A $435M Wellness Campus in South LA, a Tower Crane Rising Near the Beverly Center, and BIG Architects' Arts District Masterpiece Finally Moves to Construction

There are weeks where this market hands you three stories that each deserve their own headline—and then dares you to weave them into one. This is that week. We're talking about a landmark bioscience and affordable housing campus that just cleared LA County's highest approval hurdle, a tower crane piercing the skyline just south of the Beverly Center signaling one of the most significant Westside mixed-use deliveries of the decade, and a BIG Architects mega-complex in the Arts District that spent nine years in the pipeline and is finally—finally—moving toward construction. Los Angeles is not building incrementally right now. It is building boldly.

Let's start where the civic significance is undeniable. On July 20th, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors gave final approval to the CDU Wellness & Education Campus—a $435 million project from Century Housing and Charles R. Drew University that is unlike anything currently in the pipeline for South LA. When fully built out, this campus in Willowbrook will deliver 500 affordable housing units across three populations—250 for families, 200 for students, and 50 for faculty and workforce—alongside more than 121,000 square feet of offices, laboratories, and bioscience research space, a gymnasium, an indoor swimming pool, a multipurpose athletic field, a 700-space parking structure, and a central campus promenade designed to connect the development to the surrounding community. This is not a housing project with amenities. This is a civic ecosystem—one that combines affordable housing, biomedical employment, and educational density on publicly-owned land adjacent to the Metro Willowbrook/Rosa Parks station. For investors watching where LA County is placing its long-term infrastructure bets, Willowbrook represents the kind of convergence that reprices surrounding neighborhoods over a seven-to-ten year horizon. South LA has been underinvested for generations. Projects of this ambition are how that changes.

A few miles west and the story shifts to a very different kind of delivery—but one that carries its own outsized market signal. A tower crane now stands high just south of the Beverly Center, where Après Beverly Grove is rising at 400 S. San Vicente Boulevard. Developed by The Abraham Companies and designed by Steinberg Hart with Rodrigo Vargas Design, this eight-story mixed-use building will deliver 124 apartments—including five penthouse units—atop 11,600 square feet of commercial space, with 6,200 square feet of amenities including a pool deck and spa, a resident lounge, and a fitness center. Completion is targeted for mid-2027. Let me put that supply figure in context: 124 units landing in a submarket that is walkable to Cedars-Sinai, the Beverly Center, and the Robertson Boulevard retail corridor—one of the most structurally supply-constrained markets in all of Los Angeles—will be absorbed with the kind of velocity that keeps rents elevated and stabilized nearby assets performing. For investors evaluating Beverly Grove acquisitions today, Après is your 2027 competitive context. And it's not a threatening one.

And then there's the project I've been waiting years to write about in this context. BIG's 670 Mesquit—Bjarke Ingels Group's long-anticipated Arts District mega-complex—was approved by the Los Angeles City Council in July 2025 and is now actively moving toward construction phases. Nearly nine years after the original proposal, this project is finally becoming real: 895 residential units, 676,000 square feet of office space, a 271-room hotel, a school, retail, restaurant space, a gym, a gallery, and a grocery store or farmers market. The defining architectural gesture—a park built above an existing rail line to bridge the gap between the LA River and the Arts District—creates a new public amenity that directly connects what has historically been the most underutilized industrial edge of Downtown LA to one of its most culturally vital neighborhoods. And the sequencing matters enormously here. 670 Mesquit is moving to construction in the same window as the $2 billion Fourth & Central approval to the south. Two mega-projects activating the same corridor simultaneously is not coincidence. It is the clearest possible signal that institutional capital has decided the Arts District's next major transition is underway. Early-cycle positioning here is still available. It will not be for long.

Willowbrook. Beverly Grove. The Arts District. A bioscience campus, a Westside crane, and a BIG Architects river bridge. Los Angeles is making its most ambitious moves simultaneously—across every neighborhood, every price point, and every vision of what this city becomes next. I've been covering this market for years. The pace right now is different. Pay attention.

Joseph Trujillo is a co-owner and Editor-at-Large for L.A. STYLE Magazine and Host of Mr. Los Angeles Real Estate with eXp Luxury. DRE# 02007156. For inquiries: joseph@mrlosangelesrealestate.com | +1 424-655-2641