Three years after being forced to evict its tenants by California's 2nd District Court of Appeal, CIM Group is facing another test in its bid to reopen the shuttered Sunset Gordon apartment tower in Hollywood.

At its meeting on August 9, the Los Angeles City Planning Commission is scheduled to consider re-granting approvals to the 22-story apartment building, which was completed in 2014 at its namesake intersection of Sunset Boulevard and Gordon Street.  The tower featuring 299 apartments - including 15 to be set aside as affordable housing at the very-low-income level - in addition to approximately 38,000 square feet of office space, 7,700 square feet of ground-floor retail, and parking for 428 vehicles.

The Sunset Gordon building, as well as a 19,000-square-foot pocket park built next-door as part of a development agreement, have been closed since 2015, when the 2nd District Court of Appeal invalidated the project's approvals. Before breaking ground on the tower, CIM demolished a 1920s building that once housed an Old Spaghetti Factory restaurant, rather than preserving its facade as had been required by the project's approvals. The La Mirada Avenue Neighborhood Association, which frequently mounts legal challenges to developments in Hollywood, successfully sued to overturn the project's building permits by arguing that they should not have been issued in the first place.

Since then, an environmental impact report has been completed for the project, allowing CIM Group to push ahead with the approvals process.  But the tower faces another obstacle at its upcoming City Planning Commission hearing, where the Coalition to Preserve L.A. - an organization with close ties to the AIDS Healthcare Foundation - has appealed its vesting tentative tract map, arguing that the project's environmental study has inadequately assessed potential impacts to traffic congestion and that it would accelerate gentrification.

A staff report to the Commission recommends that its members voted to approve the Sunset Gordon development.

CIM, one of Hollywood's prolific developers, also owns a set of small commercial buildings opposite Gordon Street from the tower site, where they have considered plans to construct a mid-rise apartment complex.

Also under construction next-door is a 13-story, 275,000-square-foot office tower called Epic, which downsized in order to settle a separate lawsuit with the AIDS Healthcare Foundation.