LOS ANGELES | Downtown Project Rundown 4.0

[travanx]

$200 for custom jeans seems really cheap to me. But I have a lot of Japanese denim. I really need to check this place out while they have a sale going on.

Also about that Evoq property. I passed by this on the way home while they were having their party. Our garage entrance faces this building. I thought they were filming another something there. As they have been filming VW commercials on Hope and Flower for the last week and going to film Battlefield on the 14th over here.

Originally Posted by Illithid Dude

EDIT: Also, for those complaining about about the lack of high-end retail downtown (though there isn't), according to Brigham, a new denim place just opened in the historic core. The catch? It's a custom jean place, with each pair running for around $200. Sounds relatively high end to me.

http://denmbar.com/

[pesto]

Originally Posted by edluva

LA would suffer no doubt, but it most definitely wouldn't die. we have a giant port complex and logistics support industry, airports, public agencies, hospitals, refineries, construction, and yes, a small private financial and big public legal sector with all it's attendant bureaucracy

as far as internet and biomed goes, i doubt those sectors will grow to the extent and in the quality that they do to make white collar cities like SF or Boston as appealingly yuppified as they are. not in LA they won't. LA lacks the cluster of research institutes and educated class to do such a thing. it's blue collar, remember?

the biggest thing LA has going for it is it's big. big cities require big amounts of housekeeping work (eg regional hqs, big public service agencies, big school districts, lots of gardeners, lots of plumbers, lots of home depots, lots of taco bells, lots of liquor stores, warehousing to distribute all the junk that people buy at walmart and target, forklift servicers, etc etc), and all this economic activity adds up to a big economy. but being big alone does not produce demand for lots of sleek, pricey office towers.

ed: as usual, just nonsense. Like most other cities LA can't be discussed in a phrase. Even Gary, Indiana, can't be described as "working class" without missing most of what it is like living there. After all, I suppose that Kinshasa, Damascus and LA are mostly "working class", per your analysis.

Why is it that I can live easily and comfortably in SF, SJ, LA and NY? Huge cities have multiple layers of people who interact with some people often, some occasionally and some never. There are artsy groups, techie groups, foodie groups, racing car groups, sewing cirlces, gangs, dog lovers, country clubs, a hundred ethnics speaking 200 languages, etc. Millions and millions of people. Every single one of them unique.

And your best shot is "working class"? Seriously, you could live your whole life in WeHo or most of the westside and never talk to a Teamster. Try to use a somewhat finer approach.

[202_Cyclist]

pesto:

And your best shot is "working class"? Seriously, you could live your whole life in WeHo or most of the westside and never talk to a Teamster. Try to use a somewhat finer approach.

One of the things that determines whether a city is working class versus white collar is the percent of residents with a college or advanced degree. I think LA ranks in the middle of US cities on this, behind DC, Seattle, Boston, and San Francisco.

http://money.cnn.com/2010/10/01/pf/college/Americas_brainiest_cities/index.htm

Southern California for much of the post-WWII era had a large aerospace industry, of course, a source of many white-collar professional jobs, but this is just a fraction of the size it once was. In any large city, however, there will be plenty of professional jobs (attorneys, accountants, doctors).

[Illithid Dude]

Originally Posted by travanx

$200 for custom jeans seems really cheap to me. But I have a lot of Japanese denim. I really need to check this place out while they have a sale going on.

Also about that Evoq property. I passed by this on the way home while they were having their party. Our garage entrance faces this building. I thought they were filming another something there. As they have been filming VW commercials on Hope and Flower for the last week and going to film Battlefield on the 14th over here.

Well, it's all relative. Sure, you can say that $400 for a cashmere Gucci scarf is cheap for a cashmere Gucci scarf, but at the end of the day it is till $400 for a scarf.

And speaking of the high end......

Apparently, sales at the Ritz are ramping up. In Feb 11 units were sold, which, according to Curbed La made for 14.5 million dollars in profit. I could see a few luxury apartment towers being revived (Park Tower, L.A. Central (my god that would be amazing)) if units continue to sell at an increasingly brisk pace. It's seems that in the past few months DTLA has seen more action then all of the last three years combined.

EDIT:

This is big.

http://la.curbed.com/archives/2012/03/wilshire_grand_hotel_going_single_tower_ditching_offices.php



So, they have cancelled the office tower component of Wilshire Grand, and changed developers to AC Martin. However, they are now nearly doubling the hotel component from 450 rooms to 900 rooms (and keeping the residential component of 100 condos, I presume). This means that the entire proposal will look completely different then it does now. I wonder what the new tower will look like... Will it now be a super-tall? Or just have a huge girth? It's all very interesting. Moreover, there is still going to be offices, just not 1.5 million square feet of offices.

[LosAngelesDreamin]

Originally Posted by Illithid Dude

EDIT:

This is big.

http://la.curbed.com/archives/2012/03/wilshire_grand_hotel_going_single_tower_ditching_offices.php



So, they have cancelled the office tower component of Wilshire Grand, and changed developers to AC Martin. However, they are now nearly doubling the hotel component from 450 rooms to 900 rooms (and keeping the residential component of 100 condos, I presume). This means that the entire proposal will look completely different then it does now. I wonder what the new tower will look like... Will it now be a super-tall? Or just have a huge girth? It's all very interesting. Moreover, there is still going to be offices, just not 1.5 million square feet of offices.

i really liked the super tall

[Lovetowers]

Originally Posted by Illithid Dude

Well, it's all relative. Sure, you can say that $400 for a cashmere Gucci scarf is cheap for a cashmere Gucci scarf, but at the end of the day it is till $400 for a scarf.

And speaking of the high end......

Apparently, sales at the Ritz are ramping up. In Feb 11 units were sold, which, according to Curbed La made for 14.5 million dollars in profit. I could see a few luxury apartment towers being revived (Park Tower, L.A. Central (my god that would be amazing)) if units continue to sell at an increasingly brisk pace. It's seems that in the past few months DTLA has seen more action then all of the last three years combined.

EDIT:

This is big.

http://la.curbed.com/archives/2012/03/wilshire_grand_hotel_going_single_tower_ditching_offices.php



So, they have cancelled the office tower component of Wilshire Grand, and changed developers to AC Martin. However, they are now nearly doubling the hotel component from 450 rooms to 900 rooms (and keeping the residential component of 100 condos, I presume). This means that the entire proposal will look completely different then it does now. I wonder what the new tower will look like... Will it now be a super-tall? Or just have a huge girth? It's all very interesting. Moreover, there is still going to be offices, just not 1.5 million square feet of offices.

wow . . . typical . . . but wow

[Dale]

Don't panic. It could still be really tall. 900 rooms. 100 units. Small office component.

[strange_brew]

I don't think this is as bad of news as our first impulses dictate. Korean Air is cutting out it's postponed second phase in favor of a revised and enlarged single phase project. They don't want to be sitting on their hands with a construction site for ten years. The area is clearly hungry for new product. The market has improved. Demand has revived. They want to come out of the gate and meet that demand asap, because it's there and it's ready for it. They're DOUBLING the hotel capacity for goodness sakes! This is a show of confidence in downtown. We're going to see tall towers go up in this city this decade, believe it.

[Illithid Dude]

Yeah, guys. For all we know, the project could still be a supertall. I mean, the original hotel tower was/is 750 feet, and the new development is double the hotel rooms as the old proposal, with extra office space. That could easily be 1000 feet. It's actually very exciting.

EDIT: And I don't know if I mentioned this, but they are still going to keep the same timeline that they had. Wilshire Grand will start demolition this year, and construction of the new buildings should resume shortly afterwards.

[travanx]

What I meant above was that custom denim jeans for $200 is cheap, compared to what Japanese denim costs. The cheapest raw denim jeans I have seen besides Levis start in the $125 range, and those are French and on the lower end. This is exactly why a shop coming into Downtown doing custom clothing targeting a certain demographic is very smart. Pick any of the bars that local people frequent and they are wearing expensive clothing.

I am starting to get sad that we are going to be leaving the city just as all of these projects are about to get underway. We are seeing developers antsy to build asap on projects outside of the City, we are working on as well.

On another happy note, I took this picture after the Kings games the other night at the Blue Line stop. Good stuff.

[alki]

Originally Posted by edluva

LA would suffer no doubt, but it most definitely wouldn't die. we have a giant port complex and logistics support industry, airports, public agencies, hospitals, refineries, construction, and yes, a small private financial and big public legal sector with all it's attendant bureaucracy

as far as internet and biomed goes, i doubt those sectors will grow to the extent and in the quality that they do to make white collar cities like SF or Boston as appealingly yuppified as they are. not in LA they won't. LA lacks the cluster of research institutes and educated class to do such a thing. it's blue collar, remember?

the biggest thing LA has going for it is it's big. big cities require big amounts of housekeeping work (eg regional hqs, big public service agencies, big school districts, lots of gardeners, lots of plumbers, lots of home depots, lots of taco bells, lots of liquor stores, warehousing to distribute all the junk that people buy at walmart and target, forklift servicers, etc etc), and all this economic activity adds up to a big economy. but being big alone does not produce demand for lots of sleek, pricey office towers.

It wasn't always this way..........LA has never been called a 'smart' city like SF or Boston or Austin but it had a significant aerospace industry in the
1980's and early 1990s that got decimated when there were big cutbacks in defense spending in the early 90s. A lot of highly skilled engineers and scientists were in that industry......most of whom left the area.

In fact, from 1990 to 1994, LA lost a huge number of jobs.....nearly a million and over 1.5 million people left the area. Many of them were these aerospace people. It was a nightmare........houses would sit on the market for years and not sell. There was zilch economic growth. I thought the city would never recover.

In fact, LA's economic base has changed dramatically in the last 20 years. IMO the port and Hollywood are far more important now than back then. In addition to aerospace, the city lost a lot of manu. to Mexico, Central America and other cheaper labor markets. That has led to a dramatic slowing in its population growth.

And I agree that biomed/tech won't grow big here for the reasons you cite. However, LA has a huge base from which to pull and can continue to develop as an urban area.

[alki]

Originally Posted by colemonkee

I'm cautiously excited to hear about the resurgence of the 9th and Olive project. I, like everyone else, had written that project off. The redesign is interesting - I dig the top, but the balconies kind of ruin the nice, clean massing of the previous version, especially on the 9th street side. Yuck. Regardless, this along with Angelini (Sonni Astani's project - spelling?) will not only add to that burgeoning neighborhood, but it will start to make the pedestrian connection between the Southpark and the Historic Core.

I agree with you.....the balconies ruin what could be a potentially sleek look for the building. May be if they made the balconies as insets rather than letting them protrude.......the bldg would have worked better. Its hard for developers to leave them out because buyers/renters love their balconies.

[LosAngelesDreamin]

Originally Posted by Illithid Dude

Yeah, guys. For all we know, the project could still be a supertall. I mean, the original hotel tower was/is 750 feet, and the new development is double the hotel rooms as the old proposal, with extra office space. That could easily be 1000 feet. It's actually very exciting.

EDIT: And I don't know if I mentioned this, but they are still going to keep the same timeline that they had. Wilshire Grand will start demolition this year, and construction of the new buildings should resume shortly afterwards.

true, if u look at the rendering and double the height of the shorter tower it definitely reaches the same height as the supertall.. but it could either be a supertall or a fatter, wider 750'... idk.. we'll wait and see.. hope it is taller though.

[JRinSoCal]

They should just scrap the shorter tower and build only the tall one. Problem solved.

[colemonkee]

The loss of the taller tower is definitely a bummer, but I'm cautiously optimistic about what will eventually go on this site. It looks like it will still have an office component, so we could get a real cool mixed use tower with office, hotel & residential that could be quite tall (though in all reports I've seen, I haven't seen any mention of the residential portion anymore). Though even if the office is phased out completely, and we only get a wider 750 ft. tower, that will still make an impact on the skyline, though not as dramatic as a new tallest. In any case, with AC Martin on the job, I'm confident the design will be at least a palatable one.

[DJM19]

My only hope is that they dont try to cover the whole site with on tower+podium. Reserve some for future construction or open space.

[StethJeff]

Originally Posted by Illithid Dude

Yeah, guys. For all we know, the project could still be a supertall. I mean, the original hotel tower was/is 750 feet, and the new development is double the hotel rooms as the old proposal, with extra office space. That could easily be 1000 feet. It's actually very exciting.

EDIT: And I don't know if I mentioned this, but they are still going to keep the same timeline that they had. Wilshire Grand will start demolition this year, and construction of the new buildings should resume shortly afterwards.

no need to try to turn a huge negative into a positive. it's terrible news.

[DistrictDirt]

Originally Posted by StethJeff

no need to try to turn a huge negative into a positive. it's terrible news.

I don't see this as a negative in the slightest. Sure there's no phase 2 tower planned now, but who knows if that ever would have happened anyway. 10 years is a long time. The economy can strengthen or falter. Properties change hands. The important thing is that we're now getting a larger phase 1 tower than we were before, with the same timeline.

Originally Posted by DJM19

My only hope is that they dont try to cover the whole site with on tower+podium. Reserve some for future construction or open space.

Ditto. Here's hoping for a slender tower with a park or plaza next to it.

[Zapatan]

Originally Posted by StethJeff

no need to try to turn a huge negative into a positive. it's terrible news.

How is it negative? there is only one tower, but it could be taller than both of these.

560 hotel rooms = 750 feet
900 rooms + office component could potentially be a 1250 footer to the roof, now I'm not saying that's gonna happen, they could just make the tower fat... but still we'll have to wait and see.

[alki]

Originally Posted by Zapatan

How is it negative? there is only one tower, but it could be taller than both of these.

560 hotel rooms = 750 feet
900 rooms + office component could potentially be a 1250 footer to the roof, now I'm not saying that's gonna happen, they could just make the tower fat... but still we'll have to wait and see.

Its negative in that they don't see demand for offices anytime in the forseeable future............ten years. DTLA needs to get office absorption back on track. That means competing directly with west side bldgs.