HomeDiagramsDatabaseMapsForum About
     

Go Back   SkyscraperPage Forum > Regional Sections > United States > Pacific West


Reply

 
Thread Tools Display Modes
     
     
  #21  
Old Posted Apr 7, 2007, 4:43 AM
ocman ocman is offline
Registered User
 
Join Date: Dec 2004
Location: Burlingame
Posts: 2,687
Forget the Ralphs Supermarket. David Beckham has purchased a unit at the Biscuit company lofts. Now you know that downtown LA has really made it.
Reply With Quote
     
     
  #22  
Old Posted Apr 7, 2007, 7:31 AM
LosAngelesSportsFan's Avatar
LosAngelesSportsFan LosAngelesSportsFan is offline
Registered User
 
Join Date: Oct 2004
Location: Los Angeles
Posts: 7,838
seriously, a 4.9 million dollar loft! jesus. lucky bastard.
Reply With Quote
     
     
  #23  
Old Posted Apr 7, 2007, 9:36 AM
edluva edluva is offline
BANNED
 
Join Date: Dec 2002
Location: Los Angeles
Posts: 6,134
mt washington, "mistaken for tuscany". NYT can be pretty funny sometimes.
Reply With Quote
     
     
  #24  
Old Posted Apr 7, 2007, 3:13 PM
BrianSac's Avatar
BrianSac BrianSac is offline
CHACUN SON GOÛT
 
Join Date: Apr 2006
Posts: 1,646
Quote:
Originally Posted by jessie_sanchez View Post
NELA is where I call home.

Highland Park, Eagle Rock, and Mount Washington is where I've spent most of my life. I love how the homes here have lots of trees and the traffic isn't so bad compared to the (overrated) west side.
I love those neighborhoods.d I've been to several parties over there.
Reply With Quote
     
     
  #25  
Old Posted Apr 13, 2007, 7:19 AM
citywatch citywatch is offline
Registered User
 
Join Date: Feb 2002
Posts: 6,435
If there has to be NIMBYism, this is the kind I not only don't mind, in fact, it's the kind I fully support :



City To Join Foes of New FBI Building

By Martha Groves, Times Staff Writer
April 13, 2007

The city of Los Angeles is preparing to join a coalition of veterans and Westside residents and business groups challenging the federal government's plan to tear down the Federal Building in Westwood and erect a new FBI headquarters on Wilshire Boulevard. City Councilmen Jack Weiss and Bill Rosendahl said Thursday they planned to introduce a measure asking that the city attorney outline what steps the city would have to take to participate in an expected lawsuit.

The measure would also renew the city's request for a master plan for all federal properties in the area, including the Federal Building property and the Veterans Affairs campus. The council probably will approve the measure in a few weeks.

No suit has been filed, but the Coalition for Veterans' Land, citing concerns about traffic and terrorism, said it expected to take its battle to federal court after the government filed its final environmental impact statement on the project. That report is slated for release this month.

"We are going to fight and we are going to stop this federal proposal," Weiss said at a news conference at Wilshire and Veteran Avenue, where stiff winds whipped the multiple American flags on tall poles at the property. Weiss added that he strongly supported the FBI but had serious concerns about the potential for additional traffic in the already congested area, which is sliced by the 405 Freeway.

Rosendahl also addressed traffic fears, saying that "we cannot afford on the Westside any more gridlock." "We have had it. No more expansion," he said.

Longtime Westside activist Laura Lake called the councilmen's action "historic," saying she could not "remember when the city stood with a coalition of community groups."

The General Services Administration has said that it reviewed 35 sites but determined that the Federal Building property best suited the FBI's needs. The GSA, which oversees land purchases and construction for federal government agencies, said it planned to tear down the existing 17-story building and build two towers that combined would have 732,000 square feet. That is 170,000 square feet larger than the current building, which is about 40 years old.


Rosendahl and Weiss said the FBI office should be downtown, close to city and county offices and law enforcement. According to coalition members, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's business development team offered sites downtown, but the GSA would not budge.

Rosendahl created a stir when he said Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger also supported the coalition's cause. However, Aaron McLear, a spokesman for the governor, said later: "We've not taken a position on this."
Reply With Quote
     
     
  #26  
Old Posted Apr 13, 2007, 5:43 PM
LA/OC/London's Avatar
LA/OC/London LA/OC/London is offline
Registered User
 
Join Date: Apr 2006
Location: Escaped from behind the Orange curtain and have returned to L.A
Posts: 67
Quote:
Originally Posted by colemonkee View Post
BoConcept would be perfect for that space. Walgreens might not make it with Rite Aid literally across the street. Or one of them wouldn't make it, at least.
I agree that it probably wouldn't work to have two drug stores directly across the street from each other, but I'm a bit worried about whether or not BoConcept would do well in downtown at this stage. Maybe it would and i'm just being pessimistic. I'm sure there are plenty of loft dwellers to support it - is there furniture more of the high end or low end?
Reply With Quote
     
     
  #27  
Old Posted Apr 13, 2007, 8:50 PM
colemonkee's Avatar
colemonkee colemonkee is offline
Ridin' into the sunset
 
Join Date: Nov 2004
Location: Los Angeles
Posts: 9,093
^ It's fairly high-end, but not ridiculously high end, like HD Buttercup. There's actually some reasonably-priced stuff in there, and it all looks very modern and "loft-like". Really the only question is will there be enough people downtown to keep it alive. I think by the end of the year there might be. You can check out their site. Some pretty nice stuff there...

http://www.boconcept.us
__________________
"Then each time Fleetwood would be not so much overcome by remorse as bedazzled at having been shown the secret backlands of wealth, and how sooner or later it depended on some act of murder, seldom limited to once."

Against the Day, Thomas Pynchon
Reply With Quote
     
     
  #28  
Old Posted Apr 13, 2007, 11:10 PM
LosAngelesBeauty's Avatar
LosAngelesBeauty LosAngelesBeauty is offline
Registered User
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Los Angeles
Posts: 6,610
^ It should NOT be a furniture store, IMO. The perfect tenant for that space, being that it's also right across the street from the metro, would be an independent bookstore, such as Vromans from Pasadena. They looked at the space before, but it just never happened unfortunately. Downtown LA just doesn't have enough consumer traffic from the right demographic to support either a bookstore or a higher-end furniture store, given the kind of rents landlords are starting to ask for.

The 617 space we're talking about here is about 17,000sf. At the current average asking price psf of about $2.50-$3, you're looking at rents of $42,000 - $51,000 a month. That's not a lot for a furniture store if you have CONSTANT streams of people buying your products. But there is honestly not enough people living downtown to sustain that. And it never will. Downtown LA will have to also draw from the region as a shopping destination akin to Old Town Pasadena or Santa Monica. That's definitely possible, especially if BoConcept also has nice incentives like discounted/free delivery on large/expensive items.

But the same concept applies to a bookstore. And that's why Vromans didn't think it made sense to come downtown at this time. Would they be able to sell $41,000 worth of books/magazines/CDs/DVDs/coffee to yield some kind of slim profit? Although they didn't have to take the entire 17,000sf space, it still just didn't make financial sense.

Until Downtown LA starts to develop a critical mass of higher-end retailers, which will then attract the right kind of demographic to sustain them, stores like Vromans or BoConcept will not make sense.

We need to establish our basics first. Grocery stores, drugs stores, restaurants, and then finally luxuries like bookstores and high-end furniture purveyors.
__________________
DTLA Rising
Reply With Quote
     
     
  #29  
Old Posted Apr 13, 2007, 11:43 PM
Wright Concept's Avatar
Wright Concept Wright Concept is offline
I just ran out of B***sht
 
Join Date: Nov 2004
Location: Long Beach, CA
Posts: 2,338
^ What about an IKEA? Something that ain't high end, but affordable and middle of the road. A furniture store will be needed in an urban environment like that with growing business and USC/FIDM student clientele (important statistic).
__________________
"Statistics are used much like a drunk uses a lamp post: for support, not illumination." -Vin Scully
The Opposite of PRO is CON, that fact is clearly seen.
If Progress means moves forward, then what does Congress mean?
Reply With Quote
     
     
  #30  
Old Posted Apr 13, 2007, 11:54 PM
RAlossi RAlossi is offline
Registered User
 
Join Date: Jun 2005
Posts: 1,573
^That's a good idea... an Ikea would be a huuuge draw, and with USC right there and all the new buildings, I think that would be great... Good suggestion, PV!
Reply With Quote
     
     
  #31  
Old Posted Apr 14, 2007, 12:10 AM
LosAngelesBeauty's Avatar
LosAngelesBeauty LosAngelesBeauty is offline
Registered User
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Los Angeles
Posts: 6,610
^ IKEA could take a larger space like the Broadway Exchange Building at 8th/Broadway, but the issue of loading/unloading will be something that may be inconvenient enough to deter shoppers away if most are used to the suburban set-up offered in Burbank or Carson. Urban IKEAs do exist, and they're usually much smaller and cater to urban dwellers, which is fantastic for Downtown LA once a larger population with disposable income reaches a critical mass.

I think it could work, and it would be something of a novelty in the United States where IKEAs are usually NOT in urban settings. The only IKEAs I'm aware of that are in urban settings are in Asia. They are usually absent from dense city centers where is space is expensive and limited. IKEA is even absent from Manhattan or Downtown Chicago.

Anyway, the point here isn't that Downtown LA shouldn't get furniture stores -- I mean, there already are a few like Loft Appeal at 9th/Hill -- but that the evolution of the retail environment in Downtown LA should follow a sequential order somewhat. And I think we're getting close to seeing some more luxury-oriented retail after Ralphs opens and does well to prove the demand that exists for products downtown.

LA Live/Grand Ave Project/Fig Central/etc. will obviously bring the big names finally. But I'm also curious to see how 7+FIG will be repositioned. I would actually hope a TARGET will take the old Bullocks space. Crossing Fingers!
__________________
DTLA Rising
Reply With Quote
     
     
  #32  
Old Posted Apr 14, 2007, 12:49 AM
Wright Concept's Avatar
Wright Concept Wright Concept is offline
I just ran out of B***sht
 
Join Date: Nov 2004
Location: Long Beach, CA
Posts: 2,338
True, but one thing that is missing is that a lot of the profit that IKEA could make up for orders is through Deliveries to the loft/condo dwellers. In addition, I think a need for those small walk-in lunchtime brousing for workers would be a good draw for the IKEA store downtown as well that would bring in more $$$ because you've got a consumer thinking about their living spaces more and what they should have in them. IKEA sells quality Houseware products that folks can carry in a shopping bag and ride home on the subway or an express bus.

I also feel that in order to make Resturant row successful and therefore 7th Street successful you need those stores that if the wait at a resturant is long they can do some window shopping and brousing to IKEA. This is the exact principal of Old Town Pasadena.
__________________
"Statistics are used much like a drunk uses a lamp post: for support, not illumination." -Vin Scully
The Opposite of PRO is CON, that fact is clearly seen.
If Progress means moves forward, then what does Congress mean?
Reply With Quote
     
     
  #33  
Old Posted Apr 14, 2007, 9:32 AM
edluva edluva is offline
BANNED
 
Join Date: Dec 2002
Location: Los Angeles
Posts: 6,134
again, DTLA will NEVER reach the "critical mass" to support retail on that scale. DTLA can only hope to get enough retail to move in and steal and concentrate business away from a broad region extending to pasadena or mid-city, and get people living in those areas to drive downtown to shop.

This is especially true for a store on the scale of IKEA. Think about why IKEA's are strategically situated where they are. How many IKEA stores are there in orange county, a region of 3 million? one. San Diego? one. South Bay? one. SGV? one.

Again, Michigan Ave serves a clientele base of GREATER CHICAGO. not the loop. The same for Union Square and the Bay. Manhattan is not the way it is because of the people living in Manhattan's condos. It's because of the millions of commuters and shoppers who cross the bridges and tunnels to work and shop on a single island. This fictional "critical mass" needed to support retail is just promotional chamber of commerce propoganda used to lure retailers into opening stores downtown. If we want to be realistic about growing DTLA into something on the scale of SF or Chicago's loop, we need to focus on transit, not overpriced condominiums and "artists lofts" that people can drive to their suburban jobs from. Otherwise it's all a big make-believe downtown.

Last edited by edluva; Apr 14, 2007 at 9:38 AM.
Reply With Quote
     
     
  #34  
Old Posted Apr 14, 2007, 12:17 PM
LosAngelesBeauty's Avatar
LosAngelesBeauty LosAngelesBeauty is offline
Registered User
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Los Angeles
Posts: 6,610
Quote:
Originally Posted by edluva View Post
again, DTLA will NEVER reach the "critical mass" to support retail on that scale. DTLA can only hope to get enough retail to move in and steal and concentrate business away from a broad region extending to pasadena or mid-city, and get people living in those areas to drive downtown to shop.

This is especially true for a store on the scale of IKEA. Think about why IKEA's are strategically situated where they are. How many IKEA stores are there in orange county, a region of 3 million? one. San Diego? one. South Bay? one. SGV? one.

Again, Michigan Ave serves a clientele base of GREATER CHICAGO. not the loop. The same for Union Square and the Bay. Manhattan is not the way it is because of the people living in Manhattan's condos. It's because of the millions of commuters and shoppers who cross the bridges and tunnels to work and shop on a single island. This fictional "critical mass" needed to support retail is just promotional chamber of commerce propoganda used to lure retailers into opening stores downtown. If we want to be realistic about growing DTLA into something on the scale of SF or Chicago's loop, we need to focus on transit, not overpriced condominiums and "artists lofts" that people can drive to their suburban jobs from. Otherwise it's all a big make-believe downtown.

Yup, that's exactly what I tried to convey in my post above (#28).
__________________
DTLA Rising
Reply With Quote
     
     
  #35  
Old Posted Apr 17, 2007, 2:03 AM
dragonsky dragonsky is offline
Registered User
 
Join Date: Sep 2005
Posts: 3,132
Edit
Reply With Quote
     
     
  #36  
Old Posted Apr 19, 2007, 8:27 AM
LosAngelesBeauty's Avatar
LosAngelesBeauty LosAngelesBeauty is offline
Registered User
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Los Angeles
Posts: 6,610
NY Times:




April 18, 2007

In Los Angeles, a Gehry-Designed Awakening
By TERRY PRISTIN


LOS ANGELES — The influx of thousands of new residents has reinvigorated this city’s downtown in recent years, but most of the development has been clustered on its southern end, near the Staples Center, the sports and entertainment arena.

For more than a decade, however, Eli Broad, a billionaire and civic leader, has envisioned a vibrant focal point for the city — “a place where people from all communities want to gather,” as he put it — on the opposite edge of downtown. That section, known as Bunker Hill, is home to some of the city’s leading cultural institutions and architecturally significant structures, but they are scattered amid a hodgepodge of unsightly parking lots and drab government buildings.

Now Related Urban, the division of the Related Companies that developed the massive Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle in Manhattan, is poised to try to fulfill Mr. Broad’s ambitions. By the end of the year, the company expects to begin demolition for the first phase of a $2.05 billion mixed-use project along Grand Avenue, opposite the Walt Disney Concert Hall.

Designed by the concert hall’s architect, Frank Gehry, the Grand Avenue development will echo the Time Warner Center in some respects — the plans call for a five-star 275-room Mandarin Oriental Hotel, luxury condominiums, restaurants run by celebrity chefs and an upscale food market. But it is also expected to feature terraces and rooftop gardens to take advantage of the mild climate, the developers say.

Included in the $750 million first phase, which extends from First to Second Streets and reaches 35 feet from Grand Avenue to Olive Street, are 400 condominiums in two towers, 48 and 24 stories respectively, to be priced at around $1,000 a square foot or higher; 100 apartments devoted to families earning less than $35,000 a year; 284,000 square feet of retail space; and a 16-acre park linking the Music Center and City Hall to replace an unused swath of sloping green space near the government buildings.

As part of an agreement with community groups and public officials, Related Companies is to advance $50 million of its ground-lease rent toward the cost of the park. The agreement also requires Related and its tenants to meet specified hiring and wage goals and to set aside one-fifth of the units for low- and moderate-income residents. In exchange, officials have agreed to just under $100 million in subsidies, principally from hotel tax revenues, said William A. Witte, the president of Related California.

The City Council and County Board of Supervisors recently gave their blessing to the project, and Mr. Gehry said he expects to complete the design in June.

Rather than compete with his concert hall, with its billowing stainless-steel walls, the glassy Grand Avenue development should play a “supporting role,” Mr. Gehry said, adding that “you don’t put a bunch of iconic buildings one next to the other.” With construction costs rising, the architect said he has had to “adjust the project to that reality” by, for example, searching for less-expensive materials.

Unlike the planned Atlantic Yards development near downtown Brooklyn, which is Mr. Gehry’s other major urban project, Grand Avenue has engendered few fireworks. But some opponents maintain that subsidies are not justified for a project intended primarily for wealthy residents. They say the developer is already getting a break on the land.

Joel Kotkin, a Los Angeles resident and author of “The City: A Global History,” also argues that Los Angeles is a decentralized place with a number of lively downtowns, including Santa Monica, Pasadena and West Hollywood. In his view, the city would do better to nurture organic downtown neighborhoods, like its fashion district, “instead of replicating experiences you can get anywhere.”

But Mr. Broad said that piecemeal development of the city- and county-owned sites would have been a mistake. “I was fearful we would have unplanned development there that would create a mess,” he said. He also said that allowing the developer to define the project ensured that it would be economically workable. “You’ve got to find a developer that’s got the experience to make it work from a commercial point of view,” he said. “Without understanding what is going to work financially, you end up with no project.”

Since 1999, when the local zoning ordinance was changed to allow residential conversion of older office buildings, more than 1,500 units of housing have been built or are under construction downtown, said Carol E. Schatz, the president of the Los Angeles Downtown Center Business Improvement District.

About 29,000 people live downtown, many of them young, well-paid single people who walk to work, according to a recent survey. They are also urban pioneers who are undaunted by the many homeless people who camp out downtown. The new residents are also willing to drive five miles or more to shop for groceries. In July, however, a long-awaited 50,500-square-foot Ralph’s Fresh Fare supermarket is to open at Ninth and Flower Streets, said Terry O’Neill, a spokesman for the chain.

For the first time in memory, a number of office tenants, including Perkins Coie, a law firm, and Psomas, an engineering firm, have been migrating from the West Side to downtown, where rents are cheaper, said H. Carl Muhlstein, an executive vice president at Cushman & Wakefield.

These rents are rising, yet vacancies also increased last year, from 11.9 percent to 15.2 percent. Mr. Muhlstein attributed the rise in vacancies to the consolidation of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s headquarters and the merger of Sanwa Bank and Tokai Bank.

In addition to Grand Avenue, another megadevelopment is planned for downtown Los Angeles — a $2.5 billion entertainment and retail complex known as L.A. Live, which is under construction next to the Staples Center. Developed by the arena’s owner, AEG, it is expected to cater to sports and pop music fans and offer some of the flash of Times Square.

The Related project, by contrast, is designed to appeal to older, more affluent residents, including international buyers and others seeking a downtown pied-à-terre offering hotel services and restaurants. “That’s something that L.A. hasn’t seen,” Mr. Witte said.

Related Companies has not announced any retail leases yet, although Kenneth A. Himmel, the chief executive of Related Urban, said two potential anchor tenants for the freestanding retail structures were talking with Mr. Gehry.

Rick J. Caruso, the developer of the Grove, the popular open-air retail and entertainment center near the Farmers Market at Third Street and Fairfax Avenue, said Related was unlikely to have a problem attracting a supermarket and other stores to serve its residents. But he said downtown might not be ready for larger retailers that need to draw from a large base of customers. “The jury is still out on the retail,” Mr. Caruso said.

The Grand Avenue project is getting started at a time when the market for high-end condos appears to be softening. In December, KB Homes withdrew from its partnership with AEG to build a 54-story hotel and condominium project at L.A. Live. A planned condominium tower designed by Thom Mayne at Broadway and 11th Street was shelved after it was unable to attract financing. And Standard Pacific Corporation abandoned plans to buy a new building near Union Station and sell its 272 units as condominiums. But Mr. Witte said projects that faltered were not in desirable locations. “The best-located projects are doing very well,” he said.

Victor B. MacFarlane, a managing principal of MacFarlane Partners, one of Related’s investment partners in Grand Avenue, said he was not worried about the market’s long-term prospects.

“There’s no question that the condo market right now is softer,” he said. “But we believe that in two or three years it will be different. We believe that downtown L.A. is for real and not just a flash-in-the-pan trend.”
__________________
DTLA Rising
Reply With Quote
     
     
  #37  
Old Posted Apr 19, 2007, 7:48 PM
danparker276's Avatar
danparker276 danparker276 is offline
Registered User
 
Join Date: Oct 2005
Posts: 489
Curbed is reporting that they're gonna film the new bachlor at 1100. They gonna live and film there. Should be fun.
__________________
www.loftla.com
Reply With Quote
     
     
  #38  
Old Posted Apr 19, 2007, 10:35 PM
colemonkee's Avatar
colemonkee colemonkee is offline
Ridin' into the sunset
 
Join Date: Nov 2004
Location: Los Angeles
Posts: 9,093
^ You should already be plotting on how to pilfer some of the bachelorettes...
__________________
"Then each time Fleetwood would be not so much overcome by remorse as bedazzled at having been shown the secret backlands of wealth, and how sooner or later it depended on some act of murder, seldom limited to once."

Against the Day, Thomas Pynchon
Reply With Quote
     
     
  #39  
Old Posted Apr 19, 2007, 11:31 PM
LosAngelesBeauty's Avatar
LosAngelesBeauty LosAngelesBeauty is offline
Registered User
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Los Angeles
Posts: 6,610
Post

ARCHITECTURE

The loft re-imagined
Razor wire and Zen gardens. Graffiti and secure parking. Loft life in Los Angeles is both edgy and comfortable -- a hybrid style of urban living that's all our own.
By Christopher Hawthorne
Times Staff Writer

April 19, 2007

THERE is no single block that neatly sums up the way downtown Los Angeles is being transformed, condo by condo and loft by loft, into a place with real residential character. Just as there are many downtowns — South Park, Little Tokyo, the historic core, skid row — there are many architectural responses to the idea of downtown living in this city.

But three residential developments on a stretch of Industrial Street, just off 7th Street near the L.A. River, come pretty close.

At the corner of Industrial and Mateo streets stands the Toy Factory Lofts, a solid, broad-shouldered building offering views of the downtown skyline two miles or so to the northwest. Across Industrial are the Biscuit Company Lofts, a 1925 Nabisco factory that has been impressively transformed by architect Aleks Istanbullu into 104 narrow, high-ceilinged units, about 70% of which have been sold. And just up the street is the site of a new building, the Mill Street Lofts, a $40-million, 16-story project designed by German firm Behnisch Architects and scheduled to open in early 2009.

Together, the projects, built by developer Linear City, span the architectural range between adaptive reuse and ground-up construction. They suggest how the concept of "loft living," invented in New York City two generations ago, has been transformed — some would say deformed beyond recognition — by coming into contact with Los Angeles. (That deformation is especially acute in the case of the Mill Street Lofts, since a new loft building — creating from scratch what was once by definition a conversion — is basically a contradiction in terms.)

These projects have begun to create a micro-neighborhood whose personality feels vital, organic and entirely artificial at the same time. For all those reasons, as I spent the last couple of weeks visiting nearly a dozen loft and condo buildings downtown, Industrial Street was the place I kept coming back to.



I didn't conceive of this exploration with any particularly high-toned goals in mind. I was mostly interested in feeling the shifting ground of downtown L.A. beneath my feet.

But as it turned out, visiting the projects in person, not as an architecture critic with publicists and designers in tow but simply as a prospective renter or buyer, revealed quite a bit about where the overlapping strands of architecture, history, real estate and marketing come together downtown. .

Though I didn't run into soccer star David Beckham and his wife, Victoria "Posh Spice" Beckham, who have reportedly purchased a penthouse in the Biscuit Lofts in advance of Becks' debut with the Los Angeles Galaxy, I found in each building a variation on the same ritual. A sales agent, usually in his or her 20s, relatively attractive and seemingly bored, handed me a sheaf of fliers and floor plans ("the literature") along with a business card and led me through an affectless tour of "the property."

For a while, my tour was shaping up as a complete jumble. There were soft lofts (those with separate, closed-off bedrooms) and hard lofts (big, open spaces), apartments and condos. But in the midst of all that variety, as I stumbled from one downtown to another, a strange pattern began to emerge in these new residential buildings.

What I discovered is that the lack of a coherent architectural vision of what it means to live downtown — ambivalence, in short — is actually part of the sales package. It may, in fact, be the very heart of the sales package.

And so at the Library Court building at the corner of Hope and 6th streets, an old building restored and rebuilt by talented architect Brenda Levin, there is the strong smell of urine on the sidewalk out front and, inside, a business center overlooking a "Zen garden." Out front, the facade attempts a complicated contextual juggling act, trying its best to cram in references to the skyscrapers, hotels and low-slung offices that surround it.

At the 2121 lofts in the Arts District, where a view of the L.A. River's graffiti-covered concrete bed is part of the package, there are hard edges and "distressed" floors, but also an herb garden and a promise from the sales agent that the razor wire wreathing the parking lot will guarantee that there is no "intruder access." In other words, part of what you are buying is a tiny, manageable bit of roughness, but please be assured that nobody is going to steal your Prius.

The 2121 building — actually, it is more of a compound, with connected warehouses — was also the backdrop for an entertaining bit of symbolism. When I drove up to the sales office, I had to dodge a forklift whose operator was trying to maneuver between parked cars.

Aha! I thought. The collision of industry and residential living! But then I looked more closely and realized the forklift belonged to the Modernica warehouse across the alley, which assembles the very same Eames chairs that will be filling the lofts here and across downtown. What I saw wasn't a collision but some weird kind of synergy.

Finally, at the turquoise Eastern Columbia building on Broadway — one of the most beautiful pieces of architecture in the city, a building that would be world-famous if it were located in Manhattan or San Francisco instead of downtown Los Angeles — I noticed that the developer, the Kor Group, has covered the ground-floor windows with sales banners trumpeting the fact that the project stands "at the intersection of concrete and cashmere."

Of course, the combination of edginess and amenity has always been at the heart of the loft aesthetic. But it gets an extra couple of twists in Los Angeles, where confusion about history, centrality, authenticity and indigenous style has long reigned.



IN New York City, where the concept of "loft living" was invented by artists and other creative types who ventured below Houston Street in the 1960s in search of high ceilings and low rents, the progress of gentrification has moved consistently from the inside out, from the center to the periphery. When the New York Times reported on the state of the loft scene in 1987, the piece carried this headline: "Manhattan's Fringes Getting Voguish."

But in Los Angeles, it's not the fringes that are getting voguish these days but the downtrodden, overlooked, still vaguely ghost-town-like neighborhoods that make up large sections of the downtown core. Or, to put it another way, our center became the fringe over the last 50 years. And now it's getting center-ish again.

The shadow of downtown's residential past — people did live there once, in great numbers, particularly on Bunker Hill — can also be glimpsed on many blocks. That makes the process now unfolding here less about colonization or gentrification than about adding another layer of architecture to a part of the city that has more history than we like to admit.

A bigger difference between New York and L.A., when it comes to loft living, has to do simply with space. In New York, loft dwellers, if they were artists, sought out old industrial buildings to get more room to paint or make sculpture. For others, a high-ceilinged, light-filled loft close to the tip of Manhattan (even if it meant living illegally or without a doorman) was better than a cramped apartment uptown. And indeed it is these same desires — more space, more light — that have always driven the real estate market in New York.

But in Los Angeles the process has been reversed. For most prospective loft buyers, moving downtown will mean giving up space — and a backyard and a garage. This is a gigantic mental shift, because Los Angeles has been based for virtually all its short history on the fact that you can live like a sprawling suburbanite, with four cars and a huge lawn, in the middle of one of the biggest, most dynamic cities in the world. The shift is so great, in fact, that I'm sometimes surprised that any downtown lofts have been sold at all, except maybe to relocating Manhattanites.

Add to that the way the tastes of loft dwellers have changed in 20 years since that New York Times headline, and you're left in downtown Los Angeles with a strange architectural recipe. It is a mixture, as I discovered these last two weeks, of suburban taste and Dwell magazine taste, of a desire for comfort, style and freedom from convention at the same time. It's then salted with some speculative zeal and watered down with anxiety about the state of the residential market as a whole.



OF course, one explanation for this jumbled portrait has to do with the rising prices for these projects. Five years ago, residents of Los Angeles' downtown were wedded to the notion of living downtown. They moved here because it was somewhat undiscovered and affordable, and they were enrolling at Sci-Arc or they wanted to be near the Music Center after they retired.

But these days, putative downtown dwellers also may be real estate consumers who are thinking about moving to Culver City or Los Feliz. They may be considering a single-family house or a prefab along with lofts and condos. They may want to rent out their new place or flip it.

And so as they shop for places, they want to hear that they are pioneers, seeing the future more clearly than the lemmings buying condos in West Hollywood or Santa Monica. They want to see visual confirmation, in the form of actual, unimproved landscape, of their pioneer status: a little barbed wire, views of onramps and warehouse roofs, staircases made of corroded metal that clangs satisfyingly underfoot. They want to be reminded that they are here because they are actively rejecting the comforting historicism and the infantilizing, Disneyland quality of the architecture at a place like, say, the Medici apartments just on the western edge of downtown. They want to see some people like themselves on the sidewalk — but not too many people like themselves.

They also want parking spaces. (At nearly every building I visited, the sales agent began the tour with a lengthy spiel about parking. Either the large number of parking spaces was lauded or the limited amount was defended.) They want high-end kitchen appliances and countertops and a nice shower head. They want to know when that Ralphs supermarket is going to open, already. What they're looking for, in sum, is some mixture of authenticity and amenity, real history and faux history, risk offset by various kinds of reward.

Which brings us back to Industrial Street.

Shaded not by trees but by the hulking loft buildings themselves, Industrial Street brings to mind a block in SoHo or Tribeca. The street, with its ground-floor shops in the Toy Lofts building, including the Royal Claytons restaurant at the corner of Industrial and Mateo streets, and more to come inside the Biscuit Lofts, is a very pleasant street to walk on.

And it's not just the architecture that makes it so. It is also the fact that the developer teamed up with the city to widen the sidewalks and turn Industrial into a one-way street. (For a while, Linear tried to close off the whole block to cars and create a pedestrian plaza.) Just as in the lofts upstairs, the proportions of the new streetscape show signs of careful, skilled manipulation.

That means this new miniature neighborhood, which will be home to about 1,000 people once the Behnisch Architects building is complete, is essentially a stage set. It is a place for young Angelenos with some money in the bank (and a good number of Brits, if the rumors about the Beckhams and the number of bumper stickers I saw proclaiming allegiance to Premier League soccer clubs are any indication) to act out their ideas of urban living.

As a developer, if you have to change the traffic flow and the sidewalk width along with the loft interiors to make a project work, it becomes tough to claim you are selling a piece of historic architecture or even that you respect architectural history more than your competitors do. What you're doing is closer, it seems to me, to architectural husbandry, cross-breeding the new with the old, the commercial with the residential, to produce some loft-like hybrid.

But if Industrial Street is a stage set, it's a very effective one, a superb mixture of New Urbanist values, whip-smart design and urban grit. (Even the name is perfect.) And in a city that knows something about stage sets — both the literal, movie-business kind and the kind that architects have created here in homage to all sorts of historic styles — I'm guessing it will prove to be hugely popular. If I were one of Linear's competitors, I'd be down there right now taking notes.

christopher.hawthorne@latimes.com
__________________
DTLA Rising
Reply With Quote
     
     
  #40  
Old Posted Apr 21, 2007, 12:33 AM
DJM19 DJM19 is offline
Registered User
 
Join Date: Jan 2005
Posts: 2,518
This guy is now my hero, and I think every politician would just listen to him on this one:

Mining money out of downtown space
April 20, 2007
Rick Wartzman

ONLY a sap, it seems, would believe that you can pull money out of thin air.

But an interesting proposal is floating around L.A. that would, in effect, do just that — and it might well work, raising meaningful sums for worthwhile aims such as affordable housing.

The basic idea is not too different from the city's move this month to sell 9 million square feet of unused "air rights" from over the Convention Center, easing the way for developers operating elsewhere downtown to make their buildings taller. These deals are expected to generate as much as $200 million for the city over many years.

The matter stirred a bit of controversy when Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and the City Council clashed over how much say he'd have in picking projects spurred by the plan. But the council compromised, and the mayor signed off.

Now, developer Paul Solomon is asking: Why stop there?

A partner in the firm Linear City — which has built the Toy Factory Lofts and the Biscuit Co. Lofts at the southern edge of the Arts District — Solomon is urging L.A. officials to permit bigger structures through a giant swath of the urban core.

Specifically, he's hoping the city will authorize, on average, a quadrupling of what's known in real estate parlance as the floor area ratio, or FAR. That's the square footage in a building compared with that of the lot it sits on. The FAR here is currently 1.5 to 1.

City officials have the ability to do this, though they'd have to navigate their way around Proposition U, a slow-growth initiative that voters passed in 1986. Solomon is convinced that developers would then pay about $20 a square foot for the right to use this extra space. Going bigger, he says, can instantly make the economics of a project more favorable by creating certain efficiencies.

According to a memo that he has shared with the city Planning Department, the mayor's office and members of the council, Solomon figures that his scheme could yield more than $3 billion for L.A. over the next decade or so.

"The numbers are very impressive," says Solomon, sipping coffee at Royal Claytons, the popular restaurant in the Toy Factory building.

Alas, if only it were so easy.

Solomon's concept, not by coincidence, has become part of a larger debate over what a sizable chunk of Los Angeles should look like.

Both sides have dug in hard. One contends that allowing more residential construction in the industrial heart of the city threatens tens of thousands of well-paying manufacturing jobs. The other argues that the area is ripe for high-density housing, which would put people close to where they work and cut down on roadway congestion.

In a sense, though, the jobs-versus-houses dispute is phony. This doesn't have to be a case of either-or.

The smartest course is to encourage a combination of things: factories and warehouses where they're still truly vibrant (and the FAR can stay as is), condos and rentals in those pockets that have ample amenities to support a real neighborhood, and mixed-use buildings such as the Toy Factory Lofts (a model that Solomon wants to have extended throughout the city's manufacturing zone).

There, artists and others occupy live-work units in the upper floors, and an array of businesses — a high-tech company, two bluejeans makers and a small market among them — take up the ground level.

This approach is more limited than what Solomon is calling for. Indeed, he'd like to see the FAR lifted (in some instances to 13 to 1) across a huge expanse, bounded by the 101 Freeway to the north, the 10 to the south, the 110 to the west and the 5 to the east.

The reality, though, is that trying this on such a massive scale isn't going to get anywhere politically. What may fly is upping the FAR on a targeted basis — through the Arts District, say.

Councilman Jose Huizar, for one, is intrigued by the prospects. "I like the idea," he says, but would want to roll it out "more selectively."

Others agree. With increased building size so coveted, "to capture the value … makes sense," says Jane Blumenfeld, a city planner. "Let's do a piece and see what happens."

What would happen, I think, could be quite significant — and here's where the rest of Solomon's strategy comes in. His notion is to have the city put all the money it collects into a special fund that could be used for infrastructure improvements and to subsidize housing for teachers, police officers, firefighters and other city workers, as well as for low-income families. Artists, who Solomon says "started the downtown renaissance," would also get favored treatment.

But he wouldn't use the current affordable-housing system — a regimen of tax-exempt financing, below-market loans and other developer subsidies — to do it.

Instead, he'd have the city take advantage of a law under which it can buy or rent as much as 15% of the units in new projects. With the dough it gets from boosting the FAR, the city can then help directly pay the rents or mortgages of the needy.

Some suggest that even under Solomon's more straightforward formula — and there is a real beauty in its simplicity — many are still bound to balk at having low-income units in their buildings. "Whatever the configuration, you're going to have developers who … moan" about this, says Phil Hart, executive director of the Urban Land Institute's Los Angeles arm.

Other challenges are also sure to surface. There will be those, for instance, who say that the continued focus on downtown development defies the very nature of a horizontal L.A. (But again, this is needlessly either-or. Solomon, who grew up on the Westside, isn't saying this is the only place to build.)

There will be lots of questions, too, about how to parcel out whatever dollars are produced by this plan. Care must also be taken to ensure that bigger buildings and more density don't exacerbate parking problems and strain public services.

Still, Solomon's proposal is wise. L.A., its budget stretched thin, needs money. The time is right for the city to take this as FAR as it can.
Reply With Quote
     
     
This discussion thread continues

Use the page links to the lower-right to go to the next page for additional posts
 
 
Reply

Go Back   SkyscraperPage Forum > Regional Sections > United States > Pacific West
Forum Jump


Thread Tools
Display Modes

Forum Jump


All times are GMT. The time now is 1:28 PM.

     
SkyscraperPage.com - Archive - Privacy Statement - Top

Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.8.7
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, vBulletin Solutions, Inc.