Millennium Partners Plans 34-Story Resi Tower in Beverly Hills

A New York-based developer focused on mixed-use properties has submitted plans to the City of Beverly Hills for an ambitiously large residential project along Wilshire Boulevard in the famed enclave.

The Los Angeles arm of Millennium Partners on Friday filed an application with the city to redevelop a single-story retail property at 8300 Wilshire Boulevard, on the city’s eastern edge, into a 34-story apartment tower with nearly 10,600 square feet of ground-floor commercial space. The project, dubbed The Eastern, would feature 249 units, including 22 earmarked as affordable housing. Handel Architects is designing the plans alongside landscape architects Rios.

“This site is near the future Metro station and located on major thoroughfares of Wilshire and San Vicente, making it a logical location for density and height,” Mario Palumbo Jr., managing partner of Millennium Partners Los Angeles, said in a statement. “We are putting high-rise housing where it belongs, and more critically, adding to the city’s housing stock without any loss of existing units. That is especially important given the pressure on the City of Beverly Hills to produce more housing units amid scrutiny from state officials that it demonstrate its intention to do so.”

A development application of such scale is not without precedent, or contention, in Beverly Hills lately. The city for years was out of compliance with state housing law, opening the floodgates for projects with affordable housing elements to take advantage of a formerly little-known provision of California law dubbed “Builder’s Remedy,” which essentially allowed developers to bypass local zoning restrictions. More than a dozen Builder’s Remedy projects have been filed in Beverly Hills since 2022.

Yet the loophole for new projects seeking to take advantage of relaxed zoning restrictions was closed in the city last spring, once its housing element for 2021–2029 was finally approved by the state. Indeed, a spokesperson for Millennium said that the 8300 Wilshire Boulevard project application did not fall under the Builder’s Remedy provision.

Rather, Millennium is requesting concessions for height and density for the project via California’s Density Bonus Law, the spokesperson said, which allows builders to raise the limit on height and the number of apartments that can be included for projects that have affordable housing. 

Still, the project’s chances of approval were not immediately clear. According to the city’s approved housing element, 8300 Wilshire Boulevard falls under an area zoned for “low-density commercial use,” and Beverly Hills has a track record of resisting housing developments of such scale. However,  there is evidence that the city is relaxing its standards, having reportedly deemed six Builder’s Remedy applications complete in recent weeks.

The project notably also has the support of former city officials, landing an endorsement from former Beverly Hills Mayor Willie Brien.

“The vision put forth by The Eastern is exactly what the city called for in the General Plan when it thoughtfully designated properties at its gateways as appropriate locations for multifamily housing and increased density,” Brien said in a statement.

Yet Millennium Partners last spring walked away from a similar (though much larger) project in Hollywood. The developer in April withdrew its entitlement application for what it called Hollywood Center, a set of 46- and 35-story buildings with 1,000 residential units and 386,000 square feet of office space adjacent to the city’s famed Capitol Records building.

Nick Trombola can be reached at ntrombola@commercialobserver.com.