Wellpointe's $2B Woodland Hills senior towers seek entitlements

Wellpointe is entitling one of Los Angeles’s largest affordable housing plans in years: Viva L.A. Warner Center, a $2 billion, 3,192-unit senior complex in Woodland Hills. For developers, the story is not just the scale. It is that Wellpointe is running a four-tower megaproject through the same streamlined path built for infill lots.

Why it matters

The project qualifies for LA’s Executive Directive 1, the mayor’s by-right approval track for income-restricted housing, and it is testing whether that path can carry 2.2 million square feet rather than a single mid-rise. If it holds, ED1 becomes a tool for institutional-scale affordable development, not just small sites, and that changes what pencils on underused commercial land across the city. Wellpointe says it is stacking tax-exempt bonds, low-income housing tax credits, HUD funding and private taxable debt rather than a city or federal subsidy, a capital stack other sponsors will study closely. This is the by-right playbook we watched Samuelian Group deploy in Silver Lake, now scaled to Warner Center towers.

The numbers

The plan at 6400 Canoga Avenue calls for 3,192 senior units, part of about 3,458 total residences including staff housing, across four high-rises of 34 to 42 stories on a 4.7-acre site. Units target households at 30 to 80 percent of area median income. A Wellpointe affiliate bought the site in 2026 for $25.5 million. Construction is slated to begin in mid-2027 with an opening in 2029.

What’s next

The entitlement outcome is the tell. A clean ED1 approval at this scale would invite copycat proposals on commercial parcels across Los Angeles, while pushback on height or density would mark the ceiling of the by-right path. Either way, developers watching California’s affordable pipeline should track whether the financing closes as structured, because a subsidy-light stack at this size would be the more repeatable model.