LOS ANGELES | Downtown Project Rundown 6.0

[citywatch]

^ I think Eric Garcetti cared about LA in a generally similar manner, but his politics & those of many ppl around him have become corrupted or distorted (see last line below).

LA is pouring billions of dollars into things like this, but if city officials & others don't get a handle on things....which negatively affects devlpt patterns in LA....a lot of potential will be lost.

Dtla for over 60 yrs has increasingly become cut off from where money & the ppl & businesses associated with them end up in the LA basin. If transit lines don't really change that, the future of dt is going to be a tougher sell.

Drug use is rampant in the Metro system. Since January, 22 people have died on Metro buses and trains, mostly from suspected overdoses — more people than all of 2022. Serious crimes soared 24% last year compared with the previous.

“Horror.” That’s how one train operator recently described the scenes he sees daily. He declined to use his name because he was not authorized to talk to the media.

“We don’t even see any businesspeople anymore. We don’t see anybody going to Universal. It’s just people who have no other choice [than] to ride the system, homeless people and drug users.”

Commuters have abandoned large swaths of the Metro train system. Even before the pandemic, ridership in the region was never as high as other big-city rail systems. For January, ridership on the Gold Line was 30% of the prepandemic levels, and the Red Line was 56% of them. The new $2.1-billion Crenshaw Line that officials tout as a bright spot with little crime had fewer than 2,100 average weekday boardings that month.

The Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority reported that between November and January there were 26 medical emergencies at the station, the majority of them suspected drug overdoses. Last year, there were six deaths and one shooting, nearly all related to suspected drug activity. Earlier this year, a 28-year-old man was fatally stabbed in a breezeway of the station.

Maintenance crews are often called out for repairs at the station, and when they return to their vehicle they often find it has been burglarized. Gangs control the area and police say many of the informal vendors on the sidewalks are part of the larger drug economy, wittingly or not. Some are forced to pay the gang taxes, others sell stolen property.

The transit agency’s head of security has said she will be asking the 13-member board — that includes Mayor Karen Bass and the county supervisors — to expand the agency’s force of nearly 200 in-house transit officers, some of whom are armed and enforce fare evasion and code of conduct violations.

Some board members and social justice advocates have argued for less policing on the system, saying that racial profiling targets many passengers.

[citywatch]

This bldg is on the SE corner of 9th & Olive Sts & is across the street from the Level apt bldg. But I don't know if this is really good news or not. The AIDS healthcare organization & its owner are notorious for nimby type lawsuits & have a shaky reputation as exploiting ppl & situations....such groups have sometimes been labeled as 'poverty pimps'. But hope for the best & prepare for the worst.

theregistrysocal.com

The historic Insurance Exchange Building in downtown Los Angeles is getting a makeover.

The AIDS Healthcare Foundation, which bills itself as the largest global AIDS organization, has purchased the 99-year-old building under its Healthy Housing Foundation banner to make way for homeless and low-income housing. AHF closed on its purchase of the 12-story building on March 7 for $21.25 million. It will be the first office building that AHF will renovate and adds to the 13 other buildings the organization has purchased or renovated since 2017, the organization said. The new residence will be called Angel Tower and is set to offer 251 new living spaces.

“We know firsthand the fight for affordable housing is fought one door at a time,” said AHF President Michael Weinstein in a news release. “This building offers the potential for two-hundred fifty-one brand-new doors in its incarnation as Angel Tower.”

[craigs]

Another of the epic skyline-snow pics from a few days back, taken very early in the morning and thus with the light coming from the east:


source

[ChelseaFC]

Originally Posted by LosAngelesSportsFan

This! Our city is and has been run by absolute morons and its not getting better

While I will always care about LA because it's where I grew up, it's just not a place that we are bullish on long term, especially when it comes to our desire to raise our kids in a safe yet moderately affordable and clean area. We are a high taxed city (and state) that still has inadequate and unsafe public transportation systems, terrible management, short-sighted governance, bad roads, pollution, unsightly power lines and graffiti, homeless camps, congestion, insufficient green spaces, apartment complexes and SFHs that are falling apart, and just general ugliness. I'm a native though and I will always root for the city to improve.

[wisheye]

Wow this thread took a turn for the negative...

Insane picture craig!

[nmkef]

With regional connector probably 3-4 months away from opening, I'm looking forward to a quick train from south park to little tokyo. It's also going to unlock the lot over the historic broadway station for a proposed (approved?) development, plus whatever they end up getting new proposals for over the little tokyo station itself.

The actual status update from metro on the LT development is pretty meme-worthy:

EWDD initiating process for RFP to hire consultant to write final RFP

https://twitter.com/numble/status/16...358208/photo/1
https://docs.google.com/presentation...34dea045dd_0_6

Other tidbit from that little tokyo group presentation - there will be a new presentation 3/15 (today) by the developer for the huge "cold storage" complex on 4th & Central, old urbanize article detailing it below: https://la.urbanize.city/post/enviro...al-development

[LA21st]

https://la.urbanize.city/post/aids-h...0-w-9th-street

[colemonkee]

Moderator Edit: Lots of posts deleted and warning issued to citywatch. Please stick to the subject of downtown development. No more walking videos of downtown, please. The cause more trouble than good.

[ocman]

Originally Posted by ChelseaFC

While I will always care about LA because it's where I grew up, it's just not a place that we are bullish on long term, especially when it comes to our desire to raise our kids in a safe yet moderately affordable and clean area. We are a high taxed city (and state) that still has inadequate and unsafe public transportation systems, terrible management, short-sighted governance, bad roads, pollution, unsightly power lines and graffiti, homeless camps, congestion, insufficient green spaces, apartment complexes and SFHs that are falling apart, and just general ugliness. I'm a native though and I will always root for the city to improve.

It’s one reason I tend to focus on other things about LA like the art scene, specialized industry sectors, the food scene, and culture. Those are aspects that you can be bullish on in LA. They’re areas of exciting growth and maturation for the city that evolve independently of city hall influence and its related incompetence.

[colemonkee]

More moderator edits. The next forumer to respond with even the slightest personal jab at anyone will be suspended for 2 weeks. The person who responds to that will also be suspended for 2 weeks. If I have to suspend the entire thread, I do not have an issue with doing that.

[MAC123]

^Doesn't that make you feel powerful lol

[citywatch]

• Video Link


This article in the NY times has several pics & over 600 messages from readers about the proj. I guess there was a PR junket about it recently, apparently to indicate work is more active than before...but I'm not exactly why there has been an update. As for the drone shot of the area, the expansion of the south side of the nearby natural history museum can also be seen....good thing too because I long recall that side being a huge blank wall. So this part of Exposition park is finally being made more user friendly.

It was chased out of Chicago by preservationists, only to become the object of a bidding war between Los Angeles and San Francisco. When George Lucas finally decided to build his $1 billion museum in Los Angeles, its arrival was jeered by some critics who saw it not as a civic gift but a vanity project. The museum is “a terrible idea,” wrote Christopher Knight, the art critic for The Los Angeles Times. Since then, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art has been beset by more delays: it is not expected to open until 2025, seven years after ground was first broken on a parking lot across the street from the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum with a promised 2021 opening.

But even in the haze of construction, a seemingly endless swirl of workers, cranes and girders, the enormous scope of the project is coming into focus as its futuristic new home rises in Exposition Park: a grand homage to one of the nation’s best-known filmmakers, and a massive repository for an eclectic collection of 100,000 paintings, photographs, book illustrations and comic book drawings.

Its huge expanse of curving gray metal hovers over the landscape like a low-flying spaceship, or perhaps the unfinished Death Star being built in “Return of the Jedi,” a fitting tribute to its namesake and patron, who created the Star Wars franchise. It stands five stories high, with enough gallery space to fill one-and-a-half football fields, and it takes 15 minutes to walk across its sprawling campus.

“We are committed to creating an incredibly complicated building,” said Sandra Jackson-Dumont, the museum’s director, on a bright and beautiful Los Angeles afternoon as she led a visitor on a tour that, even after a full hour, did not cover all the corners and crannies of the building. “There isn’t a straight line in the whole place.”

On the one hand, the delays, the latest detours on the project’s long road to completion, are a result of a pandemic that has slowed projects across the nation. But the slow pace is also evidence of the dramatic construction and design ambitions brought to this legacy project by Lucas and his wife, Mellody Hobson, the co-chief executive officer of the asset management firm Ariel Investments. That includes more than 1,500 individually fabricated curved panels of fiberglass-reinforced polymer that make up the building’s shell, three starship-like curved-glass elevators, an elliptical oculus, a rooftop garden dotted with full-grown trees and two 299-seat theaters, all resting on 281 seismic base isolators to protect the building — and its valuable collection of art — from a catastrophic earthquake.

“It’s fair to say that the ambition of it has contributed to the time it has taken,” said Michael Siegel, the executive architect. He noted, in particular, the burden of the unique panels. “So you have to design, engineer, fabricate all those extraordinary unique pieces and create a system for assembling them. It’s a monumentally complicated undertaking.”

The 300,000-square-foot Lucas Museum stands out even in a wave of cultural construction that has churned ahead in Los Angeles: the $650 million David Geffen Galleries at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, set to open next year; the 24-year reconstruction of the Hammer Museum that will be completed later this month; and the Academy Museum, which opened in 2021.

Its opening has been pushed back twice, to 2023 and then 2025, reflecting setbacks many projects have suffered during this era of work-stoppages and supply-chain snags caused by the pandemic. “I came here in January 2020,” Jackson-Dumont recalled. “We walked out the door 60 days later with everyone not knowing when we could get back to the office.”

In any event, it seems no corner has been cut and no cost spared. Museum officials said that funding from Lucas and Hobson accounted for any potential cost overruns caused by the pandemic or the complications of the design.

[craigs]

Originally Posted by Blesha13

The crown at 8th and Fig has been installed. Can’t wait to see this bad boy light up at night.

Yes! I was just watching the evening news on KCAL (CBS Channel 5) and the background for the ending segment was a live shot of the downtown skyline--complete with 8th & Fig's lit crown! It looked good on the screen; some of the crown is lit, while other parts are left dark, and the contrast is sharp.

[scania]

Originally Posted by craigs

Yes! I was just watching the evening news on KCAL (CBS Channel 5) and the background for the ending segment was a live shot of the downtown skyline--complete with 8th & Fig's lit crown! It looked good on the screen; some of the crown is lit, while other parts are left dark, and the contrast is sharp.

It must be lit on the front side because I haven’t noticed anything…I can’t wait to get home to see if I see anything.

[colemonkee]

I was at the Natural History Museum at the beginning of the month and finally got to see the area in daylight for the first time in months. The Lucas Museum is chugging along, and the glass is mostly in. Starting to come into shape, but still quite a bit to go. There still weren't any exterior metal panels outside of the glass, which I recall was part of the holdup. The Natural History Museum expansion as citywide mentioned is indeed well underway, as is the Samuel Oschin Air and Space Center, which is the new pavilion to the east that will house the Space Shuttle. It had vertical rebar at ground level clearly visible.

[LosAngelesSportsFan]

Originally Posted by colemonkee

I was at the Natural History Museum at the beginning of the month and finally got to see the area in daylight for the first time in months. The Lucas Museum is chugging along, and the glass is mostly in. Starting to come into shape, but still quite a bit to go. There still weren't any exterior metal panels outside of the glass, which I recall was part of the holdup. The Natural History Museum expansion as citywide mentioned is indeed well underway, as is the Samuel Oschin Air and Space Center, which is the new pavilion to the east that will house the Space Shuttle. It had vertical rebar at ground level clearly visible.

That's great to hear! Those are huge for LA and I really am looking forward to the expo park remodel and further development tying in 3xpo.to downtown LA

[citywatch]

Even before the pandemic, I don't believe dtla's office space over the past 30 yrs has ever enjoyed a single digit vacancy rate. I know at least about 5 to 10 yrs ago, among major mkts in the US, dtla's occupancy rate was similar to the nation's post pandemic rate of today. Since psf rental rates are higher for commercial than residential, office towers are known to generate more return for an owner than apts or condos do. Keep that in mind when wondering why devlpt in dtla has been at the pace it has been & why a proj may be value engineered or not designed to be taller.

Last month, Brookfield DTLA said it defaulted on loans tied to that building and another 52-story property, the Gas Company Tower about a half-mile away. Those defaults could signal pain to come for the 69-million-square-foot downtown L.A. office market, the largest concentration of that property type in the second-biggest U.S. city.

The fallout is arriving three years after the start of the pandemic, which resulted in millions of people working from home and reduced office demand across the United States. Los Angeles is illustrative of the disruption in many major cities, with the average price per square foot for the city's downtown offices rated four or five stars so far in the first quarter at $242, according to CoStar data, less than half the $523 of three years earlier.

"It's an interesting time," said Dave Wald, president of real estate firm Wald Realty Advisors in Los Angeles, "unless you're an investor, lender or sponsor of an office building. Then it's probably horrific."

To be clear, not every office building will run into issues in downtown Los Angeles. That's especially true for newer buildings and those with amenities and space that tenants desire, including gyms, outdoor meeting spots, indoor air quality monitoring systems and rooftop decks. Shifting preferences in downtown L.A. also may create opportunities for other types of uses, such as residential.

KBS has been trying for months to sell its 40-story, roughly 701,000-square-foot Union Bank Plaza office tower at 445 S. Figueroa St. near downtown's financial district neighborhood. Real estate analysts have been tracking the deal to get a read on the health of downtown L.A.'s office market, and its potential sale may help set the value of other downtown office buildings looking to be sold.

So far, the negotiations haven't been promising. KBS has been in talks, and extending those conversations, to close a sale to New York-based private equity firm Waterbridge Capital since July 2022, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. As recently as March 9, the seller gave the buyer another week-long extension with no end to the negotiations in sight.

Union Bank Plaza joins a number of high-profile office sales that have yet to close in downtown Los Angeles from the 62-story Aon Center, downtown's third-tallest building, to the historic 464,000-square-foot PacMutual, a three-building property with its earliest construction dating back to 1908.

Downtown office properties hitting the market come at a time of weakening investor demand. Since March 2020, five properties with more than 100,000 square feet of office space have sold in downtown Los Angeles, according to CoStar data, down from the 11 traded in the prior three years.

The sluggish sales come as downtown office vacancy has risen to 18.7%, the highest level CoStar has recorded. That said, the market was hurting long before the pandemic with high vacancies and less-than-robust leasing activity.

Downtown L.A.'s vacancy is higher than the New York office market's average vacancy of 12.8%, Chicago's average of 15.6% and San Francisco's average of 17.2%. Overall, the average office market vacancy in Los Angeles is 15.1%. The U.S. office vacancy rate is 12.9%, higher than 9.5% at the end of 2019 and the completion of the last full quarter before the pandemic.

Those higher vacancy rates are even hitting traditionally desirable, high-end buildings. The 777 Tower, with a marble-clad lobby and 30-foot ceilings, for instance, was designed by Cesar Pelli & Associates and is located near a mall and a Metro stop in the downtown’s financial district. CoStar Group is a tenant in 777 Tower.

Sean Fulp isn't surprised at what's going on with downtown Los Angeles office buildings. The vice chair and head of Southwest office capital markets for Colliers has seen the downtown office market struggle through down economic cycles. Fulp said there haven't been too many winners on bets made on downtown office buildings over the years, and history is repeating itself again in recent months after working from home cut demand for office space.

On the other side of the equation, tenants have to ask themselves if it's worth inking a low-price deal in a distressed building downtown. Tenants have many office options across greater L.A., including potentially buying buildings. Plus, tenants don't want to get stuck in a situation where they're one of a few companies left in an empty office.

"You don't want to be in that building," Wald said. "It's creepy."

Ultimately, real estate analysts said that office vacancy downtown has some positive aspects. Vacancy may lure a company that wants to create an urban headquarters in Los Angeles, or some distressed offices may be converted into much-needed housing. Other vacant offices could become future educational campuses and healthcare centers.

Jessica Lall, the managing director of CBRE that oversees downtown L.A.'s office, said downtown office space is experiencing a variety of issues right now, causing distress. But before the pandemic, downtown Los Angeles was transforming from a 9-to-5 office market into a place where people wanted to live, work and play.

New restaurants were opening, while apartment towers were being built and leased, leading to a surge of new residents downtown. Los Angeles' downtown population continues to grow, from 78,000 in 2020 to roughly 90,000 now, according to a statement by the Downtown Center Business Improvement District.

Lall said she's optimistic about downtown L.A.'s future. Improvements are on the way to downtown's transportation systems in coming years, including a regional connector project and new stops on L.A. Metro. Plus, downtown will play a role in hosting World Cup soccer matches in 2026 and the Olympics in 2028.

Meanwhile, this devlpt on the former site of the bofa computer ctr bldg has recently completed work. It's another fauxtilian delight...I don't know why the owner, gh palmer, insists that all his bldgs be clones of one another. But, hey, dtla at least has a new decorative fountain! And with all the vacant office space on one side of dt, it's nice knowing that at least there are ppl living in apts on the other side. Plus things like palm trees & swimming pools aren't too common in various other American urban centers.


ferranteapts.com


ferranteapts.com


ferranteapts.com

[craigs]

Downtown LA's office vacancy rate is 18.7%. To put that in context, Oakland's downtown office vacancy rate is 18.6%, and San Francisco's is a whopping 27.6%, according to this article published today by SFGate. Those other two downtowns were essentially full before COVID, so downtown LA is no longer a crazy West Coast outlier in terms of downtown office vacancy rates.

[Zapatan]

Sort of tacky but I dig the Spanish theme.



Is Mitsui's near 600 footer still supposed to start this year?

If that building, times mirror, 1045 and Angel's landing can all be built by the Olympics I'll be impressed.

Throw the Century City projects in there too.



I'm afraid the city corruption scandal may have delayed or killed Angel's Landing though... someone correct me if I'm wrong.

[dax_gray]

Walked around Little Tokyo and snapped some pics.

Forgot about this one right beside Weller Court. Pleasantly surprised with how it turned out.






Bonus:
Weingart Center looks like its really coming along. Didn't expect to see it this tall!