Fox Must Clear a Zoning Hurdle to Renovate Site

Hoping to bring the old 20th Century Fox studio into the 21st Century, Fox Inc. wants to build several new office, production and parking facilities and renovate some historical structures on the venerable lot.

But there’s a catch: The property, next door to the high-rise towers of Century City, is zoned for condominium development, the legacy of a previous management’s plan to move the studio out of town. So Fox must persuade city officials to change the zoning before construction can begin.

And although the Westside of Los Angeles to no small degree owes its prosperity to the entertainment business, some neighborhood groups oppose the studio project, saying it would increase traffic in an area that already approaches gridlock during rush hour.

The project would “dump thousands of additional cars into the neighborhood,” says Laura Lake, a community activist who teaches at UCLA and is one of the most vocal opponents of the plan. “It means a lot more traffic cutting through the surrounding area, more peak-hour traffic.” If city officials approve the Fox plan, Lake says, “I see it as going back on a commitment to the community. . . . It creates the prospect of a second Century City.”

The Fox proposal--which would add 771,000 square feet of new construction to the lot, or somewhat more than the space in the neighboring 34-story Fox Plaza office tower--is ambitious but hardly unique in the industry. In the past decade, with tremendous growth in the business from overseas, home video, cable and other “ancillary” markets, the demand for studio office space has exploded.

Columbia Pictures, for example, has big plans to modernize its lot in Culver City and just purchased the nearby Culver Studios for further expansion.

Paramount Pictures in Hollywood has built new offices, consolidated parking and added new landscaping. It recently purchased property just south of the studio, including the site of the old Western Costume building on Melrose Avenue, for expansion.

In the San Fernando Valley, Walt Disney Co. completed construction earlier this year of a high-style “postmodern” office building at its Burbank lot and is in escrow to buy the 38.5-acre Stroh Brewery site in Van Nuys for new expansion. Warner Bros. and MCA Inc., parent of Universal Pictures, are also considering expansion plans.

If the Fox rezoning plan is rejected, company officials say, the studio would be forced to move out of the area, taking with it thousands of jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars in economic benefits. And new condos, they say, would generate at least as much new traffic as the studio plan.

“It would be absolutely catastrophic if we have to move to Valencia or somewhere,” says David Handelman, the Fox senior vice president in charge of shepherding the project through the rezoning process. He believes that the studio’s location, near the agents and lawyers and deal makers of Beverly Hills and Century City, gives Fox a kind of competitive advantage.

“The business is transacted face to face, over lunch or wherever,” Handelman says, and moving to an outlying area would undercut that advantage. Equally important, he notes, half of Fox’s employees live on the Westside, and a move would greatly increase their commute and conceivably make it more difficult to attract new employees.

“We’re not anti-growth or anti-development; we want balanced growth,” Lake responds. “Nobody’s saying (to Fox), you have to leave. You can stay, but stay in a compatible way.”

Fox’s plan for its 53-acre lot includes:

* Building 479,000 square feet of administrative and production offices, in low- and mid-rise buildings mostly on the east side of the lot, near the multistory structures of Century City;

* Constructing 172,000 square feet of post-production facilities, sound stages and support facilities;

* Adding 120,000 square feet to house Fox’s KTTV television station, now located in Hollywood;

* Renovating a number of historical buildings, updating electrical and communications systems that in some cases date to the 1930s;

* Consolidating all parking, now scattered in surface lots throughout the studio, into two or three structures at the corners of the property, and landscaping many of the former parking areas to create what Fox officials describe as a campus-like environment.

The proposal, first announced more than a year ago, still faces a long approval process. The studio has commissioned an independent study of the development’s likely effects on traffic in the neighborhood, along with recommendations on how to mitigate the effects. A second draft of the study is being analyzed by the city’s Department of Transportation, which is expected to issue its findings within several weeks.

Next, an environmental impact study will be circulated, and the Planning Commission will hold hearings on the project, probably this fall. Then the City Council will debate the issue, with a possible vote early next year. Finally, Mayor Bradley must sign off on the project. If everything goes smoothly for Fox, it might get a final OK about a year from now.

Opposition to the studio plan has focused mainly on the issue of traffic congestion, and much of Fox’s massive lobbying efforts have tried to demonstrate that the project would generate no more traffic than the roughly 2,000 condos now zoned for the site.

Fox has pledged to spend $5 million to widen certain streets and freeway ramps in the area; to install new traffic signals or computerize existing ones at several intersections, and to develop ride-sharing and other plans to reduce the traffic coming in and out of the studio. “That’s a larger than average amount for this kind of effort,” one Transportation Department officials says.

Some neighborhood organizations have expressed concern about the size of some structures that Fox proposes to build on the eastern edge of the lot, across the street from several existing Century City condo complexes.

“We have two concerns: the height of the buildings and whether the new gate will be too big,” says William Carter, president of the Century Towers Homeowners Assn., which supports the studio plan over the condo alternative. “They want seven stories, and we want five, and we’re concerned about the treatment of the entrance.”

Fox wants to build a “ceremonial” entrance, analogous to Paramount’s famous gate, on Avenue of the Stars facing the Century City condo complexes. (Most employee traffic would enter and leave the lot from new gates on Galaxy, Pico and Olympic. The current entrance on Pico would be closed.)

City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky has taken no formal position on Fox’s proposal but says he hopes that a solution can be worked out to keep the studio on the Westside. In choosing between the Fox and condo plans, “It’s not a close call. (The studio) is important to the economy of the city and the region. . . . The last thing the Westside needs is another 2,200 market-rate condos. . . . I’m optimistic that we’ll find common ground.”

Time is running out, however. If the approval process is delayed, Fox could be forced next year to commit to the condominium plan, through the formal recording of a development map, in order not to lose the property’s entitlement to 16,120 “daily trips” of traffic under the current zoning plan.

Opponents of the Fox plan, of course, hope to delay both the studio and condo alternatives. Lake, for example, would like to see the property down-zoned and a low-density version of the condominium plan adopted.

So Fox continues its full-court-press campaign to persuade the neighborhood and city officials that the project is worthwhile. “We’re not just asking” for city approval, Fox’s Handelman says, only half-jokingly. “We’re pleading. “