You can buy furniture and mattresses at Costco.

And you can even give a once over to a shiny new vehicle that you can buy at a discount using your Costco membership card.

But have you ever thought about securing living space at Costco?

As far-fetched as it might seem, in less than two years you will be able to do that.

Ground broke in September on a 185,000 square-foot Costco — some 40,000 square feet bigger than the chain’s Manteca store — in the Baldwin Village Area of South Los Angeles.

The Costco is on the ground floor.

Above it will be 800 apartments.

Forget about walking to the corner store.

Renters will be able to go downstairs to a warehouse store to buy two gallons of milk, two loaves of bread, 36 eggs (assuming you have withdrawn money from your 401K), and mega packages of other food.

But then again, you could feast on endless chicken dishes created from their famous loss leader rotisserie chicken daily from their kitchen to your dining table above it.

The $425 million Thrive Living project a first for Costco, given it will have housing on top. 

It is also a rarity for the warehouse store that owns most of its 890 locations worldwide including 616 in the United States as they will rent the ground floor from Thrive Living.

It is also the first project to be built in Los Angeles under the 2022 Affordable Housing Act, signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom.

The law was designed to spur more affordable housing.

In a nutshell, in exchange for setting aside a minimum percentage for affordable housing, new housing is allowed in specific commercial and retail zones by law.

The carrot is the project can avoid lengthy and costly environmental review processes.

Not only does the EIR process have the ability to drag out approval, but it makes projects targets for litigation.

And by shortening the approval process, it minimizes the ravages of inflation on development of a project.

The Baldwin Village project is also being constructed using pre-fabricated housing units.

The developer is also using the rent from Costco to help underwrite the affordable housing portion of the project.

That avoids the need to chase after government subsidies.

Of the 800 apartments being built above Costco, 184 will be set aside for affordable housing.

The rest will be rented at market.

While the design of the apartment portion is not in the same architectural category of the Taj Mahal, the complex will include a rooftop swimming pool, fitness center, urban gardens, community space and more.

The Costco will reflect the retailers’ no-thrills approach to retail floor space.

An urban Costco is not unusual as the nation’s third largest retail behind Walmart, and Amazon already has a few.

One investment analyst marveled at the “genius” of Costco for having a potential “on site” customer base of up to 1,600 based on two tenants per apartment.

Clearly that isn’t what drove Costco to inquire about the site that had older commercial on it. 

Besides, pre-fab apartment units tend to have smaller footprints making a sizable pantry or a big storage closet — a must if you partake in the Costco way of selling things — rare.

You just don’t buy six rolls of toilet paper at Costco, you buy 30.

And if you need toothpaste, it’s five tubes at a time.

That doesn’t mean the future residents above won’t frequent the Costco a lot. 

They just won’t be in the league of most Costco shoppers who ring up between $100 and $200 on a typical trip assuming they don’t plunk down $800 on an impulse kayak purchase.

You can leave Costco spending $25 or less, but you can’t shake the feeling it’s so odd that government data miners will put you on the Homeland Security watchlist.

Manteca had invested money via a state grant to modify zoning rules to allow an Assembly Bill 2011 project in the same genre of Costco in Baldwin Village.

While the state intended to use the work as a template, the goal was to help Poag redevelop Orchard Valley by ripping out a large swath of the inline store space that has been vacant since the center was built in 2008 and replace them with multiple story apartment complexes.

The plan called for rows of townhomes along Atherton Drive.

Poag, as was its habit, didn’t follow through.

The 760,000 square-foot Orchard Valley center anchored by Bass Pro is unlikely to become a mixed retail/residential project given that Stockton-based Grupe Huber acquired the property last year.

The company has a track record of securing retail tenants in projects throughout the Northern San Joaquin Valley.

They are aggressively marketing Orchard Valley while refreshing the 17 year-old facades of the empty spaces.

Sutter Health is in the process of remodeling 17,000 square feet into healthcare offices that will open roughly mid-year.

With the rapid growth in Manteca pulling in a number of households making $120,000 plus a year, it shouldn’t be too tough to fill the remaining space.

That said, it may not maximize the amount of parking space at the complex. 

It is why apartments replacing parking lot asphalt could still one day emerge as a possibility at Orchard Valley under the auspices of Assembly Bill 2011.

The potential appeal of Orchard Valley given its basic layout that replicates a Main Street feel is that of a secondary “city center” for Manteca.

Anything is possible in the year 2025 in California now that Sacramento has started to offer carrots for developers to build housing instead of pounding them with sticks in the form of more and more regulations.

Manteca has two retail/apartment projects in the hopper.

One is a neighborhood store with office space along with apartments at Davis Street and Walnut Avenue.

The other is the proposed 5-story project at Sycamore and Yosemite in downtown with retail on the ground and 42 units of low-income senior apartments on the upper floors.

It is not in the semi-earth shattering league as having a Costco with 800 apartment units above, but both Manteca projects are a departure from the same-old, same-old when it comes to housing. 

This column is the opinion of editor, Dennis Wyatt, and does not necessarily represent the opinions of The Bulletin or 209 Multimedia. He can be reached at dwyatt@mantecabulletin.com