If Anyone Can Sell Playa Vista, It’s Got to Be Soboroff

You drive out toward the ocean to Ballona Wetlands, that blessedly empty patch of land between the marina and the airport, and just the sight of it makes you queasy--all the scraping and shoveling, foundation-laying and curb-pouring going on, the prep work for just about the biggest single building project in the L.A. city limits.

At least it makes me queasy. Maybe it would to you, too, if you knew how L.A. ranks, park-wise. Think of it this way: If L.A. were in the parks and open space Olympics, it would still be wheezing toward the finish line while other cities already had their medals and were heading for the showers.

I went there to meet a man who once ran the city parks commission and then ran for mayor. When he comes here, to the project called Playa Vista, and he looks at the scraping and shoveling, he sees a new model for L.A. living: houses and parks and little shops and big trees. Steve Soboroff sees something to please almost all of the people almost all of the time.

In our last episode, Soboroff had come in third in the mayoral primary last spring, and that left him a man at loose ends. What to do? What to do?

Soboroff’s always been a matchmaker: matching needy boys to role-model men in Big Brothers, which didn’t get him rich, and brokering land deals for big drugstores and grocery stores and hardware and electronic stores, which did.

Few places in town have bigger, badder karma than Playa Vista. It has methane and oil residue underfoot. Its showcase tenant, DreamWorks, rolled up its blueprints and bailed. Frank Gehry, the uber-architect, came aboard, which didn’t so much warm people to Playa Vista as it did cool them to Frank Gehry. Billionaire Sam Zell, partner in a Playa Vista office building, turns out to be the same Sam Zell who just made the front page of this newspaper because taxpayers--not Zell--could be paying $200 million for belly-up government loans because Zell’s luxury cruise ship company has run aground.

So only a guy like Soboroff could take over this mess and say that this would be gratifying, challenging, all the usual corporate word-ornaments, and one more: “fun.”

I don’t know what he’s getting paid, but I believe him when he says he could have made five times more at other jobs, like “manufacturing paper bags in Vernon.” Playa Vista gets its money’s worth in his cheerful enthusiasm. On a tour of the premises, when our electric cart got stuck at the lip of a small ditch, he was as tickled as a 6-year-old when a road grader nudged enough earth in his path to let the go-cart go.

He says he had “no problem” telling the money men that his ideas meant taking profit out of their pockets for the sake of a better project. Nor does he have a problem telling environmentalists that it was “unrealistic” to expect this place to stay undeveloped: “That’s the Dennis Rodman mentality, ‘I need it all, baby.’ . . . This was not Yosemite before. This was an airport . . . oil wells. And all this environmental remediation--it wouldn’t happen otherwise.”

Leaning at the edge of a Playa Vista diorama that makes him look like a kid with a train set, he says: “This makes everyone 70% or 80% happy. Nobody gets 101%.”

I met Soboroff in the mayor’s race and came to like him, but when you’re going to talk to one of the best salesman in town, you have to work on your sales resistance.

First, I tell him I support the enemy: I send money to the Trust for Public Land, which has an option to buy nearly 200 acres of Ballona to preserve unbuilt. “Good, good,” he says, beaming. “Me too.”

Then I break it to him that I am the enemy: In 1999, my name showed up on a Playa Vista “enemies list” of known opponents. “Was I on it? I was parks commissioner,” Soboroff says impishly. Actually, “I would consider that a contact list”--more people to talk around to his point of view.

That’s what he has to offer Playa Vista--persuasion, not technicalities. (A bit later, as we jounce around the place, we pass a foundation, and he points and says of his mission, “I have no interest in understanding why those metal poles are there.” I say, “You mean the rebar?” He says, “Yeah. What I care about is that people live there and enjoy their life.”)

There’s another question. Bruce Babbitt curdled the sweet green goodwill he had acquired as Arizona governor and secretary of the Interior by signing on with Hearst Corp. to develop Central California coastland.

Soboroff has his own green credentials, like wanting trees instead of asphalt in schoolyards. Mary Menees of the Trust for Public Land says, “We certainly have a good working relationship with him.”

So I put it to him: Is he being used? “I’m a big boy,” Soboroff says. “No.”

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Patt Morrison’s e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com