Santa Monica Wants to Build Twelve Stories Out of Wood

Plans filed with Santa Monica planning call for a twelve-story residential building at 1517 15th Street, a short walk from the 17th Street/SMC station on the E Line. Thirty-two one- and two-bedroom units. One hundred thirty-eight feet tall. Six units designated affordable. Effectively no required parking, because of where the lot sits relative to transit. If it gets built it would be among the taller residential buildings in the city, and the height is not the part I keep thinking about. The structure is. The drawings show a single-story concrete podium carrying eleven floors of mass timber.

Mass timber is not framing lumber. It is engineered panel and beam — cross-laminated timber floor plates, glulam columns — milled off site to tight tolerance and delivered on a truck ready to set. A crew erects a floor plate in days instead of the pour-and-cure cycle concrete demands. The site stays dry. There is no rebar yard, no pump truck idling on 15th Street for a week at a stretch, and a fraction of the deliveries. Anyone who has lived across from a concrete high-rise going up understands exactly why that matters.

Then there is what it looks like. I spent years with The Peninsula Hotel Group and then JANUS et Cie before real estate, and the durable lesson from that world is that the best material is the one you do not have to cover up. Mass timber is structure and finish in the same piece. Exposed panel ceilings, visible columns, warmth in a unit type that usually reads cold and gray. Whether this particular building gets approved is a separate question and not one I am going to handicap. But the method is arriving in this city, and the first buyers who live under an exposed timber ceiling are going to like it more than they expect to.

Meanwhile, Brentwood broke ground. This week crews started at 11905 Wilshire — eighty-one studio, one- and two-bedroom apartments with ground-floor retail and restaurant space, a gym, a plaza and outdoor decks. Two projects, two neighborhoods, one direction. The Westside is building up along its corridors and its rail line. Slowly, and with an argument over every one of them, but it is happening.

Here is the part that matters if you are buying. Construction next door is a diligence item and almost nobody checks it. Before you write an offer, pull the planning file on the parcels around the house. It is public. What you are looking for is not whether something has been proposed — something is always proposed — but where it sits in the process. An entitlement application is years away. An issued building permit is next spring. And know that the ugliest phase comes first: shoring, excavation, export. That is six months of trucks and steel plates in the street. Framing is comparatively quiet. If you are buying near an active site, ask what phase it is in, not just what is coming.

If you are selling near one, get ahead of it. Buyers will find the crane. What you do not want is for them to find it themselves the morning of the inspection and start quietly recalculating everything else you told them. Say it first, give them the real timeline, and let them price it honestly. A known nuisance with an end date is a discount. An unknown one is a walk.

The market read is short this week, and it is the same read as August. Buyers still have room to think. Well-prepared houses are trading and everything else is sitting. I would rather tell you that plainly than manufacture a new headline out of numbers that have not moved.

While you are out. Tenderfest returns September 19, noon to ten, at the Wallis Annenberg Center in Beverly Hills — Petit Trois and Jitlada making chicken tenders, Nancy Silverton judging, which is a sentence I did not expect to write. Louma Bakery officially opened on Wilshire on September 1. And Layla Bagels is now open in Brentwood, so plan your Saturday accordingly.

Construction background. Market data. No sugarcoating.

Thinking about buying or selling on the Westside? Let’s talk.