L.A.’s Core: Limiting Leaps and Bounds

On Wilshire Boulevard, a few blocks west of the Harbor Freeway, a new high-rise office building thrusts an ungainly--and to some critics an unwelcome--new shape into the skyline of central Los Angeles.

The World Financial Center, now nearing completion, rises from a heavy masonry base that contains 13 stories of parking. On top of this rests an angled glass office tower; near its peak is a very large and mysterious sign, adding to the building’s gigantean proportions. The overwhelming monolith dwarfs a largely low-rise neighborhood.

Beyond esthetic considerations, the huge structure is criticized for the implications it poses for the city’s downtown core. For more than 25 years, public and private sectors have invested a great deal of money in revitalizing the heart of the city. Inherent in all the downtown planning and implementation effort over the years have been a number of assumptions:

--That downtown is in a circumscribed area of limited size to encourage the gathering of people in face-to-face contact, with emphasis on pedestrian circulation. This implies, as in all “centers,” high-density development, particularly in the office areas.

--That downtown has a mixture of uses--office, retail, housing, government, cultural, entertainment and industry. The interaction of these varied activities provides a synergism special to the heart of a great city.

--That substantial public intervention is necessary to revitalize downtown Los Angeles and encourage significant private investment. For 30 years, from 1930 to 1960, due to Depression, war and postwar suburban growth, there was limited private investment in downtown.

--That a healthy downtown is most important for the economic well-being of the entire region.

Much has been written about the renaissance of downtown Los Angeles in recent years, both locally and nationally. Indeed, the 1984 Olympic Games made the entire world aware of the new downtown, with TV announcers using the skyline as a backdrop. This revitalization was not happenstance, but the outgrowth of extensive public and private planning, debate, controversy and conscious policies.

Public planning and development policies and their underlying assumptions should be re-examined periodically, particularly in the light of recent market forces. The trend in development west of the Harbor Freeway offers a prime example. There are many negative factors to additional high-rise construction there, including the loss of housing affordable by families of modest means, the inadequacy of the street network to handle additional traffic, and the sapping of the economic and physical vitality of the central business district.

In the past six years, about 650 dwellings occupied by low-income families were demolished in an area bounded by the Hollywood and Harbor Freeways, Lucas Avenue and Eighth Street. Housing for the poor is always in short supply, of course, and because these transactions were handled privately, the families who lost their homes in the area did not receive a reasonable level of housing assistance like that normally provided when public agencies displace residences.

Land acquisition and demolition in this area west of the Harbor Freeway has been carried out by 23 property owners who assembled parcels totaling 128 acres of land in recent years for commercial development. While some are property owners of long standing, most are entrepreneurs recently on the scene. Much of this land has been cleared and is now vacant. Additional high-rise buildings are planned, and more existing low-income housing will be obliterated, thus further diminishing the housing choices for those with limited resources.

Such mass demolition will completely destroy a neighborhood that provides a convenient location for many people holding jobs downtown. Good public policy should aim at providing more housing in and near downtown, not less.

The area west of the Harbor Freeway has an irregular street pattern, compared with the traditional grid of the downtown core east of the freeway, and thus vehicular and pedestrian circulation is more difficult. Much of the traffic generated in the area must cross over the freeway and enter the downtown core in order to get to the Harbor Freeway on-ramps, causing additional congestion in the downtown core.

West-of-downtown entrepreneurs, buying up land at prices still relatively low, seek to take advantage of growth in the downtown core. Large public expenditures in three redevelopment projects--Bunker Hill, Little Tokyo and the central business district--and public and private spending for cultural institutions like the Music Center and the Museum of Contemporary Art represent an investment in the billions toward a revitalized downtown. All of this has resulted in a substantial increase in land values, benefiting both public and private sectors.

Intensive development west of the Harbor Freeway would drain off tenants from the core and hence endanger past public and private investment; it would also diffuse the downtown core and discourage pedestrian movement. Anyone who has tried to make crossings on foot over the wide bridges that span the freeway knows what a task--and what a deterrent--that can be.

For the developer who seeks to construct an office tower on marginally cheaper land, such dispersion is profitable. But for the collective interest of the overwhelming majority of those with a stake in downtown--residents, shoppers, merchants, tourists, office workers, property owners, taxpayers and local government--a trend toward dispersal makes the central city less convenient, less active and less interesting.

By concentrating office and related development east of the freeway, the city: gains a return on public and private investment; creates an active pedestrian environment; encourages an increase in use of public transportation, and provides economic support and patronage for diverse activities that would not otherwise be possible without the added population.

There is no shortage of office space in the central area--quite the contrary. Office buildings east of the Harbor Freeway can handle downtown-office market requirements well into the next century. The area west of the Harbor Freeway should be rehabilitated and developed primarily as a close-in residential neighborhood for all income groups, with limited and lower-density commercial uses along some of the major east-west streets.

Until a detailed plan for development can be prepared for City Council approval by the public agencies involved--the departments of City Planning and Transportation and the Community Redevelopment Agency, in consultation with residents and property owners--Los Angeles should declare a moratorium on additional high-rise office buildings west of the freeway.