Magic Johnson, Partners to Buy Shopping Center
A real estate partnership that includes former NBA star Earvin “Magic” Johnson Jr. said Tuesday that it has agreed to purchase a shopping center in southwest Los Angeles for $20.1 million as part of a venture to develop retail centers in underserved urban and minority communities in California.
The deal to buy the Ladera Shopping Center is the first for the partnership that involves Johnson, the California Public Employees’ Retirement System and San Francisco investment advisor Victor B. MacFarlane. In March, CalPERS agreed to contribute $50 million to California Urban Investment Partners, which will target retail development in predominantly minority areas.
“I don’t know of a better center to start off with,” Johnson said in a telephone interview from Osaka, Japan, where he is on a basketball tour. “It generates great business.”
Johnson, who along with MacFarlane contributed $1.5 million to the venture, said the group expects to announce soon the acquisition of two other Northern California retail centers.
Johnson has increasingly focused on expanding his business and investments in the wake of his retirement from a storied basketball career with the Los Angeles Lakers. He has been diagnosed with HIV, the virus researchers believe causes AIDS.
In a previous Times interview, Johnson said his goal now is to be a successful businessman so that he can “show other African Americans that they could make it too.”
The 184,684-square-foot Ladera Shopping Center, which is located in the predominantly African American neighborhood of Ladera Heights near Inglewood, lies a few miles away from Johnson’s bustling Magic Johnson Theatres, a $7.5-million cineplex next to the Crenshaw Plaza in Baldwin Hills.
In Nevada, Johnson was involved in the development of a shopping center in the predominantly African American community of West Las Vegas. Built in partnership with the city of Las Vegas, Magic’s Westland Plaza, which features a Vons supermarket, opened last year and is a major part of the city’s effort to attract investment to the depressed community. A nearby shopping center was burned during the 1992 unrest sparked by the “not guilty” verdicts in the Rodney King trial.
Both of Johnson’s Los Angeles projects are located in predominantly affluent, middle-class neighborhoods. But he has not ruled out investments in impoverished sections of the inner city.
“We are looking everywhere throughout the whole state” for projects,” Johnson said.
But he also acknowledged that the $51.5 million raised in partnership with CalPERS will soon be exhausted through real estate purchases and the development of retail projects in minority areas.
“The money will be spent here very quickly,” he said.
Johnson said he and his partners have approached CalPERS and other pension funds for additional investment funds to spur further development.
“It could take $300 million to $500 million,” he said. “We could spend that easily.”
