Riverbank Gamble May Pay Off : Environment: Owners of L.A. River property could hit the jackpot if development proposals are realized.
Gerald (Red) Meade is what real estate agents call a motivated seller, and he’s hoping to unload a piece of prime bottom land.
The problem is that Meade’s four acres are truly on the bottom, beneath a stretch of the Los Angeles River near Elysian Park.
“I’ve got four acres, it’s five minutes from Chinatown, seven minutes from downtown,” said Meade, his machine-gun delivery speeding up as he warmed to the sell.
He had hopes of selling some of the land awhile back when a Japanese investor talked about putting in a restaurant where patrons could fish out of windows. He said another speculator wanted to erect a huge platform as a truck storage yard. But in every case, the opportunity evaporated when the imaginative entrepreneurs realized the difficulties of building over a 400-foot-wide channel prone to sudden flooding.
Now, however, city and county plans for developing their namesake river may provide property owners like Meade of Toluca Lake--who own land at the river’s edge or land that is sometimes even under water--with the best chance they’ve ever had of making a sale.
For public officials, the news is not so upbeat. They fear the private owners’ good fortune could come at taxpayers’ expense. Various ideas afloat for converting the river into something more than a massive plumbing system could require public agencies to purchase at least some of the private properties, potentially adding to the projects’ costs and complexities.
The Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, for example, has studied building an elevated “transportation corridor” over the river to relieve freeway congestion. The city of Los Angeles is planning a 6.2-mile bike path using a portion of the river and its bank near Griffith Park. Others are studying lining the river’s sterile concrete banks with green parkways and trails for hiking and horseback riding.
While most of the land along or under the river is owned and operated by the Los Angeles County Flood Control District or other public agencies, about 100 companies and individuals own bits and pieces of its 58 miles. Most of the privately owned land consists of parcels that were in the bulldozers’ path when the concrete channel was dug, beginning after a devastating 1938 flood.
The value of the properties is difficult to estimate, but officials acknowledge that purchasing new rights of way or even the land itself will increase the cost of whatever plans are pursued.
Private ownership already has become an issue in a proposal for the bike path. Irwin Chodash, a civil engineer who heads the bikeway section of the city Department of Transportation, said the $2.4-million estimated cost of the path did not include purchasing the right-of-way from a private owner. “I don’t know what the right-of-way costs will be eventually . . . but there is a lot of backing for the project and we want to go ahead with it,” he said.
Although most of the stretch--between the intersection of Zoo Drive and Riverside Drive in Griffith Park and the intersection of Barclay Street and Riverside Drive near Elysian Park--is publicly owned, 66 individuals and companies hold 412,000 square feet of the land, according to Joe Gary, a real estate officer with the city of Los Angeles.
The ownership of the river also is of concern to the transportation commission, which is studying the possibility of building either car-pool lanes or truck lanes over the river channel between the San Fernando Valley and Long Beach.
Earlier this year, the county transportation commission surveyed the ownership of the Tujunga Wash and the river in the San Fernando Valley, along with a portion of the river from south of downtown to Long Beach. Although the portion in the Valley was publicly owned, except for four tracts near Barham Boulevard, about 40 different owners had title to mostly tiny parts of the other section.
In addition to individuals, private owners included MCA, the American Potash and Chemical Corp. of Oklahoma City, Mobil Oil, Oscar Mayer Co. and several railroads--and the Compton Hunting and Fishing Club.
The privately held land “may or may not be a problem” if the river freeway project is ever built, said Vic Kamhi, the project manager for the transportation commission’s study of building a freeway over the river.
But what are obstacles for agencies to overcome could be the chance of a lifetime for people like Meade.
“They can’t build over me, they can’t build under me,” said Meade, 61, the president of the Atwater Village/Griffith Park Chamber of Commerce and the owner of what he said is the world’s largest collection of coin-operated scales. “I’m not looking to stick nobody up. I’m open to almost any damn offer. I’m not a poor man. I’m charitable, but I’m not a lunatic and I’m not going to give it away.”
Most of the private owners have been paying taxes on the property for years.
But William Shubin, who has owned about three acres of the river in South Gate since 1987, said he quit paying taxes on the river portion of the property and now the county wants to sell that portion at auction. Shubin said he obtained the river property as part of a larger parcel. He pays taxes on the usable portion, which serves as a lot for his trucking company.
He said he was not aware that he might be able to sell the property.
Gary, the city real estate officer, said “the city is required to pay just compensation for the easements that we take.” If it can be demonstrated that a small easement through a property harms the value of the remaining property, then a governmental agency has to pay an owner for the loss.
Meade’s 4.32 acres, Gary said, are entirely within the boundaries of the flood control channel. Because of that, he said, it is possible the city might decide that the property had little or no value.
But Meade disagreed. He said property in the area is worth $1 million an acre but that he’s not asking for anything near that.
During the four years he’s tried to sell the parcel, Meade said, he also has been asked to trade it for a run-down 32-room motel along the Mexico-Texas border and, in a separate deal, a heavily mortgaged $3-million mansion in Orange County.
He turned both down, but continues to meet with interested investors.
“I don’t want this to go further on . . . for my children to have the problems I’ve had” selling the property, Meade said.
Ownership of River Land
Here is a look at a stretch of the Los Angeles River, typical in its mix of public and private ownership.
