LOS ANGELES | Countywide Project Rundown Megathread

[LA21st]

Originally Posted by ocman_

Been on this forum way too long to get excited on initial renderings anymore. Until they break ground, it's just another Times-Mirror Square project. And if it becomes reality, there's a good chance they make Onni go through the ringer and end up cutting floors, reducing units and adding more parking spaces due to city pressure.

Still, it's great timing with the D line. Frank Gehry thought Wilshire could become LA's linear downtown and if the D line spurs more developments like this, Gehry's prediction might prove to be prescient, but also prove as a successful example of high density developments around transit nodes.

Eveni if it gets knocked down to 30-40 floors (plus the other two towers) it's still a win. Times Mirror Sq was probably delayed by the antidevelopment "activist" crowd that won't be around for this
There's nothing to argue about gentification here.

Those losers dont fight anything west of western.

[sopas ej]

Originally Posted by LA21st

Eveni if it gets knocked down to 30-40 floors (plus the other two towers) it's still a win. Times Mirror Sq was probably delayed by the antidevelopment "activist" crowd that won't be around for this
There's nothing to argue about gentification here.

Those losers dont fight anything west of western.

To be fair, it wasn't anti-development or anti-gentrification activists that delayed the Times Mirror Square development; it was initially delayed because of historic preservationists. Now, I assume it's just market conditions that have delayed (or canceled? Is it still on the table?) the Times Mirror Square development.

If those people you call "losers" don't fight anything west of Western, it's probably because they feel the residents and businesses west of Western are not being disenfranchised by new development.

[caligrad]

^^^ Last I heard, Onni is still in talks with the city about the Times project, its not canceled yet. Just on a hold. They did say " Its not moving forward as its currently planned", because the oh so lovely city planning commission has requested that they do a complete redesign to "Better match the current area around it", so I'm assuming buildings that will somehow pay homage to the Times building. AKA they will have to get a really expensive facade or the buildings will be shrunk down to just one 7-story faux Art Deco design that will look like the Broadway palace apartments.

Originally Posted by ocman_

Been on this forum way too long to get excited on initial renderings anymore. Until they break ground, it's just another Times-Mirror Square project. And if it becomes reality, there's a good chance they make Onni go through the ringer and end up cutting floors, reducing units and adding more parking spaces due to city pressure.

Still, it's great timing with the D line. Frank Gehry thought Wilshire could become LA's linear downtown and if the D line spurs more developments like this, Gehry's prediction might prove to be prescient, but also prove as a successful example of high density developments around transit nodes.

I can almost guarantee they both lose 50-100 feet, which is still very impressive. But, i have hope because if we've all watched Onni the past 10 years in regard to its LA projects, they tend to use one to bankroll the other.

We all were waiting to see which project they would break ground on next, Times mirror or the Arts district. They put their Times Mirror project on hold due to "Inflation and economic environment" yet spent the time and money to put this project together, they even have floor plans and electrical/plumbing/hvacs systems detailed. Lets be honest, what's easier to market right now? Mid Wilshire or Downtown?

They seemed to be more optimistic about their arts district project briefly but I'm almost certain they are waiting to see if the city is serious about adding the metro Arts station and to see what happens with the 4th/Central project.

BUT, if they shift all their attention to this instead, which seems like it may be the case, they are going to market high (Celebrities and the rich will JUMP on being in the middle of the city with sweeping views), and whatever profit out of this will help bankroll the other 2.

Originally Posted by FoldingBoxes

The key, then, is moving north and south from Wilshire, near the D line stops (in addititon to Century City and Beverly Hills). I hear The Grove mentioned as being "near" the D line, but it's really not - it's an unpleasant walk between the two. What, and where, will be the "bump" from the D line that will create a new hub, and not just a stop on the subway?

I wouldn't call it unpleasant. I did it Tuesday, I timed it as i reached street level, took me about 9 minutes and a few second, the Park La Brea side is lined with trees which was great.

[LA21st]

Originally Posted by sopas ej

To be fair, it wasn't anti-development or anti-gentrification activists that delayed the Times Mirror Square development; it was initially delayed because of historic preservationists. Now, I assume it's just market conditions that have delayed (or canceled? Is it still on the table?) the Times Mirror Square development.

If those people you call "losers" don't fight anything west of Western, it's probably because they feel the residents and businesses west of Western are not being disenfranchised by new development.

Cities change everywhere. It's not some LA thing. Fighting development is stupid, as it limits housing supply for everyone, causing everyone to pay more.
THey're just being ignorant about it.

I think they are losers and they hurt the city from moving forward. If they dont like the change, they can move. Nobodys forcing them to live in LA
They're the same people trying to block the Little Tokyo development and LYING about it. I'd call that loser behavior, lying to get what you want. Like the ULA crowd, who had to LIE about
what that policy really is.
They can kick rocks to Texas, I don't give a shit. Leave already. I'm tired of them thinking LA is some small town because they feel nostalgia or some crap.

[caligrad]

^^^ I agree, especially for the idiots trying to block the 4th Central project ( who are also complaining about a lack of housing in the area).

There needs to be a law or something in place for when politicians/special interest purposely lie about how anything regarding the progress of a city. The current argument of "These new condo/apartment towers are only for the wealthy". You're right, it's to lure these people out of cheaper units and into units that most cant afford.

I've brought up this example before but i have a friend who makes well over 6 figures... He lives in Hawthorne.... He's currently paying 1400 for a 2 bedroom but could EASILY pay 5k a month if not more for a condo/luxury rental. He stays because "Well where else am i going to go? other buildings lease up quick and I'm not joining multiple wait lists". That 1400 apartment could easily go to someone whos paying double while living paycheck to paycheck.

[LA21st]

Originally Posted by caligrad

^^^ I agree, especially for the idiots trying to block the 4th Central project ( who are also complaining about a lack of housing in the area).

There needs to be a law or something in place for when politicians/special interest purposely lie about how anything regarding the progress of a city. The current argument of "These new condo/apartment towers are only for the wealthy". You're right, it's to lure these people out of cheaper units and into units that most cant afford.

I've brought up this example before but i have a friend who makes well over 6 figures... He lives in Hawthorne.... He's currently paying 1400 for a 2 bedroom but could EASILY pay 5k a month if not more for a condo/luxury rental. He stays because "Well where else am i going to go? other buildings lease up quick and I'm not joining multiple wait lists". That 1400 apartment could easily go to someone whos paying double while living paycheck to paycheck.

These groups meddle into city policy than any other city it seems like.
I can't stand them. Little Tokyo development isnt displacing anyone, yet they just lie and lie that it is. Theyre awful people.
They'd rather have skid row look like trash to the entire world than any improvements near or in it for some case of a "moral high ground". Just shockingly disgusting people.

[citywatch]

• Video Link

[ocman_]

edited

[craigs]

Somehow I missed this article from last month. The whole article is worth reading.

Downtown L.A.’s cratering real estate market is changing — rich renters are buying their buildings


Some very large renters are taking advantage of the depressed office market and buying their own building. The LADWP is considering buying 865 S. Figueroa St. in downtown Los Angeles. (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

Roger Vincent
Los Angeles Times
April 3, 2026

• Downtown L.A. office buildings are plummeting in value as vacancy rates soar, creating opportunities for major tenants to purchase their properties instead of renting.
• Entities like Capital Group, Riot Games and L.A. County are buying office buildings, converting record vacancies into ownership opportunities.
• Owner-users now account for nearly half of downtown office deals as investors capitalize on bargain prices triggered by the pandemic-era office market collapse.

As the office market bottoms out after a long fall, renters are swooping in to buy their own buildings.

Occupant businesses are seizing the opportunity to become owners, especially in downtown Los Angeles, where glittering high-rises have plummeted in value since occupancy dropped during the pandemic. It has never fully recovered, but investors believe the market has at least stabilized.

Among the latest to snag a skyscraper is fund manager Capital Group, which has agreed to pay about $210 million for the 55-story Bank of America Plaza atop Bunker Hill, where it has offices. Others choosing to buy over rent include Riot Games and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.

“We knew the best landlord we could possibly have would be ourselves,” Capital Group Chief Executive Mike Gitlin said.
. . . .


Renters are taking advantage of the depressed office market and buying their own building, including Bank of America Plaza at 333 S. Hope St. which was just purchased by investment firm Capital Group. (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)


The depressed office market in downtown Los Angeles has some renters looking to buy their own buildings. (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

[citywatch]

https://youtu.be/jYGiEqSbJ5Q?si=CN1H7LmrfGt4fQUB

Residents living near a cluster of vacant buildings in downtown Los Angeles say they are increasingly worried after several nearby properties caught fire in recent months — including one blaze that erupted just feet from their apartment complex.

"It was really hot in there. I had to back up at one point. It felt like I was almost melting," said resident Alex Paulson, who recorded the fire on his cellphone. In the video, Paulson can be heard yelling, "My building is about to catch on bleeping fire."

Another resident said the fires appear to be becoming more common on the block. "Two buildings on this street, this right here, it’s like this whole block is going that way," the neighbor said.

When asked what may be causing the fires, one resident speculated transients could be involved, though investigators have not announced a cause.

In a statement to FOX 11, Los Angeles City Councilmember Ysabel Jurado said residents in the South Park neighborhood "deserve to feel safe in their homes and in the neighborhoods around them." Jurado said her office is working with city departments to identify problem properties in the area and push for stronger enforcement involving unsecured or neglected buildings.

• Video Link


Clearing land for future devlp in South Pk will help make it less, 'get me the hell outta here!" Some ppl say bunker hill shouldn't have been torn down starting in the late 1950s, early 1960s. However, based on old pics, most of it wasn't historic victorian mansions....most of it was like the properties throughout south park, although there were more old apt bldgs instead of warehouses. But the arts dist has managed to go to the next level by the reuse of old bldgs...but even there new devlpt during the past 10-20 yrs has also been a part of it getting better.

[citywatch]

reddit, r/LosAngeles, 2 yr ago
Why are the fountains in Downtown never working?
I’ve lived here since 2020 and I swear I’ve never seen any fountains turned on. Grand Park, Grand Hope Park, Maguire Gardens (in front of the library), Pershing Square… all of them are dry.

The only fountains I’ve seen with water in them are the ones at Bunker Hills Steps and City National Plaza. What gives?

May 2011....

• Video Link


May 7, 2026...

After being shut down almost four years ago, the Mulholland Fountain at Los Feliz Boulevard and Riverside Drive now has a tentative reopening date of 2028. At least that’s the goal, according to Michael Ventre, a spokesperson for the L.A. Department of Water and Power.

“LADWP is in the process of securing a design consultant with specialized expertise in historical fountain restoration, which is a niche field with limited available professionals,” Ventre said.

The fountain has been closed since summer 2021, when severe flood damage hit the fountain’s pump room. Repairs were supposed to begin in autumn of 2024. Officials announced $5 million in repairs and restoration to the fountain and surrounding walkways and benches. That never happened.

The fountain needs upgrades to all its working components, according to the project website. Construction is now scheduled to begin in the second half of 2026.

13 yrs ago...

• Video Link


Last summer, & also way before then too...

https://www.youtube.com/live/chFt6JW4c5g?si=zO_AiD5j5nZyDBiQ&t=1439



Meanwhile, in washington DC, one of its pools was finally repaired, but it also took a long time...

https://youtube.com/shorts/ZbC0Ml2AdQc?si=FnpgSDLXpDECHKXO

and the one in Sacramento, although hardly like the bellagio in vegas, took forever to be fixed too....

https://youtu.be/97Y934GcQ7w?si=rC16kp_GMyYCAo2D

[citywatch]

Vogue, Annie Leibovitz


The 11-acre Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, which centers on hundreds of pieces of illustration from Lucas and Hobson’s collection and which opens in September after lavish overruns in time and budget, is the most ambitious project to date from a couple whose lives are studded with them. But it is also, in Lucas’s perception, the culmination of his life’s study—an answer to the question that he started with some 50 years ago. We haven’t waited long when an open vehicle pulls up, like a Star Wars landspeeder. (It’s actually a golf cart.)

The structure where we find ourselves is towering with rich wood paneling and almost entirely devoid of right angles. Its ceiling sweeps down; its grand staircases twist. A set of central elevators are threaded through glass tubes. The museum’s façade—its carapace, really—was designed using a process called parametric modeling, which enables its shape to be molded like Play-Doh.



Vogue, Annie Leibovitz


In the press, the museum has been described as a gift to the city of Los Angeles, a euphemistic way of saying that Lucas and Hobson are not just designing but paying for it, at a bill of around a billion dollars. Their friends describe the financial outlay as the least of their commitments. “ I know a lot of people who create—I guess the main part of my life has been with people who are creating—but I’ve not really worked with people who have created something to this scale,” says the designer Stella McCartney, who has known both Hobson and Lucas for years. “ I wouldn’t even call it a project, because that’s just not big enough a word. It’s like another limb for them.”



Vogue, Annie Leibovitz


Most museum gift shops, they were surprised to find, lose money. Lucas thought he could do better. “I know about licensing and merchandising,” he tells me in confidential tones, as if it were a secret. Alongside items tied to the museum collection, the shop will sell Star Wars merchandise. The museum’s attitude toward the famous franchise might be called pragmatic: It is emphatically not a Star Wars museum, but neither does it avoid what might get people in the door to discover, say, the 20th-century illustrator Maxfield Parrish.



Vogue, Annie Leibovitz


We walk past two 299-seat movie theaters that, on their own, stand as some of the finest screening spaces in America. The screens are huge. The ambient lighting can be set to any color. Each theater is a discrete acoustic structure, suspended on enormous springs and rubber isolators, so that the booming sound of an action scene in one will be inaudible to audiences enjoying a quiet moment next door. Lucas calls the theaters “galleries,” to put them on par with the other rooms; all through the course of a normal day, one will screen documentaries about artists and filmmakers while the other shows short films, some only a few minutes long.



Vogue, Annie Leibovitz


The Lucas Museum opens at an opportune moment. Los Angeles, in flames less than two years ago, is embarking on a period of rejuvenation. In 2028, the city will host the Summer Olympics. The enormous new David Geffen Galleries for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art opened this past spring (containing no shortage of nonfigurative art). The Lucas Museum, with its lush grounds and education programs, fills a different niche: a place where a whole family can lose an afternoon. (Visitors younger than 18 will be admitted free.)



Vogue, Annie Leibovitz


Its education wing includes a glorious closed-stack library, with a full-length window, lovely reading tables, and tiers of bookshelves—curved, of course—climbing a double balcony. The collection encompasses books about every artist represented, movie-studio design archives that Lucas has spent years rescuing from the rubbish heaps, and 2,000 art books from the collection of Hobson and Lucas’s friend Steve Martin.

The library is accessible even without a museum ticket, and children above the age of 12 can visit unaccompanied. “Growing up, I lived in the library, because my house was very chaotic,” Hobson says. She pauses, then adds quietly, “I pushed for 12.”



Vogue, Annie Leibovitz

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[ethereal_reality]

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STUNNING. I love it.

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[ocman_]

Not much conversation about the "Great Park" planned for Santa Monica airport space. But here's Rios' awful proposal.

https://www.rios.com/projects/santa-monica-airport-park/

I dont understand why LA parks are so over-programmed for sports and activities and art and music and ampitheater and basketball and tennis and soccer and etc. etc. And what the hell is a tech incubator district and why is that needed? And instead of trees, a giant grass lawn that takes up almost half the whole space.

LA parks have attention deficit disorder, or park designed by committee where everyone's input has to be incorporated.

Just copy Central Park in NYC. Mostly trees and gardens, some water features, and small lawns. Say no to most of everyone's stupid suggestions. Think in terms of Olmstead or European parks or San Francisco. They do it better. Embrace convention, and copy it, don't defy it. People romanticize Central Park for a reason.

Considering how Rios designed Gloria Molina park into nothing more than a giant lawn with absolutely no trees that were chosen for shade from the punishing heat, I hope to God they don't get chosen as the park idea progresses closer to reality. Enough with the giant lawns that take up most of the park.

[Radio5]

Melrose triangle has new renderings. Lot better use than retail/office.

https://wehoonline.com/melrose-triangle-community-meeting-west-hollywood/

[Radio5]

Originally Posted by ocman_

Not much conversation about the "Great Park" planned for Santa Monica airport space. But here's Rios' awful proposal.

https://www.rios.com/projects/santa-monica-airport-park/

I dont understand why LA parks are so over-programmed for sports and activities and art and music and ampitheater and basketball and tennis and soccer and etc. etc. And what the hell is a tech incubator district and why is that needed? And instead of trees, a giant grass lawn that takes up almost half the whole space.

LA parks have attention deficit disorder, or park designed by committee where everyone's input has to be incorporated.

Just copy Central Park in NYC. Mostly trees and gardens, some water features, and small lawns. Say no to most of everyone's stupid suggestions. Think in terms of Olmstead or European parks or San Francisco. They do it better. Embrace convention, and copy it, don't defy it. People romanticize Central Park for a reason.

Considering how Rios designed Gloria Molina park into nothing more than a giant lawn with absolutely no trees that were chosen for shade from the punishing heat, I hope to God they don't get chosen as the park idea progresses closer to reality. Enough with the giant lawns that take up most of the park.

Agreed. How many basketball courts and soccer fields do we need. It's insane. But it's not Rios, it's the city directive.

[craigs]

Originally Posted by ocman_

Not much conversation about the "Great Park" planned for Santa Monica airport space. But here's Rios' awful proposal.

https://www.rios.com/projects/santa-monica-airport-park/

I dont understand why LA parks are so over-programmed for sports and activities and art and music and ampitheater and basketball and tennis and soccer and etc. etc. And what the hell is a tech incubator district and why is that needed? And instead of trees, a giant grass lawn that takes up almost half the whole space.

LA parks have attention deficit disorder, or park designed by committee where everyone's input has to be incorporated.

Just copy Central Park in NYC. Mostly trees and gardens, some water features, and small lawns. Say no to most of everyone's stupid suggestions. Think in terms of Olmstead or European parks or San Francisco. They do it better. Embrace convention, and copy it, don't defy it. People romanticize Central Park for a reason.

Considering how Rios designed Gloria Molina park into nothing more than a giant lawn with absolutely no trees that were chosen for shade from the punishing heat, I hope to God they don't get chosen as the park idea progresses closer to reality. Enough with the giant lawns that take up most of the park.

Honestly, I wish the SM airport land could be turned into hyper-dense housing, but parks are fetishized by the NIMBYs so that is what we'll get.

As for the space we now call Gloria Molina Grand Park, it was much, much worse before the redesign. It used to be just a big empty space. Today, it is a series of small-to-midsized lawns and hardscape plazas with softscape features. Agreed there are not enough trees, but because there are parking levels right beneath the surface, it was never going to have the deep tree canopy of a Golden Gate Park or Central Park. It serves a unique purpose as the region's big, central outdoor gathering/event space, for things like protests and fireworks shows.

[LA21st]

Originally Posted by Radio5

Melrose triangle has new renderings. Lot better use than retail/office.

https://wehoonline.com/melrose-triangle-community-meeting-west-hollywood/

Much better!

[craigs]

Originally Posted by LA21st

Much better!

Wow, you're not kidding. This is an excellent proposal and a great fit for the area. I hope they can get approved before they are required to fill the hole back in as WeHo has demanded.

[Radio5]

Originally Posted by craigs

Wow, you're not kidding. This is an excellent proposal and a great fit for the area. I hope they can get approved before they are required to fill the hole back in as WeHo has demanded.

I think they are already started to backfill it no? Which is absurd. But haven't been there in a while