L.A. Says ‘Welcome Home’ to Its Increasingly Urban Population
For years, Los Angeles endured the gibe of being 38 suburbs in search of a city.
In large part, it was true. There was not much downtown to speak of, as Southern Californians kept traveling the freeways farther and farther into suburbia.
That is changing as officials try to shake off a somewhat dowdy image, reverse generations of horizontal sprawl and create a vertical downtown of high-rises bustling with night life and culture.
“It’s like a big circle. People moved out, and now they’re coming back,” said downtown resident Gary Donahue, a film editor at KABC-TV who grew weary of a two-hour daily commute from suburban Woodland Hills.
By the end of the century, the city’s plans call for a doubling of downtown office and retail space and a sixfold increase in full-time residents. A new museum of contemporary art is in the works, as is a cluster of theaters and dance studios to go along with the city’s Music Center complex.
The plans also call for a bigger convention center, expansion of Little Tokyo and Chinatown and more hotels, restaurants and night spots.
“In the past two to three years, more and more companies have tended to relocate downtown,” said Jerry Eggleston, a vice president with Cushman & Wakefield of California Inc., a commercial real estate firm. “Downtown is becoming more attractive, and it is truly becoming the financial capital of the West instead of San Francisco.”
International Business Machines this year became one of the largest tenants downtown, taking over 24 floors of the 45-story south tower of Crocker Center and consolidating 1,600 employees from four offices scattered throughout the city.
“The commute is a little harder,” said IBM spokesman Rick Weiner, who lives in the San Fernando Valley. “But it’s a nice place to work, and there are more things to do. There’s also a whole new world of restaurants to discover and, judging from my waistline, I’m doing a good job of discovering them.”
That sentiment is echoed by Dave Garcia, a publicist for Bank of America. “When I came here six years ago, downtown was dead. Now it’s alive,” he said.
Downtown is a compact, four-square-mile region bounded on three sides by the Hollywood, Harbor and Santa Monica freeways and on the fourth by the Los Angeles River.
The city’s 40-square-block financial district is at the center of most of the development. That area already is densely developed, and $3.5 billion worth of new skyscrapers are rising in projects covering 10 square blocks.
“We have expanded to our outer limits, and now we are working our way back in,” said Chris Stewart, president of the Central City Assn., a business lobbying group.
William Kieschnick, 61, president of Atlantic Richfield Co. and a prime mover in developing the downtown art museum, is more cautious.
“There will be more commitment by people not only to work but also to live and play downtown,” Kieschnick said. “What’s unknown is how quickly officials can radically change cultural attitudes.”
The high-rises are symbolic of the changes Mayor Tom Bradley and other officials worked to fashion.
“When I took office in 1973, downtown was in a state of deterioration,” Bradley said. “I was concerned that if the heart of the city was allowed to die, the rest of the city would soon follow.”
City Hall Dwarfed
For decades, growth was stunted by a municipal law prohibiting structures taller than 13 stories because of earthquake hazards and because officials did not want to obscure the distinctive 27-story City Hall building.
Since that law was repealed in 1958, City Hall has been dwarfed.
At 62 stories, the First Interstate Bank building is the tallest of the downtown skyscrapers. But not for long. A few blocks away, a 70-story tower is to be built next to the central library as part of a $1-billion Library Plaza development.
New York-based Citicorp is part owner in a three-tower $700-million project rising in the heart of downtown.
“We intend to maintain a significant presence in the nation’s second-largest city, which is the major hub for U.S. trade with the world’s fastest-growing region--the Pacific basin,” said Wilford Farnsworth, a Citicorp senior vice president.
Citicorp has been trying for years to extend its banking operations into California. It recently purchased a savings and loan association in the state to give itself a financial foothold and has hundreds of employees in the state to serve the company’s West Coast credit card holders.
Financing for most of the downtown development is coming from domestic insurance companies, banks and savings institutions, which also generally are part owners of the buildings, said Bill Puget, a spokesman for Cushman Realty Inc.
$675 a Square Foot
By the year 2000, the four-square-mile downtown region is expected to add 23 million square feet of office, retail and housing space to the existing 18 million square feet.
With prime real estate fetching as much as $675 a square foot, developers are squeezing the most out of their space. Some have bought “air rights” above smaller neighbors to allow them to build higher.
More than 1 million people come to downtown daily to work or conduct business. Only about 10,000 live downtown.
By the end of the century, those figures are expected to rise to 1.5 million workers and visitors and 70,000 residents.
“Basically, we appeal to the empty nester, the yuppie and the corporate buyer,” said Mark Bornstein, spokesman for the Promenade and Promenade West, which were among downtown’s first privately developed upper-middle-class housing developments.
“I like being one of the few people in Los Angeles who can walk to work, and I love the view,” said Betsy Berkhemer, who lives a block away in Bunker Hill Towers, a short stroll from her public relations office. “I lived here for six years, since before it was chic.”
Attracting homeowners in large numbers is difficult, however. After an initial flurry of interest, downtown residences have sold slowly, in part because of high interest rates and high prices.
‘It’s Pretty Safe’
As with any home buyers, downtown dwellers consider crime--or the perception of it--before putting down their roots. Police said that fears about downtown crime are more myth than reality.
Last year, 22,008 crimes were reported downtown, or 498.6 per 1,000 people based on the area’s tiny resident population. When downtown’s huge white-collar work force is added, the rate drops to 75.9 per 1,000 people, sixth lowest of the city’s 18 police divisions.
