A Long Beach developer is working on three buildings that he is promoting as affordable to large families who are not rich enough for luxury housing, but whose earnings are too high for them to be eligible for government assistance.

Urban Pacific Group of Cos. Chief Executive Scott Choppin calls the concept “urban town homes,” and a trio of such properties are being developed in Long Beach. One of the development sites is just north of the Gov. George Deukmejian Courthouse, another is in the city’s Willmore City area and the third is at a lot that’s just south of the Wrigley neighborhood, in the vicinity of Washington Middle School.

There are differences among the three project sites, but their commonalities include multi-story units that are intended for large households with multiple wage earners. The smallest of the three buildings that Urban Pacific is developing is a two-unit, two-story building at 325 Daisy Ave., which is the site near the courthouse. Each unit has four bedrooms, three bathrooms and a two-car garage.

“This really lives like a house,” Choppin said at the Daisy Avenue construction site. “Although its purpose-built to be rentals, for families it’s designed to be as much as a house as possible.”

The other buildings, respectively in the 500 block of Golden Avenue and 1700 block of Cedar Avenue, are planned to be larger, five-bedroom units. Choppin said he’s working with investors Neal Thompson and David Sazegar on the projects.

Choppin’s plan is to sell the buildings to investor buyers who will be able to rent the buildings out at market rates, and also intends to replicate the urban townhome model throughout Long Beach and other locales. He anticipates being able to develop similar apartments in places like midtown Long Beach, San Pedro, Wilmington and South Los Angeles.

What is affordable?

The term “affordable housing” often refers to residential developments that involve public financing and rents that are restricted to below-market levels.

In Long Beach, for example, Culver City’s Century Housing Corp.’s recently began construction of the first phase of its Beacon Apartments project, which is going up near the crossing of Anaheim Street and Long Beach Boulevard at the northern edge of downtown. The project’s budget totals to roughly $80 million and its public financing includes some $12 million from the Long Beach Community Investment Co., which is a city government body. Beacon Apartments is designed for 160 units, with all but two being subject to rent restrictions.

Nearly 40 units in Beacon Apartments’ first phase are intended for homeless and near-homeless veterans, or other veterans with special needs. Plans call for units in the project’s second phase to be let to low-income seniors.

Urban Pacific’s urban townhomes, by contrast, do not involve similar methods of public financing, nor rental rate restrictions. Instead, Choppin describes the concept as a marriage between private financing methods and an approach to affordable housing in which a “high quality without the frills” product, as he described the Daisy Avenue site, could be affordable to a large household, such as a dual or multi-generational family, with two to four wage earners.

Urban Pacific projects a five-bedroom house built as an urban townhome could get rents ranging from $2,600 to $2,800 a month.

Apartments versus houses

That rental rate may be considered comparable to a what a household may pay on a mortgage for a house.

The median July price for a Los Angeles County house was $566,240 according to California Association of Realtors.

A household able to pony up a 20 percent down payment for a house at that price in Long Beach would have a monthly mortgage payment of a little more than $2,700 a month, according to NerdWallet’s mortgage calculator.

The necessity of being competitive with houses is why Choppin wants to pursue the urban townhome concept in markets that are already urbanized, as opposed to cheaper markets beyond suburbs where more land may be available. Although he wants to find plots of land where 15- to 30-unit townhome projects would be possible, locales with an abundance of cheap dirt are places where prospective tenants are more likely to seek a stand-alone house.

And although Choppin said Urban Pacific can develop townhomes without affordability covenants, he’s not opposed to doing so. He said he’s raising two funds to finance future construction, with one fund being dedicated to market rate housing and the other for projects with long-term restrictions.