Southern California Job Market : Coping With Commuting : COMMUTING BY ELEVATOR

The investment industry has been very good to Gene Morgan, so good that he could afford to live just about anywhere he wanted.

But wasting precious hours on the freeway commuting from his downtown Los Angeles brokerage to a home at the beach, in the hills or even in nearby Hancock Park is something that this 65-year-old ex-Marine simply could not abide.

Instead, his commute is vertical and takes about a minute by elevator, from his 30th-floor condominium at Bunker Hill Towers to the building’s Plaza Level, which houses the offices of Gene Morgan Financial.

“It simplifies my life,” Morgan said of his decision to live and work in the same locale. “I waste absolutely no time on the freeways.” Across the country, more such “city within a city” projects are going up in urban and suburban areas, affording an option for workers who like the idea of a commute on the hoof.

Many are in self-contained high-rises where residents can also shop for groceries, go to the dentist, get their hair cut and work out on weight machines. Others are in sprawling communities, such as Century City, that also feature fancy hotels and restaurants, movie houses and other forms of entertainment.

As highways become more clogged and home prices spin further out of reach in some metropolitan areas, observers say, such mixed-use projects are bound to become more important fixtures on the urban landscape.

“The future for that is very, very bright,” said Rocky Tarantello, a real estate consultant and a professor of real estate and urban economics at USC.

To date, such developments have tended to work best in condensed or older cities such as Chicago, Boston, Minneapolis and San Francisco, which, unlike Los Angeles and Houston, are not completely reliant on automobiles to function. (Washington, on the other hand, has restrictions on building height that make funding such developments less economically rewarding.)

Chicago boasts one of the most successful projects--Water Tower Place--with the Ritz-Carlton hotel, condominiums, restaurants, theaters, a myriad of service establishments and an upscale shopping mall anchored by Marshall Field’s and Lord & Taylor.

Located near Lake Michigan on prestigious North Michigan Avenue, Water Tower Place also benefits from traffic at nearby cultural institutions and the presence of thousands of residents and workers in nearby high-rise condo, apartment and office buildings.

Then there is Los Angeles. With its utter dependence on autos, its lack of a downtown residential base, its far-flung suburban and exurban communities and the after-hours bleakness of its downtown core, the city has not lent itself to much mixed-use development. (The early effort at mixing offices and retail space in Arco Plaza, for example, has proven disastrous for the merchants.)

“Not all cities are so hospitable to mixed-use projects,” said Norman Elkin, vice president of Urban Investment & Development Co., a Chicago development subsidiary of JMB Realty. “In Los Angeles, that’s a problem. What do you hook on to?”

Bunker Hill Towers, with its proximity to the Music Center and the Museum of Contemporary Art, is as close as the city now comes, although other projects are under way and some others--such as Broadway Plaza, California Plaza and Citicorp Plaza--almost qualify, but for the lack of residential space.

In Tarantello’s view, a number of factors are converging that will make development of mixed-use buildings more appropriate for California. In the past 10 years, the nation’s population has increased about 16%. At the same time, by his estimate, the number of licensed drivers has risen 60% while the number of new roads is up only 5%. Meanwhile, with the surge in population, city infrastructures are strained, yet government officials face consumer outcries at the mention of tax increases to upgrade facilities.

“Without a doubt, the congestion and traffic patterns are as good now as they’re ever going to be,” Tarantello said. “The only viable solution is not building more roads but intelligent land-use planning.

“You can no longer zone houses over there, a shopping center on the corner and office buildings over here,” he added. “We are going to have to start pushing things together. The key to success is traffic mitigation--taking cars off the street.”

From the worker’s viewpoint, living near the office in a mixed-use project could prove a mixed blessing.

“If you’re a workaholic, it might not be good at all (because) you’d be more inclined to go to work at all times of the day and night,” said Dean Schwanke, director of real estate development information service at the Urban Land Institute, a Washington organization that has studied the mixed-use phenomenon.

Then again, he added, being close to home would give one the flexibility to take frequent breaks. “Obviously,” he said, “it would save on auto wear and tear.”

Surveys by the institute have shown that employees are not inclined to live in the same project where they work.

One reason is that developers of mixed-use buildings have found it difficult to integrate parking for permanent residents and retail customers or office workers.

Partly because of that, future mixed-use projects are expected to consist primarily of side-by-side structures--say, a high-rise office and retail building joined by corridors to a high-rise residential building.

“You will see less stacking,” said James J. Didion, chairman of Coldwell Banker Commercial Group in Los Angeles and a member of the Urban Land Institute’s mixed-use council. Vertically stacked, mixed-use projects that attempt to do it all “are very costly to build and very difficult to integrate.”