Central City West: Vision of Second Downtown L.A.

How does a city that never much seemed to care about having one downtown now find itself pondering blueprints for a second one?

The answer is as old as the West: The promise of cheaper land, new homes and jobs, less government regulation and a helping hand from politicians. These incentives are feeding the dreams of a new town just west of the Harbor Freeway--a stone’s throw from that other downtown, where block after block of old buildings stand 40% to 60% vacant and a general seediness frustrates those who want to see the city’s center come back to life.

Central City West, as the future town across the freeway is called, offers a vision of cosmopolitan life that has eluded downtown Los Angeles for the better part of this century. If plans are realized, the area will be transformed from a forgotten zone of stubbly vacant lots and dilapidated rent houses into a blend of tall buildings, leafy boulevards, corner parks and hillside neighborhoods where homes and offices are within walking distance of each other and rich and poor live in congenial proximity.

Design consultants for Central City West say the project will change the feeling of the Harbor Freeway from a beltway to a main street. “More like Madison Avenue,” said Clif Allen, echoing the longing many civic leaders have for a big city that looks more like a big city.

There are critics of Central City West, and they see it as an extravagant pipe dream that would divert investment from the city’s downtown and have the same deadening effect on it that suburban expansion brought during the 1920s and ‘30s. The critics also argue that building the new addition to the city will cost close to $1 billion in public improvements and place an unsupportable burden on sewers and streets--more than doubling the volume of cars on nearby freeways and choking off the downtown.

“Potentially, the city could have a catastrophe on its hands--a collision of growth and interests with no guiding vision,” said City Councilman Mike Woo, who is working with the city Planning Department on a master plan for the downtown and its environs. Another member of the council, Marvin Braude, has sued the city, charging his colleagues of wrongfully approving the first of several mega-developments planned for Central City West.

Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, who wants to see Central City West move ahead, held a meeting recently to try to allay the fears of some civic leaders over what could happen to the downtown as a consequence of the westward leap.

“Sometimes, it feels like we’re trying to prevent World War III from breaking out around here,” said City Planning Director Kenneth Topping, who attended the meeting and who has been asked by the City Council to come up with the “guiding vision” for the downtown that Woo and others say is lacking.

The downtown quarrel is not just a parochial spat over a place where many Los Angeles residents rarely venture. Three of the people most often discussed as potential mayoral candidates in 1992--City Council members Gloria Molina, Richard Alatorre and Woo--are immersed in downtown politics and draw much of their strength from adjacent constituencies.

“It offers a good opportunity to show leadership on growth, clearly one of the most important issues the city faces,” Woo said of the political implications of his downtown planning efforts.

Getting people to agree on a rational plan for the heart of the city is a tall order. Not only does the downtown cut across several council districts, but land-use decisions require the consent of half a dozen or more government agencies that have a habit of suing each other. Moreover, Woo said, there is the view of some council members that downtown redevelopment, having gobbled up more than $1 billion in property tax revenue during the last decade, has hogged the public trough long enough.

Central City West may need $500 million for transportation improvements alone. The street grid today is a rabbit warren with no north-south thoroughfares. Plans call for creating several new road segments, constructing a Metro Rail station and building a north-south bus route, possibly underground, that would extend the proposed Harbor Freeway transit way several miles north from 23rd Street to the Glendale Freeway. In addition, planners are calling for several more ramps to serve both east and west sides of the Harbor Freeway through the downtown and for a pedestrian carrier, maybe even a gondola, to ferry people back and forth across the freeway.

Built out, Central City West would reach from the Hollywood Freeway south to Olympic Boulevard, west to Union Avenue and Glendale Boulevard and east to the Harbor Freeway--encompassing an area almost as large as the current downtown. The people behind Central City West, an alliance of land owners, developers, lobbyists and private planners, predict that in 20 to 30 years its office core will be half to two-thirds the size of the Central Business District. They say the residential population could rise to 40,000 or more.

Central City West has long been a gleam in the eyes of real estate investors. They began assembling land there in the 1970s and waiting for the office market to leapfrog the Harbor Freeway. At the time, the property was a bargain, especially compared to land across the freeway.

Among the major land owners are Good Samaritan Hospital, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, and UPS, as well as several prominent developers, such as Ray Watt, Hillman Properties and the Shimizu America Corp.

Working for the developers is a cadre of lobbyists with strong ties to City Hall, including former City Councilman Arthur K. Snyder, former city Planning Commission Chairman Dan Garcia, and Fran Savitch, who for many years was a top aide to Bradley.

Among the selling points pushed by Central City West advocates is its proposed investment in housing--a conspicuous shortcoming of downtown redevelopment over the last decade.

About 12,000 apartments and condominiums are envisioned for the area west of the Harbor Freeway. A third of the housing is earmarked “low” to “very low income” and will be financed privately by fees charged against commercial development. If all of the housing is built, Central City West will come as close to achieving a one-to-one ratio of jobs to housing as any place in the city, Topping said.

The developers’ commitment to low-income housing may have given Central City West the political momentum it needs to survive the skeptical cost-benefit analysis it is receiving in some quarters. Working with developers and with low-income housing advocates, City Councilwoman Molina, whose district takes in most of Central City West, appears to have forged a powerful, if unlikely, coalition.

The first test came late last year when the City Council was confronted with a request to approve a package deal calling for twin office towers, one of them 62-stories tall, just west of the Harbor Freeway between 7th and 8th Streets, along with the construction by the same developer, Watt and Merselis, of 80 low-income housing units.

The Planning Commission recommended against the project, but the council approved it almost unanimously after heavy lobbying by the developers and tenants’ groups.

That decision by the council sparked Braude’s lawsuit and set off alarm bells downtown. Braude accused the City Council of violating an ordinance requiring it to take into account the cumulative impacts of planned building. (A Superior Court judge ruled that Braude, as a council member, could not sue the city. An aide said he is appealing.)

There are 64 new office buildings approved or proposed for both sides of the Harbor Freeway where it borders the downtown. About one third of the new construction would be built in Central City West. Altogether, the buildings could generate a 200%-plus increase for a freeway fast approaching its carrying capacity.

Proponents of Central City West insist that, if they can build the bus route, the Metro Rail station and the other planned transportation improvements, traffic won’t be a problem.

But even Allen, the design consultant for Central City West, said recently it is not clear whether there will be the money or the political will to do everything necessary to make Central City West a success. Without a budget or a plan, critics such as Braude argue that the City Council has no business giving the green light to impatient developers.

Much of the friction between the east and west sides of the Harbor Freeway has to do with parking quotas and the effect they can have on luring development.

It may seem like a trifling matter. The debate centers on whether Central City West should be held to 0.8 parking spaces for 1,000 square feet of building space, as is the case downtown, or be relaxed to allow two to three spaces for 1,000 square feet, as the developers would like. Factored over all of the commercial construction planned for Central City West, the parking quotas can determine whether 20,000 or 70,000 people would be able to drive their cars to work.

Planning Director Topping, a believer in Central City West, sounds confident that a compromise on the parking dispute can be reached. Topping tends to play down the rivalry between east and west.

“This is definitely not a tale of two cities. Central City West is not a second downtown,” he said. “What’s going on is a case of the Central Business District expanding beyond its original boundaries. The improvements we pay for west of the freeway will benefit people on both sides.”

Topping has a selling job to do.

Sue Laris, publisher of the Downtown News, summed up one opposing argument in an editorial.

“Cheap office space with lots of parking on the west side of the freeway,” she wrote, “will very likely destroy any incentive to renovate older buildings along Spring and Broadway.”

Laris and others contend that neighborhoods immediately west of the Harbor Freeway are best suited for residential development only.

On the other side of the debate is John Cushman, president of a commercial real estate firm and an expert on regional real estate trends. Cushman said that whatever happens on the west side of the Harbor Freeway, the prognosis is grim on the east side, in the city’s so-called historic core--from Broadway to Main Street and 2nd to 9th.

“Spring Street is totally dead in the eyes of corporate America,” Cushman said last week. “For the city or the CRA (the Community Redevelopment Agency) to invest more money in that area is an utter waste.”

City officials and civic leaders are working on three different plans dealing with the greater downtown, including Woo’s. By June, the council will be faced with deciding how to manage growth, not only across the Harbor Freeway but north and south of the downtown as well. To the north, Councilman Alatorre is working with a group of developers on plans to turn the industrial wasteland surrounding Union Station into another oasis of commercial and residential development. And to the south, Councilman Robert Farrell is talking about a research park--a sort of mini-Silicon Valley--next door to USC.

For the time being, the market to support some of the dreams probably does not exist. But with development spreading to the far reaches of the city and county, the emphasis increasingly is on filling the gaps closer to the heart of town.

On a wall in Topping’s office there is a map that shows the downtown growing from a pin prick on the map to a cluster of dots. From a distance, the dots blur into a big bull’s-eye, making it look as if the city without a center has finally got one.