FORA
North Park // Courtyard-Centered Infill Housing in North Park
Nehemiah Buenaventura, Business Manager
Fora is a 34-unit apartment building at 2028 Howard Avenue in the North Park neighborhood of San Diego. The building opened for business in 2025. Before redevelopment, the site was occupied by two aging single-story single-family residences—the kind of low-scale residential fabric that once defined much of North Park before rising land values and housing demand began reshaping the neighborhood.
Designed by San Diego–based architecture firm Jeff Svitak Inc., known for distinctive Uptown projects like Kaya and The Louisiana, Fora is tucked within a long, narrow 7,000-square-foot lot. This is the kind of tight urban parcel that typically pushes projects upward and inward—but instead of leaning into heavy massing, Fora’s design flips the strategy, using voids as the primary architectural move. Fora treats open space not as a leftover area, but as the project’s driving force. The voids break up the building’s footprint, creating a sense of breathing room within a high-density structure while maintaining privacy for residents.
The voids also allow light and air to penetrate deep into the site. Two of the voids double as both courtyards and vertical circulation cores, while the third serves as a shared garden space. Together, they open units on multiple sides, encouraging cross-ventilation—a quiet luxury in dense infill housing.
Rising five stories in total, the project pairs a Type I-B concrete podium level containing parking, storage, and ground-floor residential units with four levels of Type V-A wood-frame housing above—a common but efficient construction strategy for dense infill sites across San Diego. The development was made possible through the city’s Complete Communities Housing Solutions program, allowing higher residential density in exchange for proximity to transit and neighborhood services.
Of the 34 apartments, 29 are market-rate homes and five are designated as affordable units — integrating mixed-income housing directly within the project while maintaining the same design quality throughout.
SOURCES: