Posted Mar 6, 2019, 1:16 AM
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Join Date: Feb 2002
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Quote:
Revitalization Projects Reawaken Downtown Los Angeles
Hunter Kerhart
By Vivian Marino
March 5, 2019
Los Angeles’s downtown was little more than a sleepy office district not too long ago, where tens of thousands of suburbanites would clear out by the end of the workday and scores of classic Beaux-Arts and Art Deco buildings sat vacant or underutilized.
“It didn’t even have a grocery store until Ralphs opened about 10 years ago,” said Andrew D. Tashjian, a Los Angeles native and commercial real estate broker. “Downtown was dead.”
Today, cranes dot the skyline and construction routinely diverts traffic as Downtown Los Angeles — a neighborhood known as DTLA — undergoes the biggest development boom since the Roaring Twenties, when the area was then the center of the entertainment industry. As the city prepares for the 2028 Summer Olympics, a spate of new apartments, hotel rooms and retail and office space is steadily coming online throughout the 5.84-square-mile downtown area. Existing structures are being recycled, and the city’s public transit system is being expanded and improved.
“Downtown was L.A. in the early 20th century until the suburbanization and auto culture hit L.A.,” after World War II, said Nick Griffin, the executive director of the Downtown Center Business Improvement District.
Downtown construction projects will add more than 7,000 residential units, according to the business improvement district’s year-end market report, and more than 35,000 are in the pipeline. Nearly three million square feet of office space is under construction, the report said, and an additional 3.3 million square feet has been proposed.
Hunter Kerhart
Older buildings are also being repurposed at a rapid clip, enticing many businesses and institutions to plant roots downtown. The Warner Music Group is relocating to the old Ford Factory, and Arizona State University is leasing 80,000 square feet in the Herald Examiner Building, built in 1914 and designed by Julia Morgan, the architect of Hearst Castle. And technology companies like Spotify and the online coupon company Honey have opened office space.
Older buildings in Downtown Los Angeles are being put to new uses, like the Herald Examiner Building, where Arizona State University is leasing space.
“Our goal is to really bring people and density to the downtown area as it was originally envisioned and intended,” said Shana M.M. Bonstin, the deputy director for the community planning bureau at the Los Angeles City Planning Department.
Mr. Griffin believes that the growth projections will easily be surpassed, and that downtown could become a city within a city, with as many 200,000 residents in the next 21 years. Already, he said, there are an estimated 70,000, up from 18,000 20 years ago.
“The catalyst for the transformation of Downtown L.A. is the residential development,” said Bert Dezzutti, the executive vice president for the Western region of Brookfield Properties, the district’s largest real estate owner. “Once it establishes itself as a residential destination, it drives the other uses.”
Brookfield has a few developments in the works, including a residential tower next to its Figat7th shopping center, as well as a $170 million overhaul and modernization of the California Market Center in the downtown’s fashion district.
Mr. Dezzutti believes he’ll have little trouble renting out the 780 residential units planned for the high-rise at 755 South Figueroa Street, where construction is set to commence in the second quarter. “The demand is extremely strong, and really there is virtually no appreciable vacancy today.” (By the downtown center BID’s account, it’s under 10 percent.)
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Hopefully they have the entire spire lit up in time for the 4th of July 
Hopefully Korean Airlines could do a little better than that.
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