I Mapped Every Apartment Start Within 10 Miles of Beverly Hills. Here’s What I Found.
Forget the giant LA housing pipeline. I wanted to see what is actually starting construction, where it is being built, and how much is market rate, affordable and ED1.
I keep hearing about Los Angeles having this massive housing pipeline.
Thousands of units approved. Thousands more proposed. ED1 projects everywhere.
But as an apartment owner, I kept thinking the same thing:
How much of this stuff is actually getting built?
An entitlement is not an apartment.
Even an approved project can sit for years.
So I stopped looking at the giant LA pipeline and started looking at housing starts within a 10 mile radius of Beverly Hills.
That gives me a good look at the markets I actually care about. West LA. Santa Monica. West Hollywood. Hollywood. Beverly Grove. Mid City. Koreatown. Culver City and parts of Central LA.
Then I looked at what actually broke ground.
About 6,500 units started
Our preliminary project data shows roughly 6,500 apartment units in projects that broke ground within the 10 mile area we are studying.
The current split is roughly:
4,300 market rate units
2,300 affordable units
And within the affordable number:
About 660 ED1 units
These numbers are still being checked against exact addresses and our final 10 mile boundary. But they’re already telling me something.
Market rate construction is drying up.
4,300 units and those have a 10-20% affordable component to it.
That leaves about 3,900 units that could take another 24 to 36 months to get to market.
That is about 100-200 new units being delivered within this 10 mile radius map.
West LA looks very different from Hollywood
This is where the map starts getting useful.
Our preliminary data shows roughly 750 units starting in West LA.
Most are market rate.
Santa Monica has roughly 540 units, also mostly market rate.
Move east and the mix starts changing.
Hollywood has a much larger affordable share in our current data.
Mid City and Beverly Grove show more affordable and ED1 activity.
Koreatown and Westlake have some of the largest overall construction activity in the entire 10 mile area.
This means that the prime areas will have very little inventory while Koreatown will keep getting hit with more units.
I don’t care about what is being reported as entitled.
An earlier analysis found roughly 5,500 market rate units entitled in Downtown LA, while fewer than 600 were breaking ground at the time.
You could look at the entitlement numbers and think 5,500 apartments are coming.
Then you look at what is actually starting construction and see a completely different picture.
That’s why I want to watch starts.
ED1 is big. But I want to see shovels.
ED1 may be one of the biggest changes happening in LA housing.
It has made it much easier to move 100 percent affordable projects through the approval process.
The City says nearly 47,000 affordable units have entered the ED1 pipeline.
That’s a huge number.
But when the City last reported construction, only about 6,000 units were underway.
I personally think ED1 was a mistake. The underwriting was completely wrong.
No one is paying $2200 for a 1 bedroom without parking in Mid City.
There are not enough vouchers.
I think these units sit empty unless they discount them by 30-50%.
In my opinion, I would not build an ED1 project unless its in a prime area and I still probably won't do it.
LA is still delivering a lot of apartments
Here’s where this gets interesting.
Colliers reported 23,752 multifamily units under construction across Greater Los Angeles at the end of Q2 2026.
Only 666 units broke ground during Q2.
The previous quarter had 4,599 units starting construction.
At the same time, Colliers counted 5,343 apartments delivered during the first half of 2026.
At first, those numbers seem strange.
A lot of apartments are opening.
But very few started in the latest quarter.
Here’s what I want to know as an owner
Say I own a 40 unit apartment building in West LA.
Telling me there are 135,000 units somewhere in the development pipeline doesn’t help me underwrite my building.
Tell me 700 apartments just started within a few miles of me, and now I’m listening.
I want to know:
Are they market rate?
Are they affordable?
Are they studios or two bedrooms?
What rents are they going to ask?
Do they have parking?
When are they opening?
That’s competition I can understand.
The map makes this simple
That’s why we’re building the map around Beverly Hills.
Not 300 little dots that nobody can understand.
I want one clean map.
10 miles around Beverly Hills.
Then show me:
TOTAL UNITS STARTED
MARKET RATE
AFFORDABLE
ED1
Then break it down by the places people actually know:
West LA
Santa Monica
West Hollywood
Hollywood
Beverly Grove and Mid City
Koreatown
Culver City
Downtown
Now I can actually see where supply is coming.
The number I’m watching next
I’m not saying LA has stopped building apartments.
It hasn’t. But it is dropping hard and anyone in their right mind would stop building and start buying below replacement cost unless they are big players that can build 150-250 unit projects at a very low cost and without a lot of leverage. That is my opinion based on some of the last few sales I have seen at below replacement cost.
And if more of the projects that do start are affordable and ED1, the competitive picture for existing market rate apartments could change even more.
That’s what I want Atlas Brief to keep tracking.
Not how many apartments somebody announced.
Not how many got approved.
Show me what started.
Show me where it is.
And show me what kind of housing they’re actually building.
That’s the map that matters.
Stay in the conversation
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Write to David Safai at David@AtlasBrief.La
Appeared in the Oct. 3, 2026 edition of The Tape.
