Irvine-based owner-operator pushes a self-storage redevelopment toward a hearing officer as Los Angeles deliveries surge and street rates climb across the metro
Westport Properties Inc. is moving to convert a low-slung warehouse parcel on Mid-City’s commercial spine into one of the densest self-storage projects in the submarket, with the City of Los Angeles set to take public testimony on the entitlements next week. The Department of City Planning has scheduled a virtual public hearing for Tuesday, May 12, to consider Westport’s application for a seven-story, 161,645-square-foot US Storage Centers facility at 4802-4828 West San Vicente Boulevard, near the intersection with South Longwood Avenue.
The project would demolish an existing one-story warehouse and two surface parking lots to make way for a household-goods storage building featuring storage units across each floor, a 954-square-foot office, five vehicular parking stalls, 36 bicycle parking spaces and two loading bays. Operating hours are proposed for 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. daily, according to the public hearing notice issued by the Los Angeles Department of City Planning.
To unlock the building envelope, Westport is pursuing a Vesting Zone Change and Height District Change from C2-1-O to C2-2-O, which would lift the maximum permitted Floor Area Ratio from 1.5:1 to 6:1 — a four-fold density bump that signals the developer’s confidence in storage demand on the corridor. The application also seeks a Class 2 Conditional Use Permit to allow storage uses within 500 feet of a residentially zoned area, plus a Project Review tied to the additional 50,000-plus gross square feet of non-residential floor area. Westport is further requesting waivers of the requirement to dedicate or improve an additional 2.5 feet of the existing public alley and to widen South Longwood Avenue by an additional three feet, per the hearing notice. Land-use consultancy Three6ixty, led by Dana Sayles, is shepherding the application on Westport’s behalf. The site sits inside the Mid-City Recovery Redevelopment Project Area within the Wilshire Community Plan Area, in Council District 10. Environmental review will proceed under Mitigated Negative Declaration.
For Westport, the filing extends a Southern California build-out that has rarely paused since the company’s founding in 1985. Westport develops, acquires and operates self-storage, multifamily and industrial properties under the US Storage Centers brand, and as of October 2023 held roughly 15 million square feet of self-storage under management with total assets under management approaching $3.2 billion, according to the company. The Mid-City project would mark another infill bet in a metro where Westport has previously delivered facilities in Compton, Alhambra and the Eastside submarket along Valley Boulevard.
The timing tracks with a market that is tightening rather than loosening. Los Angeles claimed third place nationally for self-storage deliveries in the first half of 2025, adding more than 1.2 million rentable square feet — a 27.7 percent increase over the same period of 2024, according to Yardi Matrix data published in August 2025. That development push is being absorbed by stubbornly thin per-capita supply: roughly 74 cities across the Los Angeles metro reported rising street rates through the third quarter of 2025, with the steepest double-digit gains concentrated in undersupplied submarkets where storage availability often runs below two square feet per capita, according to a Voit Real Estate Services market analysis published in November 2025.
National pricing reinforces the underwriting case. Self-storage sales totaled $755 million across 9.2 million square feet of transactions through October 2025, with the average sale price climbing to $123 per square foot — a 19 percent year-over-year increase, according to StorageCafe’s October 2025 report cited by Voit. In dense urban and coastal markets where land is scarce and entitlements are slow, the brokerage noted, storage assets are trading at prices comparable to prime multifamily product.
Capital flows are following the math. Yardi Matrix recorded approximately $5.9 billion in year-to-date self-storage transaction volume through November 21, 2025, surpassing the full-year 2024 total, with deal pricing skewed toward higher-quality Class A product and elevated values in the Northeast and West. Construction starts in the second half of 2025 also lifted the under-construction pipeline, prompting the firm to raise its new supply forecast by six percent for 2026 and 4.8 percent for 2027, according to a February 2026 update from Yardi Matrix.
For Mid-City, the proposal lands at a corridor in transition. West San Vicente Boulevard between Pico Boulevard and the residential blocks to the north has historically held a mix of warehouses, surface lots and small-format retail, and Extra Space Storage already operates a competing facility on the boulevard near the 10 freeway. Westport’s seven-story footprint, if approved at the requested 6:1 FAR, would be among the most vertically intensive storage products entering the West Los Angeles trade area.
