Los Angeles Apartment Starts Double From Last Year

Los Angeles multifamily developers are stepping on the gas while much of the country pumps the brakes.

Builders kicked off more than 4,000 apartment units across Greater Los Angeles in the first quarter, roughly double the pace from a year ago and the strongest showing since late 2022, Bisnow reported, citing new data from Colliers.

The rebound flies in the face of a national pullback in multifamily construction, where developers have slowed apartment starts to absorb a wave of new supply and weakening rent growth. It also pours cold water on the idea that developers are avoiding building in California, and Los Angeles specifically.

“A lot of folks have kind of decided to not underwrite what they consider to be some political risk associated with the city of L.A.,” Alex Valente — partner at High Street Residential, which has a 281-unit project underway in the city — told Bisnow. “Those of us that know the city as well as we do and have as much confidence as we do in the city and the lifestyle here… I think we feel really good about it.”

After peaking above a 26,000-unit development pipeline in 2024 and 2025, Los Angeles County’s project planning eased to about 24,000 units, and developers are now ramping back up in the county, according to Bisnow. At the same time, roughly 600,000 units delivered nationwide in 2024 helped push rent growth into negative territory as the country saw a 1.7 percent annual decline in rents in April, per Apartment List data cited by Bisnow. L.A. rents fell 1.4 percent, though the drop is modest compared to Sun Belt markets like Austin and Phoenix, where rents have fallen far more sharply at 5.7 and 4.4 percent, respectively.

Affordable housing makes up a notable chunk of the new housing built in Los Angeles. The city ranks among the top 10 in the country building units for low-income households, according to RentCafe. Between 2020 and 2024, a total of 9,406 income-restricted apartments were completed in the city, accounting for roughly 20.5 percent of all apartment construction in the L.A. metro area. Legislation like Executive Directive 1 and the Citywide Housing Incentive Program seeks to entice developers to pursue income-restricted developments rather than market-rate as the city works to meet its lofty state-mandated housing goals.

— Chris Malone Méndez