may sound complicated, but Ames says that what initially started out as a challenge turned out to be what brought the project to fruition in the most timely and cost-effective way.

“Our biggest challenge was finding a land-use strategy that mitigated entitlement risk. Entitlements in L.A. are notoriously problematic and tend to obstruct development,” he explains. “The hallmark of our plan was to have an easy entitlement process where the county was able to use its own powers and authority to entitle its office building.”

The total cost of the project is unavailable, though Ames adds that the affordable senior housing portion of the project was “deemed as a county critical mission element,” and the market-rate housing building was designed to fit within L.A.’s adaptive reuse ordinance, which would make it a by-right project and remove entitlements risk from that phase.

“All of those solutions are what made each piece and the project as a whole feasible,” he says.

For a look at other standout mixed-use communities, read more.