Arena Is Answer to Church’s Prayers

Upon finding itself in the shadow of the $350-million Staples Center, one of the city’s oldest churches has become a real estate developer intent on transforming the surrounding neighborhood.

The long-stagnant South Park district of downtown Los Angeles is attracting new business and investment. Among the builders is First United Methodist Church of Los Angeles, which recently completed a senior housing complex and hopes to make over an entire block into a pedestrian-friendly neighborhood with housing for working-class and middle-class renters.

The church’s home-building activities are part of a larger wave of development surrounding Staples Center.

L.A. Arena Co., the developer of Staples, is currently interviewing master-plan architects for a proposed “entertainment district” to be built mostly on the block immediately north of the arena, between Olympic Boulevard and 11th Street. The developer envisions stores and restaurants, and city officials are hoping that a long-awaited Convention Center hotel might someday occupy part of the site as well.

DarEll T. Weist, senior pastor of First United Methodist, is optimistic about the prospect of sports fans spilling over into the formerly lonely streets of downtown Los Angeles after Staples Center opens next October.

“If people . . . experience the neighborhood, I think they will find it quite delightful,” he said.

Weist is nothing if not forward-looking. Today, South Park is a huddle of apartment buildings and condominium complexes amid the parking lots, aging brick buildings and zooming traffic south of the financial district.

One current resident, who said he is enthusiastic about the future of South Park, does not hesitate to call the area “desolate.”

But Weist has a stake in boosting public acceptance of South Park: Besides being a minister, he is also president of 1010 Development Corp., a nonprofit builder created by the church to erect four apartment buildings, a supermarket and a church on the block bounded by Olympic Boulevard, Flower, 11th and Hope streets. Much of the site is clear and awaiting development.

The church’s first project there, the seven-story Villa Flores, which provides low-income housing for seniors, opened its doors in October. The Department of Housing and Urban Development provided two-thirds of the $11-million construction cost, while the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency provided the remainder.

Weist’s vision for South Park goes beyond mere construction. The pastor wants to create a model neighborhood that stresses sociability amid a setting of courtyards, gardens and pedestrian-oriented lanes.

First United Methodist did not set out to become one of downtown’s biggest residential developers. At the same time, the role of home builder is not out of keeping for the church, which has existed downtown since 1854 and adopted a social service mission 100 years ago.

“This is a church that is less concerned about right and wrong positions of doctrine and much more concerned about serving the community,” Weist said.

Although many churches have created nonprofit home-building outfits, such developers often limit their development activities to small apartment buildings. First United Methodist has the rare opportunity to work on a large canvas--nearly a full downtown block--to give full flight to its dreams of community-building.

The church has become a significant force in shaping the neighborhood surrounding Staples Center. The burst of activity in South Park is also a reflection of the cachet that the new sports arena is bringing to a neighborhood that is little known outside downtown.

Weist said he is primarily interested in building a full-service community around his church, rather than merely provide housing. For that reason, he said, market-rate apartments will stand next to low-income and special-needs housing on the same block.

New apartment buildings and stores, in fact, are part of the city’s blueprint for the stadium area, said David Riccitiello, a CRA project manager.

“We saw the arena project as not only stimulating downtown as a whole, but also stimulating our goals for South Park,” said Riccitiello. “One reason that the [redevelopment] agency supported the arena project is the interest it would generate in both retail development and market-rate housing.”

One example is the recent revival of interest in bringing a supermarket--arguably the neighborhood’s most-needed amenity--to South Park. City officials say that grocery chains have been reluctant to go into an area with such a small population. Downtown currently has 3,000 residential units, of which about a third are in South Park.

“We have been trying to get a supermarket for five years. All of a sudden, the [CRA] is talking to supermarket chains,” Weist said. “The reason why [supermarket operators] are interested is that the [location] is near Staples Center, even though nobody who goes to a Kings game will stop and buy a loaf of bread at the market.”

But Weist said he is encouraged by the crowds of pedestrians that the arena will attract, especially at night.

“I would hope that a 24-hour city emerges with Staples Center,” including such businesses as “coffee shops, dessert places and other kinds of night-life destinations,” he said, sounding more like an urban planner than a clergyman.

Weist’s role as Methodist minister is the key to understanding his zeal as a housing developer, said Villa Flores resident Loran Knight.

“Methodist ministers wear more than one hat, and they are builders,” said Knight, a retired social worker whose father was also a Methodist minister.

Methodism had its origins among the working poor of 18th-century London, and the tradition of social service survives to this day, Knight said.

The local church’s progress as a home builder has been gradual. The church bought its current building at 1010 S. Flower in 1984, shortly after selling its former building at Hope and 8th streets to the Gas Co. First United Methodist has been a social service provider for more than a century, and the upper stories of its buildings are currently occupied by such nonprofit operations as the Asian Pacific Legal Center and the Homeless Healthcare Center.

When he became senior pastor in 1989, Weist said, he felt “something needed to be done” to provide a residential community around the church, which had become increasingly isolated amid the high-rise landscape of downtown.

“The thing we have been interested in from the beginning is in building a community,” Weist said.

He said he was unimpressed with the other residential buildings in South Park that do not appear to encourage social life outside their walls. Such buildings, Weist said, have an “interior-oriented design. You don’t see anyone walking.”

At the invitation of architect John Mutlow, Weist discussed this desire with students at the USC School of Architecture. Students devoted several class projects to studying possible designs. At one point, Mutlow suggested to Weist that students design the entire block, even though the church owned only a small portion of it. Most of the rest was controlled by the CRA.

Eventually, the church hired a San Francisco-based firm, Herman Stoller Coliver, to create a master plan for the block.

The plan addresses the difficulty of creating safe and attractive streets and courtyards in a downtown area by emphasizing the dual nature of the site: Buildings on major streets such as Flower and Hope must be tall, to match the high-rise scale of other downtown buildings. Buildings must also meet the sidewalk, so that streets appear inviting to pedestrians.

The interior of the block, on the other hand, is human-scaled. Each building has its own courtyard, which faces onto an interior pedestrian street called Pembroke Lane, which cuts through the block in a north-south direction.

In the master plan, “every building has a usable outside space,” Mutlow said. ‘That’s very unusual for downtown.”

Security is a major concern in a downtown site. The basic approach is to maintain visibility at all points, and to locate windows facing in all directions, “so that there are eyes on the courtyard,” according to Mutlow. Security cameras also rake across the courtyard.

In 1994, Los Angeles designated the church-based home builder as the city’s agent in bringing new housing to the block. Weist grabbed the opportunity, but also discovered how trying the nonprofit home-building business can be.

“If we had known from the beginning how complicated it was, we would never have done it,” Weist said. “We were so green.”

Weist’s efforts are the most recent chapter in a 20-year effort by city officials to establish a residential community in South Park.

“People who work in the garment district or in the service industries need decent, affordable housing,” Riccitiello said. “Plus, you have professional and management-level people who need housing downtown and who can afford to pay market rents.”

Now city officials say they are pleasantly surprised that South Park, where no market-rate housing has been built since 1992, may become fashionable, or least acceptable, to middle-class renters, because of the area’s proximity to Staples Center and the new stores and restaurants planned for the surrounding streets.

“This [block] has become a prime neighborhood,” said Ayahlushim Hammond, CRA project manager for the Central Business District. “Who would have known?”