By Burnham Planning & Development has offered to provide housing for Long Beach State students as part of the firm’s upcoming project to convert numerous offices from Park Tower into apartments.
According to the local development firm and Milan Capital Management, LLP, the owner of Park Tower, construction for the project will start near the end of next year and is presumed to take 15 months to complete.
Located at 5150 East Pacific Coast Highway, Park Tower is a seven-story office building, a four-minute drive to CSULB. The upcoming project will create 149 apartments with 593 beds in total. Each apartment will have five-to-six beds and one bathroom, along with a communal lounge and kitchen area.
The project will also construct a new pavilion building with a triangular open space on Clark Avenue. This area will include amenities such as a pool, gym and laundry area.
Although CSULB is not financially involved with the upcoming project, CSULB students will be able to rent the converted apartments once the project is completed.
Overall, the project will contribute to CSULB’s Master Plan by increasing student housing off-campus.
Since 2014, CSULB has expanded available student housing on-campus from projects via the Master Plan which offers some benefits.
“Students that live in student housing were likely to complete their degree,” Michael Gardner, campus planning and sustainability director, said.
“They form a cohort feeling with other students, they are more connected to campus activities…they can focus on themselves, as a college student,” he said.
Typically, CSULB student housing projects are funded by the university and partially funded by the state of California’s Higher Education Student Housing Grant Program. However, Burnham Planning & Development became the first private developer to offer off-campus housing to the university’s students.
Construction is set to start in 2025 at Park Tower located near the CSULB campus on PCH. Burnham Planning & Development is currently working on the project that will provide new housing for students. Photo Credit: Lauren Benson
Burnham Development picked up the project in late 2022, after a former private developer had worked on it with Milan Capital Management, LLP the year before. Two years later, on Aug. 4, the Park Tower remodeling project was publicly announced.
“There’s a need for housing around the university,” Bret Bernard, Milan Capital Management, LLP director of planning and development, said. “…there’s a desire for housing for students and [Park Tower] is so close to Long Beach [State]; it made sense.”
According to Bernard, mixed-use properties are common in downtown Long Beach, thus Park Tower will convert into both an office and a residential zone.
“It made sense to try and merge the two—demand for student housing and lack of demand for office space—to seek this conversion,” Bernard said.
Currently, the project is in its initial phases, focusing on an Environmental Impact Report with the city of Long Beach.
So far, the overall cost and the construction company for the project has yet to be determined.
