A Valley Rising

Los Angeles opened a new frontier in the San Fernando Valley 13 years ago with the adoption of the Warner Center 2035 Specific Plan.

It promised to usher in the Valley’s greatest comeback story.

The 1.7-square-mile business district directly north of the Ventura Freeway had been stymied by the Valley’s slow-growth mindset in the 1980s, rattled by the Northridge Earthquake in 1994, and in the new millennium, saddled with a 34-acre dying mall.

Los Angeles Rams owner Stan Kroenke exuberantly demolished the defunct Promenade mall after acquiring it in 2022, a sign of progress toward Warner Center’s eventual revival. It cemented his place as the district’s biggest booster and landlord. In 2025, Kroenke unveiled Rams Village, a $10 billion vision for Warner Center’s commercial core that will include the Rams’ permanent headquarters and training facility, along with more than three million square feet of residential space and nearly 2 million square feet of hotel, office, retail and indoor entertainment venues.

Rams Village has reinvigorated investment in the future “downtown of the Valley.”

“The plan is to create the critical mass for a true work-live pedestrian-oriented downtown,” says Brad Rosenheim, an early architect of the Specific Plan and current land use consultant for The Kroenke Organization. “A lot of folks in the community really wanted to see an intensity of development in Warner Center with a specific requirement for high-rise residential. Then as you go along the perimeter, it gets scaled back.”

Planning officials are now reviewing several proposals that dwarf what’s been built to date in Warner Center, including Wellpointe’s 3,200-unit Viva L.A. senior housing project at 6400 Canoga Ave. and new mixed‑use proposals from Meta and Kaplan Multifamily.

This building boom will add towers reaching 42 stories to Warner Center’s skyline and make significant headway toward the city’s goal of roughly 26,000 housing units across the district by 2035, up from 6,200 units in 2008.

But for now, Warner Center is a literal field of dreams. Can Los Angeles pull all this off in the next nine years?

The 2013 Specific Plan allows for some 14 million square feet of new commercial development, but only 3.1 million square feet had been approved for construction permits at the end of the plan’s first 10 years, city planning officials reported. And for every housing unit completed, there’s another that failed to pencil out.

A dream deferred

The first 13 years of the plan have produced a patchwork of successes and failures that are on display just a block east of the future Rams Village.

Mixed‑use and luxury residential towers like Balaciano Group’s 245‑unit Q Variel at 6200 Variel Ave. and BCEG International Investment’s 274-unit Essence at 6041 Variel Ave. were among the first to sprout up in 2020.

But just 500 feet away lies a crumbling 1970s office park known as Variel Court, which remains in limbo after Eri Kroh’s Sandstone Properties defaulted on its $20 million loan tied to the property and handed it back to its lender, Brasa Capital Management. The proposed 395-unit multifamily project at 6330 Variel Ave. never broke ground.

Kroh did not respond to a request for comment.

“When you have investors, you have to adjust everything you do,” says Shawn Evenhaim, founder and chief executive of Calabasas‑based Balaciano. “If the numbers don’t work, then they won’t let you build. If they won’t finance it, you can’t do it. That’s why there are a few projects in Warner Center that went back to the bank.”

In fact, of the 2,500 units entitled in the first five years after the Specific Plan was adopted, 981 have since expired without being built, according to a recent city planning report.

The odds of failing to start construction after a project is entitled are high across Los Angeles, but Warner Center is especially notorious, according to Evenhaim.

And Balaciano isn’t immune either. One of the firm’s newest proposals, a 194-unit apartment building next to a 192,000-square-foot office tower at 21300 Califa St., is on hold after receiving entitlements. A spokesperson for the firm said it will reevaluate the project in a few years.

“It’s all in the financials,” Evenhaim says. “You can hardly build anything market rate today – not just in the Warner Center but all of Los Angeles.”

But Rosenheim, for his part, isn’t overly anxious.

“That’s the nature of real estate development,” Rosenheim says. “It’s a risky business.”

From a ranch to major development

Studio executive Harry Warner sold much of the family’s Warner Ranch land to master developer Kaiser Aetna in 1968 for $30 million. The joint venture spent the next 20 years building 4,300 residential units and a suburban office hub anchored by the Westfield Promenade mall and Kaiser Permanente Hospital. Steel-frame office towers soon followed, including the 1.9-million-square-foot Warner Center Plaza and Douglas Emmett’s Trillium office towers, completed in 1986.

The 1994 Northridge earthquake and an economic slowdown then stalled growth, and the Promenade fell into a long decline.

By the mid‑2000s, new multifamily projects raised alarms about traffic and congestion, prompting the city to convene a Citizen’s Advisory Committee in 2005 that spent years crafting a comprehensive strategy. The City Council adopted the resulting Warner Center 2035 Specific Plan in 2013, removing height and density caps to incentivize mixed-use housing development, parks and retail space clustered along “paseos.” The city’s new design standards aimed to break up the district’s superblocks and make it more walkable.

“It’s very developer‑friendly,” says broker Scott Romick of Lee & Associates, who has worked in Warner Center for two decades on landlord leasing and land sales. “They made it one of the largest employment areas in the Valley. The idea was to build about 20,000 units and make it pedestrian-friendly, so you can work and live in the same environment.”

Because much of the land was historically commercial or industrial, Warner Center also has fewer single‑family homeowners than other L.A. neighborhoods.

And that’s why “Warner Center has less NIMBYs,” according to Romick. “NIMBYs are everywhere. But there are less homeowners here.”

When one door closes…

Even still, there’s a daunting road ahead for Wellpointe, which unveiled its massive 3,200-unit Viva L.A. senior housing project at 6400 Canoga Ave. in July.

Before Wellpointe acquired the 4.7‑acre site in December, it had been slated for a 650‑unit, 35‑story market‑rate tower and a four‑story, 240‑key luxury hotel. But the original vision collapsed under rising costs and shifting capital markets.

Sandstone Properties paid $27.8 million for the lot in 2018, taking out a $16.8 million loan from Midland National Life Insurance Co. and later a $28 million loan from Parkview Financial in 2022. By mid‑2023, the project was under stress: contractors including John Labib Structural Engineers and EDG Interior Architecture Plus Design filed mechanics liens, and Sandstone defaulted on its loan from Parkview that October.

A representative for Parkview, an alternative lender specializing in construction loans, declined to comment.

Hard money lender Hankey Capital acquired the roughly $31.6 million in debt tied to the property in 2024, according to property records. Finally, Wellpointe bought the development site in December 2025 for about $25.5 million.

“Distress opens the door to success,” says George Kutnerian, Wellpointe co-founder and chief executive.

While Sandstone envisioned a luxury tower, Wellpointe saw a site for a 100 percent affordable high‑rise senior housing community. The company unveiled plans for Viva L.A., a $2 billion, 2.2 million‑square‑foot project featuring four towers ranging from 34 to 42 stories and 3,200 deed‑restricted affordable units for seniors. It will be the largest project yet to use Mayor Karen Bass’ Executive Directive 1, a fast‑track program for affordable housing approvals.

Kutnerian says Warner Center’s generous floor‑area ratio and the rare availability of a nearly five‑acre site made Viva L.A. possible.

“We’ve always done affordable without deed restricting,” he says. “Now we will do it as deed‑restricted.”

Wellpointe plans to finance the project with tax‑exempt private activity bonds and 4% low‑income housing tax credits, a common choice for L.A. housing developers in the era of Measure ULA.

“If you structure it right, the LIHTC makes a difference,” Lee & Associates’ Eugene Kim says. “These are not low-income. These are more 80% AMI. Depending on how it’s structured, it’s workforce housing.”

The reign of affordability

And Viva L.A. isn’t alone. Warner Center’s economics now favor affordable and mixed‑income projects over market-rate housing, Kim and Romick say.

“It’s shifted away from market-rate,” Romick says. “That’s what we’re really bullish on right now.”

Rising interest rates, a softening rental market and the city’s transfer tax, known as Measure ULA, have pushed market‑rate developers to pivot while others have fled Los Angeles altogether. Meanwhile, Warner Center’s density bonuses, tied to the percentage of affordable units in a project, give 100% affordable deals a leg up on the competition for land and construction financing.

“There’s a lot of people on the sidelines who would love to build but it’s very expensive in California,” Romick says.

Balaciano has so far been an exception to that trend. The developer previously evolved from building single‑family infill homes to multifamily infill as it became harder to make standalone houses pencil out in Los Angeles. Warner Center’s flexible height and density rules, along with its long‑term vision, made it an appealing place to scale up, and Balaciano was one of the first firms to swoop in after the Specific Plan was adopted.

Balaciano purchased 6200 Variel Ave. for $12 million in 2014 and completed its first Warner Center building, the 245-unit Q Variel, by 2020.

It followed with Q Topanga, a 347‑unit building at 6263 Topanga Canyon Blvd. that opened in 2021. This year, the firm completed Q De Soto, its largest Warner Center project yet, with 375 units, 24,500 square feet of retail and a 600‑car subterranean garage on De Soto Avenue and Erwin Street.

Amid this construction frenzy, Balaciano received a $136.5 million loan from Morgan Stanley to refinance Q Topanga and took out another $101.5 million construction loan from U.S. Bank and California Bank & Trust for Q De Soto in 2023.

Next in its pipeline is the Q Erwin, a 264-unit project that broke ground this year at 21050 Erwin St.

Romick, who has brokered several Warner Center land sales for Balaciano over the years, credits the firm’s success to staying true to the Specific Plan and keeping tight control over capital.

“They are local. They built to the spirit of the plan. No investors or partners,” says Romick. “They view each development as a long-term investment, not a construction investment.”

The L.A. Rams effect

No developer has more at stake in Warner Center today than Kroenke.

After acquiring the Promenade mall from Unibail‑Rodamco‑Westfield for about $150 million in 2022, he bought the 13‑story, 450,000‑square‑foot Anthem office tower across the street for roughly $175 million. The deal added another 31 acres to his Warner Center portfolio.

At the end of 2022, Kroenke bought The Village shopping center for $325 million, later renaming it Topanga Village – together creating an L‑shaped, roughly 100-acre footprint.

The Rams currently practice on-site in a temporary facility of modular trailers and grass fields.

Councilman Bob Blumenfield, who represents Warner Center, calls Rams Village a “game changer.” For now, though, the ambitious project has just begun working its way through city approvals.

“We knew we’d be sitting here now,” Hunter says. “You go through various iterations. This is standard city process.”

Still not quite walkable

Back in 2013, the Warner Center Specific Plan was “a little bit ahead of the times in terms of actually implementing the whole concept of live, work and play within a limited geographic area,” Rosenheim says. “The idea was to allow for that mix of uses that lets people live here and work here.”

As cranes prepare to rise over Warner Center, brokers and residents say the neighborhood is closer than ever to the “live, work, play” ideal planners sketched in 2013 – but not quite there yet.

The Village and Topanga Village already offer a dense concentration of restaurants, shops, and entertainment. New residential projects, including the Q communities and a wave of affordable developments such as the 316‑unit Elysian Housing’s The Green at 21155 Califa St., are bringing thousands of residents within walking distance of those amenities.

Still, the street grid is incomplete. Many blocks remain dominated by single‑story office buildings and surface parking lots, and some high‑profile sites are still in limbo.

“It’s not quite walkable yet, but more and more is getting built,” Romick says. “The bottom line is every community needs more housing. We are just scratching the surface of what is needed.”