New Housing Use for Lincoln Heights Building
A former paint warehouse in the Lincoln Heights district of Los Angeles is about to get a $20-million makeover. And not just new paint.
Next year, the 78-year-old W.P. Fuller Paint Co. building will be converted into condominiums as the trend of transforming obsolete or aging commercial buildings into housing moves beyond downtown.
The four-story building, near the Los Angeles River, will be turned into 105 units that developer Ryan Lehman described as “workforce housing” intended for people with moderate incomes. Most units probably will be priced in the low to mid-$200,000 range, he said, and 79 of them will be reserved for buyers who qualify for city and state housing subsidies.
Lehman’s nonprofit Los Angeles development firm, Livable Places Inc., bought the building at 238 N. San Fernando Road for $4.4 million from Vin Sanh Properties. Vin Sanh is an importer of Southeast Asian food products that has been using the building as a warehouse but wants to move to a more modern facility, said Allan Maxwell of GVA Daum, a real estate brokerage that represented both parties in the transaction.
The 131,000-square-foot property was never officially on the market, Maxwell said. Developers made an offer on the building after the city expanded its “adaptive reuse” ordinance this year to include older neighborhoods such as Lincoln Heights, Mid-Wilshire and Hollywood. The ordinance was created in 1999 to streamline the conversion of older, vacant commercial buildings into residential units by relaxing building requirements. The ordinance is credited with reviving the residential movement downtown.
The makeover of the Fuller building will include cutting a light well in the middle from the roof to the basement, said Santa Monica architect Larry Scarpa of Pugh & Scarpa. His design calls for adding a fifth story with 15 units plus an additional 16 units and a 150-stall parking structure that will be built adjacent to the existing building.
There also will be 11,000 square feet of office space and a cafe. The ornamental concrete facade on San Fernando Road will be preserved and the lobby will be restored.
Scarpa, who is a board member of Livable Places, said the developer, which specializes in creating affordable housing near transportation hubs, sees great potential in Lincoln Heights.
Downtown Los Angeles, where 16 aging commercial buildings are currently being converted to 1,800 units of housing, may be saturated with residential development for the time being, he said. Several more downtown projects have been completed, approved or proposed.
Fuller Lofts, as the property will be known, is about a 10-minute walk from a Gold Line rail stop at Avenue 26, Lehman said.
Livable Places also is a partner in a proposed 151-unit condominium and retail project adjacent to that station on a 7-acre site formerly occupied by Bassett Furniture Co.
Construction on Fuller Lofts is slated to begin in July and be completed by September 2005.
