Claim:
Costco is building apartments over its stores to address the affordable housing crisis.
Rating:
What’s True
Costco is partnering with a real estate developer to build affordable housing over a store under construction in Los Angeles.
What’s False
Costco has not, as of this writing, announced its intent to take on similar projects for its other stores across the United States.
In December 2025, social media users claimed Costco, the popular big-box warehouse club retail store chain, was building apartments over its stores to address the affordable housing crisis. Some of these posts highlighted a specific Costco store in Los Angeles, whereas other posts referenced the rumored company initiative more broadly, without naming any particular stores.
Internet users shared the claim through posts (archived) on (archived) Instagram (archived), Facebook (archived) and Reddit (archived). It also appeared on X (archived) in January 2025. The posts used various images that appeared to come from multiple different Costco construction projects.
It’s true that, as of this writing, Costco was working with a real estate firm to build affordable apartments over a store currently under construction in Los Angeles. However, there was no evidence that Costco had any particular plan to similarly add housing to its other stores nationwide. Therefore, we’ve rated this story a mixture of truth and falsehoods.
Snopes reached out to Costco by email to confirm if the company had any plans to build apartments over its stores nationwide. We’ll update this story if and when we learn more.
The claim originated from reports about a real Costco store and housing development under construction in the Baldwin Village neighborhood of southern Los Angeles. Confirmation of the project, which is being developed by real estate firm Thrive Living and AO Architects, appeared in a news release from the city of Los Angeles, multiple news releases from Thrive Living and webpages dedicated to the project on both the AO Architects and Thrive Living websites.
According to the releases, the finished project will include 800 rental apartment units split between five floors, all on top of a street-level Costco Wholesale store. The project will consist of 184 apartments dedicated to low-income households, with the rest of the units aimed at middle-income families. Specifically, those middle apartment units would be for tenants who may not be eligible for low-income housing but aren’t able to afford a typical rental unit in the area.
The developer of the project, Thrive Living, is a private real estate firm that focuses on developing underused properties in places experiencing housing affordability issues. The Costco housing project is replacing an abandoned office development previously on the property.
The development’s construction broke ground in September 2024, at which time Thrive Living said in a news release it believed the construction would take 2 1/2 years. If the construction finishes when anticipated, that would put its completion in 2027.
As of Dec. 30, 2025, Snopes found no project updates or images dated after January 2025. The images of the project available at the time all showed concept art. Six of these images appeared on the AO Architects website and another on the city of Los Angeles website. Images in December 2025 social media posts that appeared to show the development under construction did not depict the real project.
While there are news reports of some cities integrating Costco stores into residential areas, any other reporting on Costco apartment units just pointed to the Los Angeles project as the first-of-a-kind.
For further reading, Snopes has previously fact-checked a number of other claims related to Costco.
