Multifamily Development Glossary

Zoning and Base Entitlement Basics

Every multifamily project starts with what the underlying zoning already allows before any state density law or incentive comes into play. These are the foundation terms.

By-Right Approval (Ministerial Approval)

A project is by-right, or ministerial, when it uses only the base municipal code with nothing extra requested: no additional units, no additional height, no reduced open space. Because nothing is being negotiated, the project bypasses the discretionary city planning process entirely and goes straight to building and safety review.

The moment a project asks for anything beyond that baseline, extra units, extra height, extra floor area, or smaller yards, it moves out of ministerial territory and into the incentive process described later in this glossary, which runs through a more involved, negotiated review.

Floor Area Ratio (FAR)

Floor Area Ratio governs how much building square footage a multifamily lot can support relative to its buildable area, typically around three times the buildable area after required setbacks are applied. It is the multifamily equivalent of Residential Floor Area (RFA), which governs single-family lots.

Multifamily lots generally carry significantly more building potential than a single-family lot of the same size, largely because the required front setback is much smaller on multifamily-zoned parcels. That gap is one of the first things worth checking when comparing a multifamily deal to a single-family conversion on a similarly sized site.

Residential Floor Area (RFA)

Residential Floor Area caps how much of a single-family lot can be built out, typically under 50 percent of lot area. On a standard 6,000 square foot lot, that pencils out to roughly 3,000 buildable square feet. The math gets tighter when a lot is subdivided into smaller parcels, since each new piece is still measured against that same percentage.

On small-lot subdivision projects, that tightening shows up directly: splitting a lot into roughly 1,100 square foot parcels under the standard 50 percent cap would only pencil out to 500 to 600 square feet of buildable area per unit, too small to work as a livable home. State law addressed this by raising allowable RFA on qualifying small-lot projects up to 100 to 125 percent of lot area. Even with that increase, getting close to 2,000 square feet per unit on these projects remains a genuine challenge.

Prevailing Setback

On a single-family property, the required front yard setback is calculated from the setbacks of neighboring homes on the block, a rule known as prevailing setback. It can be large enough to eliminate an entire unit from a small-lot conversion project unless the project has vested around it.

Without a vested entitlement in place, a prevailing setback requirement will often remove a full unit from a small-lot conversion project, which is one of the main reasons vesting, covered later in this glossary, matters so much on these deals.

ZIMAS (Zone Information and Map Access System)

ZIMAS is the City of Los Angeles's public zoning lookup tool. It shows a parcel's zoning designation, overlay districts, general plan land use, and applicable specific plans, and it is typically the first stop for confirming what a lot is zoned for before evaluating density bonus, TOC, or small-lot conversion options.

State and Local Density Laws

California has passed a stack of housing laws over the past several years aimed at increasing unit count, reducing parking requirements, and speeding up approval timelines. These are the ones that come up most often on Feld and Associates multifamily projects.

Density Bonus

California's density bonus law lets a developer build more units than base zoning allows in exchange for setting aside a portion of those units as income-restricted housing. The trade is straightforward: additional market-rate units in exchange for a share of below-market units.

Transit Oriented Communities (TOC)

Transit Oriented Communities is the City of Los Angeles's local version of state density bonus law, applied to projects near qualifying transit stops. It works as a straightforward trade: additional units in exchange for setting aside a share of them, typically as income-restricted housing. A typical TOC deal has traded roughly a 35 percent bump in unit count for setting aside somewhere between 7 and 11 percent of revenue on the low-income units, meaning reduced rent collected on those units rather than units surrendered outright.

Two recent projects show how the tool plays out differently depending on lot size. Alta Vista, an early TOC project on a double lot in Hollywood, used this structure to build 20 units across 3 stories, giving up just one of the 20 to restricted low-income rent. Holt, on a single lot near the Feld and Associates office at Whitworth and Olympic, took the same TOC approach and, because single-lot rules there allow more height than double-lot rules, reached 5 stories instead of 3. Holt is roughly 80 percent built as of this writing.

SB 684

Senate Bill 684, sometimes referenced by its working name, the Starter Home Revitalization Act, allows small-lot subdivision and streamlines the path to multifamily zoning, specifically for R2-zoned parcels. It is the first step in a two-part legislative sequence that later extended to single-family zoning through SB 1123, below.

SB 1123

Senate Bill 1123 extends the SB 684 small-lot subdivision framework down to R1, straight single-family-zoned lots. That extension matters because R1 lots carry tighter constraints than R2, including the prevailing setback rules described above, which makes the unit-count math meaningfully harder.

Three current Feld and Associates projects, referred to internally as Orlando, Fuller, and 22nd Street, are single-family-zoned lots being converted to multifamily under SB 684 and SB 1123. All three vested to lock in earlier, more generous entitlement terms before net habitable area rules tightened, and all three are currently in plan check. For an investor audience, this cluster of projects is a useful illustration of exactly how these two bills can be used together to maximize buildable units and square footage on a single-family lot.

AB 2011

Assembly Bill 2011 creates a streamlined, ministerial approval path for affordable and mixed-income housing on qualifying commercial corridors, including sites zoned for office and retail use that would otherwise require a rezone to add housing. It is a separate legislative track from the SB 684 and SB 1123 small-lot pathway and applies to a different category of site.

SB 9

Senate Bill 9 lets an owner of a single-family-zoned lot split it into two parcels and build up to two units on each, for a maximum of four units on what was one lot, without a rezone. It predates SB 684 and SB 1123 and works through a different mechanism: a straight lot split rather than the small-lot subdivision and multifamily conversion path those bills created.

AB 2097

Assembly Bill 2097 eliminates minimum parking requirements for residential and other projects located near qualifying transit. It applies to roughly 70 percent of Los Angeles, though not universally, so site-specific confirmation still matters before assuming a project qualifies.

Parking used to be the single biggest limiting factor on unit count in Los Angeles, more so than zoning or density allowances. Fitting required parking while still maximizing units used to be one of the harder problems on a multifamily deal. AB 2097, alongside ED1 and TOC-linked reductions, has removed a large part of that constraint, though not all of it, since bonus-density projects still need to fit whatever reduced parking requirement remains.

ED1 (Executive Directive 1)

Executive Directive 1 fast-tracks approval for 100 percent affordable housing projects and, layered with other state parking reforms, can eliminate parking requirements entirely on qualifying sites.

On a downtown-adjacent Feld and Associates project referred to internally as Valley, this shift played out directly: what started as a roughly 30-unit TOC project became a 60-unit affordable housing project under ED1, and the parking requirement dropped from a full below-grade level to zero.

Entitlement Tools: Incentives, Waivers and Vesting

Base zoning and state density law set the starting point. These are the tools an architect uses to negotiate beyond it, and to protect a deal once the rules change mid-project.

Incentives

Incentives are additional allowances the city will grant beyond base code, extra units, extra height, extra floor area, reduced open space, in exchange for something the developer provides in return. It is a narrowly defined negotiation: specific rules govern what can be traded and how, and the process to secure an incentive can be lengthy, so it is worth pursuing only when the additional entitlement is substantial enough to justify the time.

Some incentive negotiations fall outside architectural scope entirely, and the Feld and Associates team brings in outside consultants for that piece of the process when a deal calls for it.

Waiver

A waiver is a step beyond a standard incentive. It requires the architect to submit formal findings, documented evidence showing that even though code or a specific plan requires something, that requirement is not necessary in this specific case.

St. Andrew's, a K-Town project, needed a waiver from a mandated street dedication under the city's Transportation Plan. The finding that supported it: no other property on the block would ever be required to make the same dedication, so a partial street widening at a single lot would have provided no real traffic benefit. The waiver took roughly 12 months to clear. The project has been fully entitled for years and is currently paused on financing rather than approvals.

Vesting

Vesting locks in an earlier, often more favorable version of code or entitlement terms before a rule change takes effect. A vesting application submits plans and secures a defined unit count and square footage that the city is obligated to honor even if the underlying rules shift before construction documents are complete.

Vesting is what allowed the Orlando, Fuller, and 22nd Street projects to lock in more units and square footage than current rules alone would allow. Once a project vests, defending that entitlement against later rule changes becomes one of the priorities of the whole process, since state and local rules can and do shift while a project is still moving through review.

Net Habitable Area

Net habitable area is a newer state-defined square footage standard requiring space to be enclosed on all four sides and fully conditioned, meaning heated and air conditioned, in order to count toward a project's allowed square footage. It can override square footage terms a project previously vested for.

On the current small-lot projects, this rule threatened to shrink vested entitlements from over 2,000 to 2,500 square feet per unit down to a 1,750 square foot average. The workaround: converting the affected space into an unconditioned patio rather than a closed, conditioned room, which preserves the square footage without triggering the net habitable area standard, with the intent to enclose that space again once the project clears review.

Street Dedication

Street dedication requires a property owner to give up a strip of land, often a few feet along the front of a lot, to support future street widening called for in the city's periodic Transportation Plan. Because widening happens incrementally as individual lots redevelop, streets that see this over time can end up with a visibly uneven curb line block to block. St. Andrew's, discussed above under Waiver, is a direct example of a project that successfully avoided this requirement rather than complying with it.

Permitting, Process and Preservation Terms

Ready to Issue (RTI)

Ready to Issue means the city's plan check reviewer has approved a project's construction drawings and the permit is cleared to be issued once required fees are paid. It marks the point where an architect's core scope of work is typically complete, since what happens after that is largely outside the architect's control.

In practice, only about 25 to 30 percent of RTI'd projects actually break ground. The gap is rarely about the entitlement itself. Financing dries up, ownership positions shift, or a client sells the entitled plans to another buyer instead of building. Reselling RTI'd plans carries a smaller premium today than it once did, since buyers place less value on pre-entitled land than they used to.

Historic Preservation Overlay Zone (HPOZ)

An HPOZ is a city historic designation overlaid on a defined neighborhood, adding a review layer for exterior changes and new construction. Los Angeles has 22 active HPOZ boards, each with five members appointed through the neighborhood, the Mayor's office, and the Cultural Heritage Commission.

Dovid Feld currently serves on the HPOZ board for Adams-Normandie, giving Feld and Associates a working understanding of how these boards evaluate projects from the inside, not just as an applicant. A separate cautionary example illustrates how layered these reviews can get on a historic or coastal-adjacent site: a grandfathered building on the Venice boardwalk sits at the intersection of preservation rules, a Venice-specific zoning overlay, and California Coastal Commission jurisdiction, each with its own separate approval authority.

Junior Accessory Dwelling Unit (JADU)

A Junior Accessory Dwelling Unit is a smaller, more restricted category of accessory dwelling unit, generally up to 500 square feet and created within the existing walls of a single-family home, with its own entrance and at minimum an efficiency kitchen. JADUs are frequently paired with a standard ADU on the same lot to add a second unit of housing without expanding the building's footprint.