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SANTA
MONICA
VERMONT
TOD
Los Angeles, CA
Client: Little Tokyo Service Center
Proving social housing can be vibrant, welcoming, and deeply affordable, Santa Monica and Vermont Apartments provide a neighborly and spirited environment for low-income residents of East Hollywood. A network of terraced open spaces provides an armature of community life for 187 units of affordable and supportive housing: a transit plaza wrapped with retail and seating, a ground floor ‘resi-alley’ complete with kitchen and community gardens, and children’s play and look out terraces on the upper levels. The organization fosters a sense of neighborliness, elevates transit experience and ridership, and increases safety.
The Realization of Alliance and Vision
Synonymous with both the transit station and apartment complex, SMV Apartments serves as an integrated community hub offering deeply affordable living and an improved transit experience. Non-profit developer, Little Tokyo Service Center, teamed with LA Metro to turn a barren transit plaza of 20 years into a meaningful community redevelopment project with half the units designated as permeate supportive housing.
DISTINCTLY SOCAL
Working closely with the architect’s playful yet modest palette—CMU block, cast-in place concrete, and corrugated metal screens—the landscape softens the living experience with sculptural plantings evoking an authentic sense of place set within a Southern California urban setting: utility, vibrancy, and open air.
