LOS ANGELES | Downtown Project Rundown 3.0

[BrandonJXN]

1025 Wilshire is already complete and by the looks of it, they serve pretty good Mexican food.

http://events.la.com/santa-monica-ca/venues/show/116578-el-cholo

[colemonkee]

We'll have to keep an eye on this one. There are conflicting reports: wolverine at SSC hints that they may be starting on the 50-story tower, while DowntownGymRat posits that it might just be re-building a walkway from the shopping center to the parking garage.

I kind of agree with Steve that with all the news around Maguire's buy-back talks recently, there's no way that construction start on a 50-story office tower (the first downtown in well over a decade) would have somehow slipped the reporter's attention. Especially the very large financing deal that would have needed to take place to start construction.

[colemonkee]

Originally Posted by ThreeHundred

1025 Wilshire is already complete and by the looks of it, they serve pretty good Mexican food.

http://events.la.com/santa-monica-ca/venues/show/116578-el-cholo

That's in Santa Monica, dude.

[JDRCRASH]

Originally Posted by ThreeHundred

1025 Wilshire is already complete and by the looks of it, they serve pretty good Mexican food.

http://events.la.com/santa-monica-ca/venues/show/116578-el-cholo

OH SHIT!!!! I meant 1027 Wilshire!

I better change it, and quick before people troll on me for it.

[BrandonJXN]

Originally Posted by colemonkee

That's in Santa Monica, dude.

^ Only 1025 on Wilshire Blvd. I sure could go for a torta right about now.

But as I said, if (big if) this tower is preparing itself for construction, it would have to be one of the more shocking groundbreakings in LA. But we'll see.

[BrandonJXN]

From Angelenic:

Now that the first wave of residential development has had a chance to soak into Downtown’s western-most neighborhood, the area — sometimes referred to as the “Jersey” side of 110 Freeway — is seeing an uptick of spinoff investment from property owners and commercial developers looking to join the redevelopment efforts.

Proliferated by Wilshire Boulevard accessibility and proximity the Financial District, the blocks of City West from the Witmer to St. Paul are receiving “byproduct” improvements such as facade upgrades, retail openings and new office projects, even as several high-profile residential towers sit pending over market conditions.


Directly across from the new luxury residences of TENTEN Wilshire, a modest office structure at 1001 Wilshire recently completed an extensive face-lift, bringing a new color scheme and plans to lure a restaurant or cafe tenant to the ground level retail space.

Proposed for a narrow surface lot near 1100 Wilshire, West Edge Architects is designing a 60,000 square-foot mixed use complex called Civic Wilshire, slated to contain class A office space, a fine dining restaurant and corner cafe.

The project, being publicized as “a commercial addition to a succession of residential real estate developments within the booming Central City West district in Downtown Los Angeles,” should be completed by next year.

On the 1200 block of Wilshire, the Wells Fargo Bank office building is in the process of facade and signage repairs, while a nearby decades-old apartment building is greeting spring with a much-needed exterior rejuvenation.

Two parcels over at Witmer, an empty 7,000 square-foot corner lot was placed on the market for sale last week. The land, directly adjacent to Vero and across from the Parkside Tower site and proposed Good Samaritan medical office structure, could be seen by developers as a prime development site for small-scale residential.

Possibly the most unexpected changes are occurring one block south of Wilshire at the once run-faded Motel De Ville. While the motel stills caters to a seedy clientèle, significant changes to the block with the Residences @ Bixel and Lucas One project announcements have prompted upgrades to the lodging facility.

A paint job and charming new retail space carved out of the street front space facing 7th have drastically improved the building’s appeal in the neighborhood. The space is now available for lease.

Residents, Rejoice

“New Jerseyans” patiently waiting for more resident amenities will need to hold on just a little longer. Signage welcoming Vero’s new retailers are going up, and a quadruple-debut of Subway, Mitaki Sushi, Wein Bakery and Yogurberry is finally expected in June.

Two new commercial businesses, one of which is most likely a Mexican food chain, will soon be announced for GLO, further cultivating the pedestrian life ignited by Starbucks in March.

Though no retail prospects exist at this time for 1100 Wilshire and TENTEN, Amidi Real Estate Group (developers behind TENTEN and 1027 Wilshire) will soon transform a triangular patch of land overlooking the 110 Freeway into a new dog park for the community.

The small green space will be located at the quiet intersection of Ingraham and Beaudry, an ideal location for area residents and their active pups.

[JDRCRASH]

Nice, but how old is that photo?

[milquetoast]

When is the crane jump coming, anyone know? I've actually never seen a crane jump in person before; kinda want to see it at least once...

WolverineMan says May 19th! Be there!

[milquetoast]

Originally Posted by colemonkee

I kind of agree with Steve that with all the news around Maguire's buy-back talks recently, there's no way that construction start on a 50-story office tower (the first downtown in well over a decade) would have somehow slipped the reporter's attention. Especially the very large financing deal that would have needed to take place to start construction.

Brookfield Shows Interest in Maguire, Too
May 1, 2008
By: Dees Stribling, Contributing Correspondent

The saga of Maguire Properties Inc. continued to unfold today with word that Brookfield Properties Corp. is interesting in buying, along with other partners, Maguire's interests in Downtown Los Angeles office properties for about $750 million.

The Wall Street Journal reported the offer, citing a letter from Brookfield to Maguire that the newspaper had seen.

"It's hard to know how Maquire's board is going to respond to Brookfield," David AuBuchon, an analyst with Robert W. Baird & Co., told CPN this morning. "It seems like an adequate, though not stellar, offer. There's really only one other current office trade in the same market to compare it to. Brookfield is offering a little less on a square foot basis than that transaction, which is trading for about $440-$450 per square foot."

AuBuchon noted that Maquire still has the option of trying to wait out current economic conditions in hopes of striking a better deal later. "They could conclude that now isn't the best time to sell and say 'Thank you, not now' to Brookfield," he said.

News of the offer came during the same week that Robert Maguire III, chairman & CEO of Maguire Properties, formally expressed an interest in taking the company private with an offer of about $21 per share (as of this morning, the company is trading at about $16.40 per share). A special committee of directors, set up in recent months to ascertain how to deal with the company's high debt levels incurred last year with the purchase of an office portfolio from Blackstone, declined to act on Mr. Maguire's "expression of interest," however.

"The expression of interest is not currently actionable for consideration by the special committee, including assessing the adequacy of the nominal value for shareholders ascribed to the plan and the realistic prospect and timing of the value of the plan ultimately being delivered to shareholders," the committee noted in a filing earlier this week with the SEC.
commercialpropertynews.com

[milquetoast]

Q&A: Jane Ellison Usher

Downton LA at night. courtesy LACVB

In the heady first days of his administration in 2005, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa handpicked Jane Ellison Usher, a legal adviser to former Mayor Tom Bradley and counsel to the 1984 Olympics, to be president of the Los Angeles City Planning Commission. He also selected the well-respected Gail Goldberg to be director of the Los Angeles City Planning Department. The two women set out on a course to deliver a great urban city to the mayor by adopting a manifesto entitled “Do Real Planning.” The rich but brief document represented a change in perspective for City Hall: create a beautiful, livable, and walkable city by upholding overall planning strategies rather than allowing city council members to negotiate political favors with developers in individual districts. More than two years later, that vision is taking hits. Not only did the council cast off Goldberg’s policy to protect lots currently zoned for industrial uses citywide, but Councilman Ed Reyes said that each councilperson should be free to determine planning policy in his own district.

Then came the council’s adoption in February of SB 1818, a state bill that provides developers with density bonuses and other incentives in return for constructing affordable housing. When the city council passed an ordinance exempting certain SB 1818 developments from environmental review processes (CEQA), Usher not only opposed the city and its planning department, but she suggested that neighborhood groups sue the city. With insiders wondering whether she would be removed from her position, we sat down to talk to her about the state of planning in Los Angeles.

The Architect’s Newspaper: Given the events of the last few months, is the era of “Do Real Planning” over before it has begun?

Jane Ellison Usher: There are some foundational activities occurring in the city of Los Angeles that keep “Do Real Planning” alive certainly for me, and hopefully into perpetuity for the rest of the city. But here’s what we’re facing:

courtesy J.E. Usher

One, a planning department that culturally has not been as excited and aggressive as they needed to be to do real planning. There’s a lot of leadership now at the top that’s encouraging them to be more aggressive, to think out of the box, to behave and act differently, but I don’t think there’s a magic bullet.

I would add to that that there’s quite a legacy of absence of planning in Los Angeles. There is some sense of entitlement on the part of the development community to live in a city where planning principals are secondary or perhaps tertiary. It will take us more time than we’ve had to turn that thinking around.

The third piece is the regular practice of the city council to defer to the home district whenever a planning issue is on the table. This practice has caused the city council to forget to think holistically about the city and about a vision that can be achieved if we’re focusing on all the moving pieces at the same time.

You openly invited neighborhood groups to sue the city over its implementation of SB 1818.

I did.

What’s wrong with it?
Part of my dissatisfaction was that my commission wasn’t updated until the day the ordinance took effect. And on that score, I have to say that the planning department did its commission a disservice. But the other part of my dissatisfaction was when I read the final ordinance that day, I saw such departures from all of the “Do Real Planning” conversations that the commission had been having for the last two-and-a-half years. I was taken by surprise by the final product.

An awful lot of work went into [the ordinance] on the council floor and I will confess to you that I don’t think that that’s the optimal place for that volume of change to occur.

Then my eye falls, almost immediately, on language that I had never seen discussed and it does this because I’m a lawyer. I saw a word in the ordinance that means an awful lot to a land-use lawyer and that word is “ministerial.” To a land-use lawyer, anything that is ministerial, by definition, doesn’t require CEQA [environmental impact] review. The ultimate payday for a developer is something that is ministerial, and the ordinance was defining a large set of projects as ministerial. That surprised me.

I went back and looked at the CEQA clearance for the ordinance itself. In January, the planning director had offered the council CEQA: a categorical exemption for the ordinance. And the basis for its being exempt from CEQA was her description of how the ordinance would work, namely, every project using the ordinance’s provision would have its own independent, individualized CEQA clearance.

So here you find an ordinance that’s categorizing a large class of projects as ministerial and exempt from CEQA and the ordinance saying: Each project will have its own CEQA clearance. The two are inconsistent.

I took it a step further. In a brochure that the California APA had written for cities as they worked on implementing SB 1818 ordinances, the California APA said that implementing ordinances must have an environmental clearance; they must go through CEQA.

So I stitched all of those pieces together and came to my own conclusion, which was that the city’s implementing ordinance insufficiently attended to CEQA. Whether a court would agree with me remains to be seen, and may never be known. But it absolutely did bother me.

In your opinion, which group hinders Los Angeles from being a great city: those developers who don’t respect the envelope or use mandates, or NIMBYs who fight structures in their neighborhood that could alleviate chronic problems such as affordable housing or mass transit projects?

Well, it’s funny. I don’t think of anybody as being a NIMBY. Somebody coined that less-than-gracious phrase and it stuck. I was thinking about this, and I like to call these people WIMBYs in the city of LA. It’s not “Not In My Backyard.” I’ve met with countless members of residents and homeowners and neighborhood associations and neighborhood councils. Their question is: “What’s In My Backyard?” I find them to be largely very responsible. They simply want to know: What’s going to be in their backyard and have we provided the support and the infrastructure for whatever it is that is going to be located near them?

Those questions are smart questions, the right questions. So if I’m supportive and in league with those kinds of questions, what is it that I have to say to developers? Well, there again, I find the developers to be largely very reasonable. They just want to know what the rules are. So I don’t blame the developers and I don’t blame the homeowners. I find that the most blameworthy place is the department of city planning, which I think has let down both sides of the equation by not defining for them with sufficient specificity what our vision is for land use.

But doesn’t that go to the city council and not the planning department?

I think we should delineate—if you have a department that’s insufficiently staffed and not directed to do real planning, you’re going to have an unhappy outcome. Here we are at a crossroads, where we’re asking the right questions, we’re staffing up the department, we’re focusing on rewriting all of the community plans with an eye to do real planning. If these plans arrive at the city council and as a consensus-building matter become adopted, we should see a different kind of city in the future, one with lots of predictability and much less uncertainty. If these plans arrive at the city council a year, two years, three years from now and are eviscerated—then you’ll have your answer.

The word on the street is that the mayor will quietly remove you because of the email you sent out on SB 1818. What’s your response?

I work in my role as the president of the commission at the pleasure of the mayor and on any day, at any time, it is absolutely his prerogative to remove me and that’s a power unique to him and he should exercise it whenever he thinks the time is right.

archpaper.com

[LosAngelesBeauty]

^ Very insightful. I like this Usher lady. And it's true what she pointed out that these City Councilmembers should not be able to make their own decisions in their own districts regarding city planning. Usher points out that it doesn't make the city cohesive and doesn't look at it holistically. LA is too damn sprawled out and there isn't the kind of leadership (like Usher) who can control the centrifugal effects of its sprawl. What a shame if she gets fired because of her stance against SB 1818.

[DJM19]

I disagree with her overly-politically correct stance on NIMBYs. There are tons of them. And even if they where asking "whats in my back yard", once they find out its NOT IN MY BACK YARD!

Theres no winning with these people!

[vodila]

Thanks, milquetoast. And please thank WolverineMan for me.

Walked around LA Live yesterday, snapped a few pictures. These are a day old (didn't have the strength to post them yesterday).

First of all, the sidewalk at Hanover. It actually looks rather inviting; I had an urge to walk up to 9th street, but alas it was still closed to pedestrians.



Now compare that to the sidewalk along the ESPN building. That stretch looks depressing to me. I don't know if it's the design or the color scheme they chose or because it is simply not finished yet, but I didn't get the same vibe the Hanover's sidewalk gave out.



The "Alley" is slowly chugging along.







I'm starting to like the feel of Nokia Plaza.



The Hotel as seen from the Nokia Plaza.



A construction worker told me they are going to start pouring concrete into the beams soon to stabilize the building. Then the crane jump would follow (I guess on the 19th), so we shouldn't expect any height increase 'till then.

What are those yellow things?







They are also setting up trailers on the clearance by the freeway (along the Cherry st).



One more thing. LA Live's website says Nokia Plaza will feature a "22' x 40' LED display" (which is widescreen, btw), but the worker told me the Conga Room is responsible for that portion of the building. The Congra Room is building it out and they will decide what to put up there. I sure hope for a large LED display with a large resolution.

[citywatch]

Originally Posted by JDRCRASH

These were taken by Tujunga:


From tujunga

What the heck is going on there??!! If I didn't know better, I'd think the devlpr (or owner) of that site was playing a game of bait & switch with ppl into new projs in DT. Or attaching to everyone's head a stick with a carrot hanging at the end of it.

When news of that trailer with a construction company's sign on it first surfaced, that could be easily blown off as a sign of nothing.

Maybe the trailer was being stored there? Maybe the trailer actually was for another proj? But now there's a trailer and heavy equipment moving right around it?!

I too read a post at SSC that suggested some big new highrise proj somewhere in DT could happen sooner rather than later....

Originally Posted by colemonkee

We'll have to keep an eye on this one. There are conflicting reports: wolverine at SSC hints that they may be starting on the 50-story tower, while DowntownGymRat posits that it might just be re-building a walkway from the shopping center to the parking garage.

but I didn't take it too seriously. I thought wolverine may have misheard comments about a new devlpt. Or, even more likely, that he had overheard news that no longer was accurate.

But both a construction trailer & heavy equipment for building just a walkway?

Here's another possibility: maybe the owner of that site is building a multilevel addition to the parking structure. If so, zzzzzz.

Whatever the case, it's interesting how even in the age of the internet & lots of blogs, inc those that deal with DTLA, where info, updates & insider gossip move very fast, that no one still really knows what's going on north of 8th St, between Fig & the fwy.

[citywatch]

Originally Posted by vodila

Now compare that to the sidewalk along the ESPN building. That stretch looks depressing to me. I don't know if it's the design or the color scheme they chose or because it is simply not finished yet, but I didn't get the same vibe the Hanover's sidewalk gave out.

Good to see another forumer posting pics here!

One reason you may find the LA Live side of Fig St depressing is cuz it's on the west side & therefore in the shade, so it looks gloomier, while the east side of the street, inc around the Hanover bldg, faces directly into the afternoon sun.

[BrandonJXN]

^ I was going to say that. Besides which, I think LA Live will look better at night anyway.

[Quixote]

They need to widen the sidewalks along Figueroa in order to accommodate greater foot traffic.

Regarding Hanover's sidewalk; I love trees, but did they have to put them right smack dab in the middle of the sidewalk?

[DJM19]

Yeah that placement really seems obstructive, and the trees look lonely away from everything.

[Quixote]

^ It works for Elleven, but that's because that part of South Park is less commercial and more residential. Also, the sidewalks are wider.


From Flickr, by LA311

[milquetoast]

Like I said before at SSC: These are the very same trees that will be uprooted and set on fire when the LAKERS win their next championship. We must keep these saplings in plain view for easy removal. Come on! How else are we gonna show the world our bonfire making capabilities?