Less than two months after a storm of unexpected builder’s remedy proposals shocked Santa Monica — and then much of California — WS Communities (WSC), the firm behind most of the projects, has filed its first full application.
The proposal is for a 10-story, 75-unit apartment building located at 1238 7th Street, in central Santa Monica near Christine Emerson Reed Park. The plans include 15 affordable units, per the 20 percent affordable requirement associated with builder’s remedy, the previously obscure legal provision that enables developers to bypass local zoning in cities that are failing to meet their state-mandated housing planning goals.
While WSC’s full application mostly hews to its earlier preliminary application, the full filing is significant because it further advances the firm’s plans and, especially, the implementation of builder’s remedy — a provision that stems from a 1990 state law but was largely unknown until more than a dozen applications in Santa Monica were revealed in October.
“Over the coming months they’ll all be in before the deadline,” said Scott Walter, the CEO of WSC, of the firm’s additional full project applications. “We’re working on all of them.”
The firm filed the application on Thursday, roughly four months before the deadline. Under SB 330, a pro-housing state law passed in 2019, developers are able to vest entitlement rights with only a preliminary project application and then file the full application within six months; this year the law emerged as a key factor in Southern California’s surprise surge in builder’s remedy applications, after a state agency affirmed in October that SB 330 also applies to the older provision.
“I went, Oh shit,” Dave Rand, a land use attorney who worked with WSC, said earlier this fall of the moment he received that notification from the state. “This is going to be a big deal.”
WSC, an affiliate of Neil Shekhter’s firm NMS Properties, filed a total of 14 preliminary builder’s remedy applications before Santa Monica regained state compliance on its Housing Element days after the projects were revealed in October. The firm later listed three sites, but plans to develop the remaining 11, Walter said.
On the 7th Street project WSC is working with L.A.-based Ottinger Architects; renderings show a modern-style, mostly gray and white building with a curved facade and rooftop terrace. The full application also plans for five more total units than the firm’s preliminary application.
“It’s pro forma,” Walter said of the filing. “The law is definitely on the side of affordable housing and getting housing approved.”
A representative for the City of Santa Monica did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Earlier this fall, after the revelation of the builder’s remedy applications set off a local frenzy — and prompted hundreds of furious comments and emails from residents — the city began exploring potential legal options to fight the projects, particularly a proposed 15-story, 2,000-unit building on Nebraska Avenue, although experts quickly dismissed one potential strategy floated by the city attorney.
Days later Phil Brock, a council member who was elected on a “slow growth” platform and vocally opposed some of the builder’s remedy projects, also said to The Real Deal that he was interested in compromise.
“Look, there are a lot of questions,” the council member, Phil Brock, said in early November. “Are you going to start a battle when maybe there’s no battle needed?”
He added then that it would be premature for the city to act until the developers actually filed the full applications.
The post WSC files first full builder’s remedy application in Santa Monica appeared first on The Real Deal Los Angeles.
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