Creative Tenants Making Culver City Fashionable
In yet another demonstration of the power of entertainment and technology firms to bring neglected neighborhoods to life, an obscure corner of Culver City has emerged as a fashionable hub of creative industries.
Architects, advertising agencies, post-production companies and Internet-related firms are crowding into the Hayden Tract, a 50-acre huddle of industrial buildings south of Venice Boulevard that was formerly considered a drab secondary market.
Despite grumbling from real estate professionals who say the city is unfriendly to developers, Culver City has attracted a number of corporate and high-profile creative tenants in the last three years, including New York-based advertising firm Ogilvy Group, Internet film producer Anonymous Content, several divisions of Sony Corp., a division of America Online and a digital-imaging unit of Kodak. National Public Radio is said to be close to signing a lease in a rehabbed warehouse building.
Culver City’s industrial area is one of several in the region--including the industrial area of Santa Monica, the Brewery complex in downtown Los Angeles and the NoHo district of North Hollywood--that have turned the conventional wisdom of the real estate industry topsy-turvy by attracting fast-growing, well-capitalized firms to aging, grungy areas.
“Within a year, Culver City will be where Santa Monica is now,” said Alan Landau, owner of Cognito Films, a maker of commercials and music videos that is moving into a 12,000-square-foot space in a 70,000-square-foot building in the Hayden Tract developed by the PAS Trust of Los Angeles.
Landau said he bases his prediction on his own experience. “Five years ago, I was one of the first companies to move into a warehouse in Santa Monica south of Wilshire Boulevard. People said, ‘Wow! That’s really on the fringe!’ Now it’s corporate America,” he said.
Among the small firms that have recently arrived in Culver City are architects Steve Johnson and James Favaro, who relocated from Santa Monica, the region’s most expensive market for creative space. (Creative space is typically found in older industrial buildings that have been refurbished for non-industrial tenants.)
The architects, who have purchased a 5,200-square-foot building formerly used for iron working, said they were attracted to Culver City for many reasons: the high number of older industrial buildings available for conversion, a central location close to the Santa Monica Freeway and a growing community of like-minded firms.
“The center of gravity has shifted east,” Favaro said, referring to the willingness of creative tenants to look beyond Santa Monica to Culver City and downtown L.A.
Although leasing has “slowed dramatically” in all categories of Westside real estate, including creative space, the longer-term outlook for Culver City is good, according to real estate broker Neil Resnick of Grubb & Ellis.
“As the economy picks up and entertainment and creative firms decide to expand their businesses, the largest pool of buildings that offer this type of creative environment are located in Culver City,” he said.
The combined Marina del Rey and Culver City market has the most creative space in the metropolitan area, according to a July report from Grubb & Ellis, which said the area had 2.6 million square feet. Santa Monica, the next-largest creative space market, has 2 million square feet. Lease rates average $2.46 monthly in the Marina and Culver City, compared with $3.36 in Santa Monica.
The most active areas in Culver City include the Hayden Tract and portions of Jefferson Boulevard. Veteran Culver City developers Frederick and Laurie Smith recently finished two buildings: the 25,000-square-foot Beehive, which was leased to Medschool.com late last year, and the 15,000-square-foot Stealth, which is 50% leased to Geneva Films.
Other Culver City developers include PMI Properties of Beverly Hills, which is finishing its third rehab in the Hayden Tract, and Santa Monica-based DMC Investment Co., which is rehabbing 90,000 square feet in five buildings on Jefferson.
DMC partner Michael Kelson said the project, designed by the Santa Monica firm of Pugh & Scarpa, will incorporate lots of greenery to give it a campus feel.
Founded in 1913 by developer Harry Culver, Culver City has a long history of attracting creative firms, primarily film studios. Among the studios that formerly operated in Culver City were Hal Roach Studios, Pathe, Lorimar, Desilu and MGM. Sony Pictures Entertainment remains in the city.
The acknowledged redevelopment pioneers of Culver City are the husband-and-wife Smith team, the principals of Samitaur Constructs. Frederick Smith, a former magazine writer and industrial real estate broker, started rehabbing industrial property in 1987 after inheriting several buildings from his father, an industrial developer.
Smith has gained international attention for his artistically ambitious buildings, designed entirely by Eric Owen Moss. The architect has won many design awards for the sculptural buildings, which often express philosophical and literary ideas in fantastic erupting forms. The Hayden Tract has become a site of architectural pilgrimages--design students and architects can often be seen wandering with maps and cameras in hand.
Smith, however, says he paid a high price--both financially and personally, for being an innovator. In the 1980s and early 1990s, with only a few industrial buildings to his credit, he had to put up much of his own money to reconstruct the industrial buildings into one-of-a-kind extravaganzas--as well as to pay for extensive seismic reinforcements and to clean up industrial contaminants in the soil.
Now the Smiths own 300,000 square feet of creative space in Culver City. The centerpiece is a self-contained business park known as Conjunctive Points, consisting of 16 free-standing buildings, fronted by the Stealth building, whose dark colors and soaring lines readily evoke a bomber.
Now a group of developers has gathered around the Smiths and are rehabbing buildings for what seemed, in the late 1990s, to be an unquenchable demand among entertainment firms and dot-coms for creative, unconventional space.
“The key to marketing was that the space had to be a ‘blowout,’ ” said Jeff Palmer of PMI Properties. That is, “extremely interesting and architecturally significant.”
If developers and tenants are excited about Culver City, some people are less than thrilled about doing business with city officials.
Several developers and leasing agents said the city delayed projects through bureaucracy and lengthy plan checks and made some projects more expensive by requiring landscaping and graded parking areas.
One developer complained that departments had conflicting requirements and that some city departments often called for changes in the design after preliminary approval from the planning department, causing further cost.
“This is not a city that has intelligently assisted developers in an unbiased way,” said Ian Strano, an office broker with First Property Realty of West Los Angeles. “This is a disorganized city.”
The city appears to be making an effort to mend fences with developers. At the request of Community Development Director Marsha Rood, the City Council approved hiring a San Diego-based consultant, Zucker Systems, to examine the city’s interaction with developers.
The Zucker report, which was presented to the City Council about three weeks ago, contains 120 recommendations to the city to improve its relationship with developers and tenants.
Despite the disputes with developers, Rood remained upbeat about Culver City’s future as a development market.
Culver City, Rood said, “will be a small town with urban flair. It will be a different city than anything else on the Westside, and probably in the region.”
