LOS ANGELES--(BUSINESS WIRE)--AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF), on behalf of its Healthy Housing Foundation, today submitted a formal offer to purchase the stalled Sunset Gordon residential tower in Hollywood. The building currently is a 22-story, 299-unit Sunset Boulevard almost entirely market rate apartment complex that has been sitting vacant for three years after a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge retroactively invalidated the project’s construction permits. The project currently only has 15 units set aside for people earning below median income.
As part of AHF’s $50 million purchase offer, the Coalition to Preserve L.A. will drop a pending lawsuit against the City of Los Angeles and CIM, the project’s developer, over the number and type of affordable housing units planned in the existing project.
“We intend to turn the complex into over one-thousand smaller housing units,” said Michael Weinstein, president of AHF. “So, CIM can settle the Coalition’s lawsuit and add many more affordable units or they can sell the entire property to us so we may repurpose the complex for more—and more truly affordable—housing units.”
The project first stalled and the initial construction permits were revoked after it came to light that developer CIM razed a columned front entry section of the historic Spaghetti Factory building, which they were to save and incorporate into the new building.
The purchase offer comes amid exploding and intertwined homelessness and affordable housing crises in Los Angeles and as government officials prepare to release the official 2019 homeless count for Los Angeles on Tuesday, June 4th. The official 2018 homeless count in Los Angeles County was 53,195.
