In Los Angeles, where a one-bedroom apartment can cost anywhere from $2,655 to $3,000 a month and the median home price has skyrocketed to $1.1 million—a staggering 10% increase from last year—the financial pressure is pushing residents to the brink, often leading to homelessness, poverty, or both. The wealth gap isn’t just widening; it’s exploding. But imagine an L.A. where monthly rent could drop to $1,000. Where owning a home didn’t demand a seven-figure salary, but instead just $250,000.
A pipe dream? Hardly. It’s the blueprint Martin Muoto is bringing to life through SoLa Impact, the real estate firm on a mission to disrupt how affordable housing is done in Southern California.
“I say disrupt because we feel it’s not working,” says Muoto. “It’s not a criticism of a lot of well-intended efforts, but they’re just not working evidenced by the fact that we have 60,000 people unhoused, and thousands more under-housed or surfing couches. Much of the so-called affordable housing built with government subsidies costs $700,000-$900,000 per unit and taxpayers are increasingly raising their hand to say, this is not working.”
Muoto isn’t just raising questions — he’s offering solutions, and he’s got the receipts to prove it. With their first 11 projects, SoLa Impact delivered units at an all-in cost of $287,000 per door, including financing—a figure far below the industry norm. And Muoto is committed to going even lower, with a goal of scaling production to 10,000 units annually at $200,000 per door.
“Over the past five years, we’ve launched 40 projects—17 completed, 13 under construction, and 10 in the pipeline—totaling nearly 3,000 units,” he shares. “And if there’s one thing we’ve learned, it’s this: scaling affordable housing is an entirely different game.”
That insight lit the fuse for SoLa Impact, which Muoto started in a garage in 2015 with one mission: to level the housing playing field for Black and Brown communities. Today, SoLa is the largest private landlord of Section 8 tenants in LA, managing $180 million in affordable housing and commercial real estate concentrated in historically neglected neighborhoods. But Muoto isn’t stopping there. With the launch of the $1 billion Black Impact Fund targeting Opportunity Zones, SoLa is on track to become one of the largest minority-focused real estate funds in the nation. Affordable housing, reimagined — not someday, but right now.
When Muoto arrived in the U.S. from Nigeria at 18 years old, he carried a powerful lesson from his childhood in northern Nigeria — that the combination of poverty, disenfranchisement, and lack of opportunity can create devastating consequences for communities.
Unlike traditional developers, Muoto saw opportunity where others saw risk. Early in his real estate journey, he realized that South Los Angeles — often dismissed by investors — offered not just yields, but the chance to create systemic change. Ignoring warnings that he would “lose his shirt,” Muoto bought 10 buildings with his own money in South LA neighborhoods like Watts and Compton, managing the renovations and leasing himself.
Using personal investment as his training ground, he learned firsthand the nuances of working in disenfranchised communities — from negotiating with local leaders to holding tenants to high standards for building upkeep. His experience reinforced a core belief: that the majority of people in low-income communities are hardworking individuals seeking a safe place to live but have been failed by systems not built for their success.
Muoto’s strategy was — and remains — radically different. He embraces Section 8 vouchers, renovating properties rather than flipping them. Partnering with nonprofits to connect with tenants, he leverages private capital to build high-quality affordable units at about half the cost of traditional, subsidized developments.
About three years ago, he started exploring modular housing, embarking on a comprehensive tour of factories spanning the western U.S. to Mexico. The conclusion? They all suffered from the same critical flaw. “One week they’re bidding on a project for SoLa — great. The next, they’re bidding on senior housing in Santa Fe, or student housing in San Luis Obispo. Totally different specs, different goals. There was no real value in manufacturing because nothing was standardized,” he explained.
With SoLa Impact, Muoto flipped the script, spending 18 months designing a universal one-bedroom chassis — Model Z — built specifically for Los Angeles and adhering to ADA, HUD, and Section 8 standards, while complying with 80% of California’s municipal codes. Constructed using steel and light-gauge metal, it offered durability and resilience—being fire, water, termite, and dry-rot resistant—setting a new standard for modular housing solutions.
“These homes will last literally 100 years”, said Muoto. But building was only half the battle. “The design and entitlement process in any major metropolitan city in America is incredibly bureaucratic — 107 checkpoints in LA alone and layers upon layers of policy and red tape,” said Muoto.
To address this challenge, Muoto, co-managing partner Gray Lusk, and the SoLa Impact team are pioneering software designed to revolutionize the process. Software that can generate heat maps to identify the best parcels for modular construction and evaluate options based on specific optimization goals. And for any given parcel, it can estimate the number of units that can be built and produce 85% of fully fleshed-out plans without architectural or human intervention, dramatically simplifying and expediting the design permitting and approval process. But the holy grail of Muoto’s plan is the economic upside that would flow back to local residents, churches, and long-time landowners.
“There are parcels burnt in the Rodney King riots still vacant. Churches with dwindling attendance and oversized parking lots that are struggling financially and may be willing to repurpose their land for affordable housing. What we hope to be able to do in two to three years is to go to those entrepreneurs, those families, those institutions, those churches, those business owners and say, our software has identified your land. You’ve got 12,000 square feet. You can build 45 units or 55 units or 75 units. Then we’ll help — with permitting, financing, construction, even property management — or connect them with our certified local partners.
“This isn’t just affordable housing,” Muoto said. “It’s affordable ownership, and a model for equity at scale,” Muoto continued. “And best of all they don’t have to sell. SoLa Impact will partner with them, or we can simply sell you the module and you can do it all yourself. Our goal, and I say this with no hubris, is to create an ecosystem of opportunity as we migrate to high quality affordable housing with the goal of expanding nationwide once we prove the model works in Los Angeles.”
Major investors are taking notice. Institutions like CalSTRS, Ally Financial, and PayPal have invested tens of millions into SoLa’s Black Impact Fund. L.A. Mayor Karen Bass and Oprah Winfrey are among those praising SoLa’s work, and HUD Secretary Scott Turner recently toured Model/Z’s modular housing factory, calling it “a part of the solution” to America’s housing crisis.
Muoto also views the modules as a critical answer for those who have lost their homes to devastating fires. The LA fires, he says, have crystalized SoLa’s mission and purpose: to provide housing for the most vulnerable members of society and foster wealth creation in historically marginalized communities through innovative solutions and robust market mechanisms.
“This is what I was put on this earth to do,” Muoto reflects. The mission, he says, has instilled in him a profound sense of urgency — one shaped by personal experience, having lost everything he owned in the Pacific Palisades fire He is now looking to place the modules on the burned-out parcels in Altadena, provided the land has been cleared and the residents have access to water, electricity and sewer.
“If we can do that, we can deliver 100 units in 60 days to opt in,” he contends.. The other option is to put those units on church owned land as interim housing. The idea is for the next three to seven years, residents would have this home for free. At the end of that period, they would have the option of either returning it back to SOLA, or we would find it creative ways to finance them. We would then take those units and repurpose them for multifamily apartment buildings in Altadena, so they would get a second life.”
Three hundred Altadena residents have already signed up for homes.
SoLa Impact’s growth has been powered by relentless innovation and scale. Currently, SoLa owns and manages about 2,500 units in Southern California, with another 2,000 units under development. Projects like the 43rd and Vermont Affordable Housing Project — a $63 million, 188-unit development in South LA’s Vermont Square neighborhood — embodying Muoto’s model: affordable, transit-oriented, environmentally sustainable, and rooted in the community it serves.
“We standardize every element — windows, wood, showerheads — buying in bulk across our 30-plus active construction sites,” Muoto explains. “It’s hundreds of small levers that allow us to build at $250,000 a unit, when traditional developers are building at twice that.”
Housing is just the beginning. At SoLa’s developments, the focus extends beyond providing homes, fostering opportunities in workforce development, education, and entrepreneurship. At their factory, they employ individuals like John, who is formerly incarcerated, offering training and a starting salary of $25 per hour to help them rebuild their lives.
“I’ve always enjoyed working in construction,” John said, “but when I came home from prison, no one wanted to give me a job because of my background. SoLa took a chance on me, and it’s made all the difference.”
In addition to providing second chances for those like John, SoLa Impact is laying the foundation for future opportunity through major community-focused developments. At Crenshaw Lofts, a 190-unit affordable development, SoLa is building two major initiatives: the SoLa Tech & Entertainment Center powered by Live Nation, and the Crenshaw Culinary Arts Cafe. Both will offer training in technology, music, media production, and culinary arts — preparing young people from underserved neighborhoods for the jobs of the future.
His drive for creating pathways to social impact led him to establish “The Beehive”. Located in the heart of South Central, The Beehive is the nation’s first-ever business campus dedicated to opportunity zone (OZ) operated businesses. Spanning 92,000 square feet across six architecturally stunning red-brick warehouses, the venue has become a cultural and entrepreneurial epicenter for the Black community offering a vibrant mix of workspaces, social hubs, meeting spaces and a state-of-the-art technology and entrepreneurship Center.
Conveniently located just ten minutes south of downtown L.A., it’s a space where underrepresented entrepreneurs meet investors, build networks, and access real economic opportunity. It has hosted events by celebrities like Tiffany Haddish and Holly Robinson Peete, as well as elected leaders such as Congresswoman Sydney Kamlager-Dove and is home to California’s first Black-owned craft brewery. The Beehive has also served vital community needs—most notably providing temporary classrooms for 120 displaced students from Altadena’s Rosebud Academy following the Eaton fire.
Moreover, the SoLa Foundation, SoLa Impact’s nonprofit arm, has secured millions in funding to build youth centers and provide vocational training, financial literacy classes, and college scholarships to local residents.
“The most important thing we can do is give our youth real pathways to success,” Muoto says. “Not just housing, but futures.”
Through SoLa, Muoto proves that doing good and doing well are not mutually exclusive. By blending disciplined real estate investing with intentional social impact, SoLa offers a model for what inclusive capitalism can look like — one that benefits investors while fundamentally transforming communities.
“We’re not claiming to solve racial inequity overnight,” Muoto says. “But by focusing on housing, education, access to capital, and ownership, and doing so with intelligence and pragmatism, we can create real, lasting solutions.”
Nearly a decade after founding SoLa Impact in a garage, Martin Muoto is showing how bold vision, innovative thinking, and a deep commitment to community can reshape the future of American cities — one neighborhood at a time.