701 S Myrtle

Monrovia's City Council has approved a 204-unit mixed-use building at the southwest corner of Myrtle and Olive, in the city's Old Town Extension District. The project replaces a 1.61-acre office site with five stories of apartments over ground-floor retail and underground parking. The council voted 5-0 to approve it in December 2025, after a two-year environmental review.

What's proposed

Blake Griggs Properties would build 204 apartments: 20 studios, 147 one-bedrooms, and 37 two-bedrooms. Twenty of them are set aside as affordable under the state density bonus (17 low-income, 3 moderate-income). The ground floor adds about 2,370 square feet of retail space and a 2,782-square-foot fitness center, and residents get more than 25,000 square feet of shared amenities. Parking is underground: 329 spaces across two subterranean levels. The project was earlier called The Monroe; it was renamed in mid-2025.

The building is designed by AO Architects, who also announced the project on their own site. A rendering is available on the developer's project page and in AO's own project announcement.

The site and the entitlements

The project sits in Monrovia's Old Town Extension District, within the city's Specific Plan framework, on the site of the existing 1979 Myrtle Olive Business Park. Because the existing zoning and general plan designation didn't allow a building this size, the approval package was unusually layered: a General Plan Amendment, a Zoning Code Amendment, a Specific Plan, a Vesting Tentative Parcel Map, and a Conditional Use Permit, all adopted together on December 2, 2025.

The city certified an Environmental Impact Report for the project, a more thorough review than the Mitigated Negative Declaration most SGV infill projects use, and filed its Notice of Determination on December 4, 2025.

Why this one matters

Old Town Monrovia has filled in steadily with housing near the Metro A Line station. 701 S. Myrtle replaces an office park with apartments, and the city had to change both its general plan and its zoning code to allow it. The council approved it 5-0 after a full environmental review. The next milestone to watch is a building permit.

What this means if you live nearby

The approval is final; nothing is under construction yet. The developer's own timeline puts the start of construction roughly 12 to 15 months after the December 2025 approval, which points to early 2027, followed by a 26 to 30 month build. Expect the next visible step to be demolition of the existing office buildings once permits are pulled, which hadn't happened as of this write-up.