The owners of Barrington Plaza, an aging Los Angeles apartment complex with a record of life-threatening fires, said Monday that they plan to evict all tenants to make way for a sprinkler retrofit that will cost more than $300 million and take several years.
Landlord Douglas Emmett Inc. notified city officials that it will withdraw all 712 units in Barrington Plaza from the rental market under the Ellis Act. The state law allows landlords to remove tenants from rent-stabilized apartments if their building is removed from the rental market.
It is expected to be one of the largest mass evictions in the city in recent years, affecting 577 occupied units, some of which house tenants who have lived in the property for decades under rent controls that keep their monthly payments below market rate.
Residents were notified Monday of the planned closure.
Tenant rights advocate Larry Gross of the Coalition for Economic Survival said Douglas Emmett should have planned to temporarily relocate the tenants and allow them to return to their rent-controlled units when repairs are complete.
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“There are long-term tenants who are going to end up being displaced and will have to pay much higher rents” in the future, he said. “They won’t be able to find comparable housing in the neighborhood or even the city.”
The complex at Wilshire Boulevard and Barrington Avenue in L.A.’s Sawtelle neighborhood will be returned to the rental market when the upgrades are complete, the landlord said. No completion date has been set and there are no provisions for tenants to return to their units.
Current tenants may have as long as a year to move out and, in the case of elderly or disabled occupants, could receive more than $22,000 in financial assistance for relocation, the landlord said.
Relocation expense payments for tenants who have lived in the building for less than three years will be as much as $9,200 and may be used for such costs as first and last months’ rent in another apartment, security deposits and moving fees. The dollar amounts follow city eviction guidelines.
Due to high turnover, most tenants are currently paying market rate rent, the landlord said.
The three-tower complex was built in the early 1960s, which puts it in a group of 55 residential towers in Los Angeles that are exempt from laws requiring sprinklers that are triggered by fire. Sprinklers are mandated in most apartment buildings, but the city has maintained an exemption for high-rises built between 1943 and 1974. Among them are condominium buildings occupied by owners who have resisted the expense of adding sprinklers.
The lack of sprinklers at Barrington Plaza proved dangerous in 2013, when one of its three towers caught fire, displacing 125 residents. Fire erupted again in the same 25-story structure, known as Tower A, in 2020. A 19-year-old man died and 13 people were injured, including a 3-month-old baby and two firefighters. Eight floors in the building were red-tagged by city inspectors as unsafe to occupy and remain vacant.
Although city law does not require Barrington Plaza and other residential towers of its era to perform sprinkler retrofits, city officials did make approval of Barrington Plaza’s planned repairs from the 2020 fire contingent on upgrading the safety standards of all units.
“We understand the impact removing all Barrington Plaza rental units from the market will have on our tenants,” Douglas Emmett Chief Executive Jordan Kaplan said in a statement. “Unfortunately, this is the only way to comply with city directives to install fire sprinklers and other life safety improvements throughout the towers following the January 2020 fire.”
Barrington Plaza will have relocation specialists available at the property who can provide individualized tenant support and aid in locating, viewing and moving into new residences, the landlord said. There will also be a telephone hotline to answer tenant questions.
“Although almost 75% of our residents have been at Barrington Plaza for less than three years, we have some residents that have been here over 20 years, and we want to make sure that this process is as seamless as possible for them,” Kaplan said. “That is why we are going far beyond the Ellis Act requirements by providing individualized relocation support tailored to the specific circumstances of each tenant.”
Gross said the landlord should use other means to protect tenants’ housing at Barrington Plaza.
“That’s one of the largest complexes on the Westside,” he said. Its “rent-controlled units will be lost forever if they use the Ellis Act.”
Don’t it always seem to go That you don’t know what you got till it’s gone? They paved paradise, put up a parking lot …
—Joni Mitchell
It seemed like old times at my favorite Hollywood restaurant the other night. The rains had stopped and everyone was coming out for their favorite California comfort food. A fire was crackling in the fireplace and dessert soufflés were puffing up in the ovens. The party room upstairs was packed with 35 colleagues at a celebratory business dinner and downstairs every table was filled. But something strange was happening.
When diners finished their meals, they took out their phones and began photographing the place. Pictures on the walls had price tags on them. So did lamps and antique tables. Every now and then people hugged each other and wiped away tears. I was one of them.
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This was the last week of life for Off Vine restaurant, a treasured refuge from the hurly burly of Sunset Boulevard, housed in a bungalow with a 115-year history, a repository of countless, colorful movieland stories.
For me, this was personal. Off Vine had become my own Cheers. Like the theme of the TV show, it was the place “Where everybody knows your name / And they’re always glad you came.”
With my friends and neighbors I found camaraderie and a warm welcome at Off Vine for over 30 years. Like so many other Angelenos, we built memories here and shared delicious meals.
“You’re crying for a restaurant?” she said.
“No,” I said. “I’m crying for all we are losing.”
We also formed a society here called the Oy Luck Club, a tongue-in-cheek title that conveyed this was a place to have a good time. We celebrated birthdays and anniversaries. Some of us brought our children as babies and they grew up with this special group of “aunts” and “uncles.” They are now adults and still came back to Off Vine as if it were a second home, a family home. It was the glue that bound us together for the rest of our lives.
How can I tell you why Off Vine matters? If you have been there for a festive brunch on the graceful patio with its bowers of bougainvillea, you may understand. If you took family there for birthday dinners or, like one of my friends, you hosted foreign dignitaries for lunch to show them another side of Hollywood, you will understand.
Recently a friend told me, “You will have to find a new place to go instead of Off Vine.”
I caught my breath, whispered, “I can’t” and began to cry.
“You’re crying for a restaurant?” she said.
“No,” I said. “I’m crying for all we are losing.”
The owners did not plan this. They hoped to stay for a long time. But this is a story of the cost of insensitive development, the devaluation of our city’s history and a place that deserves to be preserved. Otherwise, a treasured piece of Hollywood history will soon be unremembered by anyone.
Hollywood legends
My own story is linked indelibly to the history of Hollywood.
Long ago and far away in a land called New Jersey, I spent many snowy days of childhood dreaming of a magical place called Hollywood where it was always warm and movie stars were everywhere. My dreams were enhanced by movie magazines, which showed a never-ending stream of glamorous actors dining and dancing at night clubs like Ciro’s, Cafe Trocadero, Mocambo and the Earl Carroll Theatre.
Food and drink played a role in the glamour life. Stars had private booths at the likes of Chasen’s and the Brown Derby, where an artist drew caricatures of the famous that hung on the walls. Even a soda fountain, Schwab’s, was famous because legend had it that Lana Turner had been discovered there sitting on a stool sipping a milkshake.
Years later, I would move to Hollywood, but those places were mostly gone, torn down in the march toward modernization. The celebrated history of the movie capital would become confined to the footprints at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre (now TCL Chinese Theatre), stars on the sidewalk and books about its fabled past. As a journalist with the Associated Press, I had the chance to interview stars at the Brown Derby with its big brown hat on the rooftop looming over Hollywood. But soon that too was gone, as was C.C. Brown’s, the birthplace of the hot fudge sundae.
So often I’d strike out when I went in search of a Hollywood landmark such as the Garden of Allah residential hotel, where stars such as Errol Flynn and famous writers including F. Scott Fitzgerald and Dorothy Parker lived and partied in their heyday. I found it had been demolished and replaced by a bank (which was itself torn down a couple of years back for a never-built Frank Gehry project).
But all was not lost. One day in 1989 I was driving around Hollywood with my best friend and fellow reporter, Theo Wilson, when she and I discovered a remaining piece of the wonderland I‘d been searching for. It was a small, hidden oasis of a restaurant called Off Vine. Tucked away on a street just south of Sunset Boulevard and east of Vine Street, it was a delightful bungalow with a traditional porch and an outdoor patio. When we stepped inside, the warming fireplace, coffered ceilings and vintage pictures of old-time stars and movie premieres made us feel we had come home. We learned the place had a colorful Hollywood history and just recently had opened as an eating place.
We sat down for a meal of California cuisine coupled with old-fashioned comfort food that pleased our taste buds. We knew this place was a keeper.
Over the years it became our go-to destination for brunches, dinners, birthdays and pretheater meals. We brought neighbors from our Hollywood Heights enclave and founded the Oy Luck Club, a name that reflected the lighthearted intent of the members who were part of a unique community that was not the glitzy movie capital but was Hollywood, a small town with homes and shops, block parties and interesting people.
At one time there were so many of us that we brought our own huge, round tabletop that unfolded to accommodate up to 16 people, our own version of the Algonquin Round Table.
Amid this idyllic camaraderie, we never imagined that one day we would lose our treasured piece of history and community. Sadly, that time appears to be now unless some rescuer turns up at the last minute to save it.
The parcel of land on which the restaurant sits has been sold to an investor who plans to tear it down and put up a row of apartments on the whole block. Off Vine sits on what will become an underground parking garage. (Cue the Joni Mitchell song.)
For the record:
12:29 p.m. March 29, 2023The final Oy Luck Club gathering at Off Vine was on a recent Saturday, not a Sunday as originally stated.
A couple of Saturdays ago the surviving members of Oy Luck Club gathered at Off Vine to celebrate two birthdays and reminisce about our beloved clubhouse.
One of those being feted was Diva Ward, 31, who had first come to an Oy Luck at Off Vine as an infant in the arms of her mother, Carol, who flew in from Wisconsin for the event. Also celebrating was architect Michael Mekeel, a founding member of Oy Luck. The oldest member present was famed actor Alan Oppenheimer, 92.
We ordered favorites from the brunch menu: a huge Belgian waffle with berries and bacon, eggs Benedict with exquisite hollandaise sauce, omelets, a breakfast quesadilla and salads. The grand finale was, as always, the signature Off Vine soufflé available in chocolate, raspberry or Grand Marnier. It had to be ordered half an hour ahead but was worth the wait. Nowhere else have I ever tasted such a rich, puffy soufflé.
Movie-worthy history
We shared memories with co-owner Richard Falzone who has saved Off Vine repeatedly. Everyone listened as I recounted the colorful story of the little house, which itself could be the inspiration for a movie.
The classic Craftsman bungalow was built in 1908 on a dirt road surrounded by fruit trees and orange groves off a newly formed country path called Vine Street.
With the burgeoning film industry in its infancy, houses began popping up to accommodate the actors, crews and producers who came west to get in on the new art form.
The house at 6263 Leland Way off Vine Street eventually was purchased by theater and nightclub impresario Earl Carroll for the actress and showgirl Beryl Wallace.
Carroll discovered Wallace in New York and put her onstage in his famous and somewhat scandalous “Vanities,” which featured elaborate productions with beautiful, scantily clad showgirls. She was his star. The two fell in love and for the next two decades she would be his girlfriend and constant companion. When he left Broadway under a cloud due to increasingly risqué shows, he decided to go West to seek a new venue for his extravagant dreams. He brought Wallace with him to Hollywood, where she had small roles in 23 films and performed at the Earl Carroll Theatre, a supper club and entertainment venue on Sunset Boulevard. The building’s exterior bore a 24-foot neon likeness of Wallace with the slogan, “Through these portals pass the most beautiful girls in the world.”
The club, which was colossal in size and from 1997 to 2017 housed Nickelodeon’s TV production studios, is set for renovation and has been declared a historic monument. Built by Carroll in 1938, it housed a 1,000-seat showroom where productions featured 60 showgirls performing on a double revolving stage. Members of Hollywood royalty were among those who paid $1,000 each for VIP lifetime memberships.
Wallace was its premier star, and Carroll felt she needed a residence that would also serve as a retreat between shows. He purchased the charming bungalow on Leland Way that became Wallace’s home. Later her mother lived with her there while the town of Hollywood grew around them. The Pantages Theatre is a few blocks away and the Cinerama Dome is around the corner. Schwab’s was up the street at Hollywood and Vine.
But not all Hollywood stories have happy endings. Tragedy struck in 1948 when Wallace and Carroll, en route to New York to discuss an even bigger project, died together in a plane crash in Pennsylvania. A year later, her mother, suffering from depression over the loss of her daughter, committed suicide.
The little bungalow was home to Beryl’s sister for a time and then was rented to several short-term tenants, including a music production company and a shoe repair shop.
In 1989 it emerged from hiding and became the unexpected restaurant known as Off Vine, which offered an escape from the chaos and glitz that is current-day Hollywood. One historian of the area said of the spot: “It has survived through the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, Hollywood’s Silent and Golden eras, numerous earthquakes, ambitious landowners and, in 2007, a disastrous fire.” But even the electrical fire that gutted the upper story and forced closure of the restaurant for two years while repairs were done could not kill Off Vine. Its savior since 1997 has been Falzone, a former Broadway theater performer who came West in search of his movieland dreams.
He found an unexpected career change when he took a temporary job as a server at Off Vine. He loved the place, worked his way up to general manager and became a part owner with two partners. Eight months later the fire sparked in antiquated wiring panels devastated the house.
But Falzone persisted. He set up an office on the front porch to handle calls from loyal customers and to deal with the city and insurance companies. Two years later, the Craftsman bungalow, looking the same as ever, reopened. It took $750,000 to save it.
The owners were required to bring the house up to code and added a sprinkler system, larger restrooms, a wheelchair ramp and a new state-of-the-art kitchen. The upper floor, used for parties, was restored with its 13-foot coffered ceiling.
“Our journey has been long and tumultuous, full of struggles and setbacks,” Falzone said at the reopening ceremony. “It also has come to exemplify the strength of a community that has continually offered guidance, encouragement and support to a small business that found itself struggling to reopen its doors during one of the worst economic crises our country has ever seen.”
Then L.A. City Council president and future mayor Eric Garcetti said, “This Hollywood gem adds to the continued revitalization of our community.” Loyal customers, including the Oy Luck Club gang, returned in droves. The rebirth of the Pantages Theatre as a venue for Broadway road shows brought audience members there for pretheater meals.
Things were going so well that Falzone decided it might be time to apply for designation as a Hollywood historic landmark. He was supported by Hollywood Heritage, a preservation group whose co-founder, architect Fran Offenhauser, has spearheaded campaigns to save historic buildings from the wrecking ball.
But the arbiters of such decisions looked at its history and ruled that because of the fire, which resulted in a few visible exterior changes, Off Vine did not qualify.
Then the pandemic hit and Falzone had to close. But again the little restaurant that could, with the help of government COVID subsidies, survived. Off Vine reopened as soon as it was safe and struggled to get enough servers. Some loyal employees returned. Amid all of that, Falzone was blindsided by the sale and was given notice that when the lease expires this April he would be required to vacate the property.
It turns out that Earl Carroll, in a seeming premonition and an act of love for his inamorata, added a codicil to his will stating that if he and Wallace should die together the property would go to her heirs. It was still owned by Wallace’s descendants 75 years later when they yielded to a multimillion-dollar offer from Invesco, a development firm that was interested not in the lovely little house but the land on which it stands.
Notice also was given to other nearby restaurants. A Chipotle has already relocated.
“This has been my life for 26 years. It’s been my heart, my soul, my baby and my family. It’s been my everything,” Falzone told me. “It’s not just a restaurant. People are coming into a family home and they are our family. It’s a home where there’s love, good food and good cheer.”
Offenhauser, who also is a founding member of the Oy Luck Club and a powerful advocate for Hollywood preservation, sees this as another nail in the coffin of Hollywood’s history.
“There is a real Hollywood and it’s getting smothered,” she told me as we commiserated about the impending loss. “It is not a sign of progress to destroy things that are meaningful. It’s important to integrate them with whatever is new that is compatible and complementary.
“It’s not rocket science to be able to save Off Vine,” she said. “If you recognize something is important you can build around it. It’s possible to build new and not destroy the old. In the alternative, the building could be moved to another lot. It’s not that complicated.”
We reflected on how many of us who are transplants to Hollywood made it our real hometown.
“For whatever reason when we came to Hollywood we bonded with it deeply,” Offenhauser said. “This bungalow reflects that. It means something much bigger than our individual personal memories. It manifests what neighbors mean; what Beryl’s life meant; how Richard knit people together with his unique grasp of food in a home; what a livable humanistic neighborhood in Hollywood — with neighbors walking by that porch — did mean and should mean.”
When I asked Falzone the other day what happened to the pictures and memorabilia of the beautiful Beryl Wallace that adorned the walls of Off Vine as long as I had been going there, he said the family came and collected everything. Sadly, there remains no evidence that the glamorous star ever lived there.
Deutsch, longtime special correspondent for the Associated Press, is known for covering the trials of O.J. Simpson, Angela Davis, Phil Spector, Patty Hearst, Charles Manson, Robert Blake, Lyle and Erik Menendez, Michael Jackson and many more. She has been a resident of Hollywood for more than 50 years, first in the Hollywood Heights and currently the Hollywood Dell.
Radford Studio Center, a storied movie lot in Studio City that has been home to generations of landmark television shows — including “Gunsmoke” and “Seinfeld” — is set to get a $1-billion upgrade to expand its facilities and bring them further into the digital age.
The owners of the lot formerly known as CBS Studio Center submitted plans to Los Angeles officials Friday to revamp and enlarge the aging studio and broadcasting complex, adding as much as 1 million square feet of new soundstages, production facilities and offices.
Founded by movie comedy legend Mack Sennett in 1928, the lot became known as “Hit City” in the decades after World War II as popular TV shows such as “Leave It to Beaver,” “Gilligan’s Island,” “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “The Bob Newhart Show” and “Will & Grace” were made there. Current shows include “Big Brother 24” and “Physical.”
“It’s got this mystique that if you come there you’re going to make it,” said studio President Mike Klausman, who has worked on the property since he started there as a CBS page in 1971.
The Radford complex was the very studio lot that gave rise to the name Studio City. It’s had numerous incarnations, including decades as Republic Studios, home to such screen legends as Roy Rogers, John Wayne and Joan Crawford. Among Republic’s popular movies were “The Quiet Man,” “Sands of Iwo Jima” and “Johnny Guitar.”
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The current state of the 55-acre studio is less glamorous than its heritage would suggest, having evolved like an old city where new additions, often built on a tight budget, were layered over and around existing structures.
“There was never really a master plan,” Klausman said. “You would never tear down anything, just add on. We had to work around what was there.”
Bungalows for writers and stars — often quaint structures from Hollywood’s Golden Age on other historic movie lots — are clusters of mobile homes delivered in the 1990s when times were lean, he said. The vast roofs of soundstages used to drain rainwater directly onto the asphalt roads below.
“You almost needed a boat to get from one studio to another,” Klausman said. “It was like a river in that place.”
The drainage issue has been fixed, and times are no longer lean as the rise of streaming has escalated demand for soundstages and other production facilities and prompted the development of new studios in the Los Angeles region. Radford and other studios are booked year-round.
Though it is outwardly unassuming with its main entrance tucked around a corner from Ventura Boulevard on Radford Avenue, the Radford studio is among the most valuable in the world based on price. It sold in 2021 for $1.85 billion to Hackman Capital Partners, one of the largest providers of entertainment production facilities, and New York real estate investor Square Mile Capital Management.
“The history of hit shows that have been produced at Radford trace the trajectory of culture and entertainment in Los Angeles,” said Zach Sokoloff, a senior vice president at Culver City-based Hackman, who plans to complete its makeover.
Its location in an upscale Los Angeles neighborhood near other illustrious movie studios beloved by filmmakers made Radford highly sought after when it hit the market nearly two years ago, said real estate broker Carl Muhlstein of JLL, who represented seller ViacomCBS in the deal. There were multiple bidders for the property, he said.
“Between Studio City and Burbank there are four iconic studio lots. Disney, Warner Bros. and Universal haven’t changed hands for over 100 years,” he said. “Here was an opportunity to buy something that only became surplus with the merger of CBS and Viacom” in 2019.
In addition to the real estate assets, ViacomCBS (which now goes by Paramount Global) turned over its lucrative studio operations business at the former CBS Studio Center, which includes stage rentals, facilities management and production support services on the Radford lot.
ViacomCBS sold another former CBS property, Television City in L.A.’s Fairfax district, to Hackman for $750 million in 2019. Paramount Global controls legendary Paramount Studios in Hollywood.
CBS’ two L.A. television stations, KCBS-TV (Channel 2) and KCAL-TV (Channel 9), are housed at the CBS Broadcast Center on the Radford lot, and the local news operation will stay put as part of a long-term lease-back.
CBS, which acquired the property from Republic Pictures in the 1960s, will continue to occupy stages and produce content on the Radford lot. CBS-produced shows there now include “SEAL Team,” “Entertainment Tonight,” “The Neighborhood” and “The Talk,” which is recorded before a live audience.
In its present form, Radford Studio Center offers tenants 18 traditional soundstages and four other stages. The site also has about 210,000 square feet of production office space and its own mill to provide carpentry services and special effects, a commissary and a carwash.
It has a backlot with a “Central Park” and a “New York Street” with 11 building fronts, including four brownstones. It also includes simulated residential neighborhoods with a hodgepodge of houses in different architectural styles, including a facade used as the Cleaver residence in the sitcom “Leave It to Beaver.”
Hackman’s proposal calls for creating a largely new studio with 2.2 million square feet of buildings, including up to 25 soundstages and 300,000 square feet of production support space such as wardrobe, storage and a mill. There would be 725,000 square feet of offices to support productions and an additional 700,000 square feet of offices available for rent to companies in the entertainment industry.
Historic structures, including the Mack Sennett Building and Stages 9 and 10, would be preserved.
To improve access, an entrance off Ventura Boulevard at Carpenter Avenue would be “resurrected,” Sokoloff said. The studio once had an entrance there, but it closed several decades ago.
Also planned is a new bridge over Tujunga Wash at Moorpark Street that would make Radford Avenue a through street. Only vehicles going to the studio could cross the bridge, but it would be open to members of the public on foot or on bicycles. The Los Angeles River Greenway, a 51-mile bike and pedestrian path, is currently interrupted at Radford Studio Center and a new bridge would close that gap.
Hackman owns five studios in the L.A. region, along with facilities in New York, New Orleans, Ireland, Canada, London and Scotland.
The company plans $1.25 billion worth of improvements to Television City that will add soundstages, production support facilities and offices for rent.
Though the Los Angeles area has the largest number of soundstages of any city in the world, studios are operating near 100% capacity with waiting lists as long as five film productions deep for those spaces, financial advisor Deloitte said in a 2021 report.
“To meet the booming demand, supply would need to more than double in Los Angeles County” in the next few years, Deloitte said. Planned projects for more studio space fall far short of that.
The Radford Studio project would add more than 4,000 workers upon completion, doubling the number of people employed there now, according to a study by the L.A. County Economic Development Corp.
Growing up in Orange County in the late 1970s, KL DeHart often wandered the Westminster Mall with her mother, checking out the latest fashions and seeing what movies were playing.
As a teenager, she spent many weekends there with friends playing pinball and skeeball at the arcade and shopping for trendy Chemin De Fer jeans.
Now, the mall is pocked with empty storefronts. At the remaining businesses, employees eagerly jump to help the few customers passing through.
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What may rise in its place, if developers and city officials have their way, is a new kind of mall, one that will include lawns, walking trails and thousands of apartments.
“It was the hip place to be, and it’s really faded out, but it’s just sad to see it go,” said DeHart, a 55-year-old massage therapist who still lives near the mall, in the house she grew up in. She is among the residents worried that the new apartments will increase traffic while doing little to solve the region’s affordable housing crisis.
In Orange County, the San Fernando Valley and suburbs throughout America, the mall was a gathering spot where there were few other places to hang out. It was where kids stocked up on the latest fashions and roamed in packs after school, spawning the term “mall rat.”
The 1980s cult classic “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” began and ended at the mall where the teens worked. In the 1995 film “Clueless,” a Beverly Hills teen retreated to the mall, which she described as a “sanctuary,” after failing to persuade a teacher to boost her grade.
Now, teenagers text with their friends and make TikTok videos. Their parents are more likely to shop online than at a brick-and-mortar store.
At the same time, Orange County is desperate for housing, with rents and home prices escalating and state laws requiring cities to zone for new construction. In a region where there is little undeveloped land and neighbors are likely to push back at new housing, some see declining malls as ideal places to build.
The Westminster Mall is “probably one of the largest areas of developable space that still exists in our time in this area,” City Manager Christine Cordon told the City Council during a meeting last November.
Cordon remembers taking the bus to the mall decades ago to pick out CDs at Best Buy.
“You’re too young as a teenager to hang out in an actual nightclub, so back in the day, where would you go? The mall,” said Karen North, a USC professor who specializes in social media and psychology.
“It became this default place to go because it had something for everybody. You never knew who you were going to bump into, but you were always guaranteed there was something going on and there would be people around.”
As envisioned in a plan adopted by the City Council last year, the new mall would contain at least 600,000 square feet of retail space. It would include up to 3,000 residential units and up to 425 hotel rooms, surrounded by a park with 17 acres of green space.
Teenagers could still hang out there — it just wouldn’t be the echoey indoor turf that Alicia Silverstone claimed in “Clueless.”
Orange County is catching on to a trend that has already taken hold farther north in the Los Angeles area, led by developer Rick Caruso with his Americana at Brand and Palisades Village malls and residences.
“This is really our opportunity to create something that we can be absolutely proud of for the next generation to create those same fond memories that I have and that others have in a fashion that is consistent with what the times are now,” Cordon said.
Bill Shopoff said his company, which purchased the Macy’s store and the former Sears store in the Westminster Mall last year, hopes to draw people back with shops, a hotel, townhouses and apartments.
Upscale malls like South Coast Plaza are thriving because “they have entertainment, food, there’s a reason to go there,” said Shopoff, president and CEO of Shopoff Realty Investments. “I think we need to do that in Westminster to create a sense of something.”
As for who will rent or purchase the homes in his preliminary plan, Shopoff is counting on a modern type of suburban dweller — one who would rather walk to restaurants and other amenities than live in a single-family home with a yard.
Experts say that new laws, along with increased pressure from the state to build more homes, have convinced some local officials who might have been resistant to rezoning commercial properties in the past.
Roughly every eight years, California cities are assigned a certain number of new housing units they’re required to zone for. As part of the 2020 assessment, Orange County needs to make space for about 183,000 new units, shared among all its cities.
Last year, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed two pieces of legislation aimed at spurring housing development in corridors otherwise zoned for large retail and office buildings.
“Whether you want to call Orange County urban suburbia or suburban urbanism, it’s definitely shifting,” said Elizabeth Hansburg, co-founder and executive director of People for Housing Orange County. “We have an interesting mix of historic districts and tract housing of the ’40s, ’50s, ’60s and even the ’70s, but I don’t see us building like that again. It’s going to be interesting to see how families evolve in denser spaces.”
Elsewhere in Orange County, similar mall conversions are at various stages.
In Santa Ana, a 309-unit apartment complex is under construction on the parking lot of the Mainplace Mall, part of a larger project that will include more apartments, restaurants, courtyards and a music venue.
Simon Property Group has said it is open to adding residential zoning to its mall in Mission Viejo. In Brea, the company has proposed redeveloping 15.5 acres of the mall to include shops, a resort-style fitness center, apartments and a large central green space.
A proposal to redevelop the Village at Orange mall to include housing along with retail has run into stiff opposition. Residents are voicing concerns about tall residential buildings looming above nearby single-family homes.
In Westminster, DeHart said that she and her neighbors who live in tract homes adjacent to the malls are not “NIMBYs” — an acronym for “Not In My Backyard.”
“That’s not what this is,” she said. “We’re asking legitimate questions, and we’re not getting answers.”
In Laguna Hills, the mall is being repurposed along the lines of Caruso’s Los Angeles-area developments, with up to 1,500 apartments, an upscale hotel, commercial office space and 250,000 square feet of stores surrounding a large green space.
On a recent day, a chain-link fence wrapped with a blue tarp surrounded the partly demolished main building, with the “Laguna Hills Mall” lettering barely legible.
A sign affixed to the fence featured a rendering of the new homes, asserting that “a brighter future is coming soon.”
Residents have voiced concerns similar to those of DeHart and her neighbors — traffic, overcrowding. But Laguna Hills Mayor Janine Heft said a change is needed.
“There’s a lot of nostalgia for what the mall used to be,” Heft said. “What we didn’t want was a blight, and that’s really what we had. We had this mall that hadn’t been kept up in years.”
On a recent afternoon, most of the sprawling Westminster Mall was deserted. The only activity was at an indoor playground near JCPenney.
Corrie Essex watched her 5-month-old son playing on a blanket as rain pounded on the glass ceiling.
She grew up in the San Fernando Valley and recalls listing the Northridge Mall as one of her favorite places in an elementary school assignment. Her mother took her and her siblings there to get burgers and go to the movies — a relatively inexpensive way to keep four kids occupied.
“We’d go all the time,” said Essex, 30, who now lives in Huntington Beach. “It was fun. Now, I hate the mall. It’s just not the same. Nothing’s beautiful anymore.”
But on a rainy day like this one, it was a good place to take her son. And, noted her sister, 27-year-old Jessie Lane, there’s little danger of spending money — “it doesn’t have any bougie stores that we would want to buy anything from.”
Their mother, 57-year-old Rachel Lane, said she likes the idea of adding housing to malls.
But with the new outdoor designs, she wondered, “Where are we going to go when it rains?”
Housing does not come cheap in Los Angeles. But if you are willing to live somewhat like a troll, there might be something available for you in Alhambra.
Compass Real Estate recently put on the market a one-bedroom fixer-upper on East Main Street that sits under a bridge, within walking distance of a Vietnamese restaurant and a hair salon.
Southern California’s pricey housing market has forced many potential buyers to either settle into comfortable homes in far-flung suburbs or purchase postage stamp-size properties closer to the region’s job centers. The recent hikes in mortgage interest rates have only aggravated the problem.
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Another extreme option for potential buyers: Consider a quirky, one-of-a-kind property like Alhambra’s bridge house.
The 450-square-foot apartment built in 1949 has a terrace that looks over a stream and a rooftop patio that sits next to a road bridge, separated only by a fence. It is priced at $250,000 — a steal considering the median sale price for an existing single-family house in Southern California is about $785,000.
“We had no comparables … no similar properties,” said Doug Lee, the Compass agent who listed the home, which he said once belonged to a high school friend’s parents. “This is a very, very unique property.”
Lee said his friend’s parents purchased the home in 2005 for about $72,000.
Already, Lee has seen a flurry of interest in the home, which has been on the market for a few weeks.
He held open houses and showed the place to 40 or 50 groups each day, he said.
“This weekend we had it open and it was a zoo,” he said.
The average one-bedroom home in the Alhambra neighborhood costs about $350,000, so Lee decided to strategically price the apartment at just under $250,000 to generate interest — and because there’s no dedicated parking spot, Lee said.
“It’s a fixer-upper. We didn’t know how responsive the market would be,” he said.
The low price makes it one of only 11 properties in the county listed for under $250,000, Lee said.
There is one potential hiccup. While most homeowners own the land under their house, the bridge is presumably public land, Lee said. The real estate agents are working to clear up such property issues with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
Nelson Rising, who oversaw some of the biggest real estate projects in California and ran Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley’s political campaigns, has died at 81.
Rising’s family said he died Thursday at his Pasadena home of complications from Alzheimer’s disease.
Rising led the development of such large-scale properties as U.S. Bank Tower, an office skyscraper in downtown Los Angeles that was for many years the tallest building in the West, and Playa Vista, a mixed-use neighborhood created on land near the Los Angeles coast that had been home to business mogul Howard Hughes’ aviation empire.
In San Francisco, he oversaw one of largest mixed-use developments in the city’s history with the revitalization Mission Bay, an abandoned rail yard and brownfield site near downtown.
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“From Mission Bay to projects that helped revitalize downtown Los Angeles, Nelson Rising spearheaded iconic developments that transformed neighborhoods across California,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said. “Nelson cared deeply about California and Californians, and his dynamic leadership and problem-solving brought together stakeholders from across the board to accomplish monumental feats.”
A protege of diplomat and former Secretary of State Warren Christopher, Rising forged consensus for mammoth urban projects that required backing from multiple government agencies and citizen stakeholders.
“He made stuff happen that was extremely complicated,” said John Cushman, chairman of global transactions at real estate services firm Cushman & Wakefield.
In addition to navigating complex government approval processes, Rising was able to defuse passions that inevitably rose around large real estate projects that altered city streets and skylines, Cushman said.
“People get very fired up. Nelson could bring calm,” Cushman said. “He could take confusion and chaos and translate it into common sense and bring people back to the table who were yelling. He was a genius in terms of dealing with people”
Rising was shepherded into behind-the-scenes roles in Democratic politics by Christopher and served as Bradley’s campaign chairman in each of his mayoral victories beginning in 1973, as well as in his gubernatorial defeat in 1982.
Rising worked for Bradley after successfully managing the upstart 1970 campaign of John Tunney, a 36-year-old lawyer who defeated a Republican incumbent in the U.S. Senate. After Tunney’s victory, The Times described campaign manager Rising as an “enthusiastic amateur” who was “pleasant but tough.”
The experience led Rising to becoming a producer on “The Candidate,” a satiric 1972 film with parallels to the Tunney campaign. Robert Redford played an idealistic young lawyer running for the U.S. Senate who grows dependent on the advice of his campaign manager and media consultants.
Recognized as an authority in corporate and public finance, Rising served on the board of directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco in the late 1990s and early 2000s, including a three-year stint as chairman. Other public service included three years in the United States Marine Corps Reserve during college.
Rising was born on Aug. 27, 1941, in the Queens borough of New York, the second of two children. A few years later the family headed west to Glendale. Rising’s father, Henry, worked as chief engineer at the Statler Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. His mother, Mary, was a seamstress.
Rising attended UCLA on a football scholarship and went on to graduate from its law school in 1967. He found work at Los Angeles law firm O’Melveny & Myers, where he was mentored by Christopher, a partner at the firm. The attorney and statesman was a high-profile leader in Democratic politics and served as secretary of State under President Clinton.
“Christopher was a mentor to me all … through my life,” Rising said in a podcast. Rising named his first son Christopher in honor of their friendship.
Former Los Angeles Dodgers owner Peter O’Malley had a decades-long friendship with Rising and tapped him to be “my No. 1 consultant” in O’Malley’s drive to build an NFL stadium next to the Dodgers’ ballpark in the 1990s, he said. At the time, Los Angeles did not have a pro football team.
Rising, then chief executive of Catellus Development Corp., was an “extraordinary communicator” who built support for the project, O’Malley said. The plan had the backing of many city officials and the NFL, but O’Malley withdrew his proposal at the request of then-Mayor Richard Riordan, who supported a plan to get pro football back in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.
“You can’t fight City Hall,” O’Malley said, but Rising proved his mettle to the team owner in the failed campaign. “He was at my side with brilliance and ideas. He was a very thorough guy — he even brought in an acoustician who could advise us on sound levels.”
O’Malley said he enjoyed brainstorming with Rising. “He was a very forward-thinking realist. I don’t think I have met anyone in L.A. similar.”
Rising was an executive for commercial developer and landlord Maguire Thomas Partners in the 1980s and ’90s and oversaw some of its biggest projects, including Playa Vista, the sprawling and controversial development that sprang from property near Marina del Rey where Hughes built his enormous wooden airplane popularly known as the “Spruce Goose” during the 1940s.
Hughes’ company tried to develop the property after his death, but ran into tenacious opposition over its proposed density and threat to local wetlands. Maguire Thomas took over the stalled project in the 1980s and put Rising in charge of reviving it in a new form. Rising labored for four years to reach compromises with environmental activists and other opponents. He secured city approval for the project in 1993.
Maguire Thomas lost control of Playa Vista in 1997 after defaulting on payments to its lenders, but the project moved forward largely on the vision Rising advanced and is now home to thousands of residents. Its office space is in the heart of the Westside’s “Silicon Beach” favored by technology companies.
Rising was Maguire Thomas’ partner-in-charge for the Library Square development in downtown Los Angeles, which included the 72-story U.S. Bank Tower and the 52-story Gas Co. Tower. The intricate project created by the developer, the city and the Community Redevelopment Agency provided about $125 million toward financing the renovation and expansion of the fire-damaged Central Library and other city benefits.
“Nelson Rising has left a lasting mark on our city’s skyline,” Mayor Karen Bass said. “Nelson’s work is very much a part of L.A.”
Rising was recruited in 1994 to take over Catellus Development, the languishing real estate spin-off of Southern Pacific Railroad that hoped to reinvent itself as a builder. Over the next 11 years he supervised the growing company and its most ambitious project, Mission Bay.
Catellus, which also owned Union Station in Los Angeles, was sold in 2005 and Rising went on to start a private real estate company with his son Christopher.
Rising’s civic roles included serving as chairman of the Grand Avenue Committee, and as real estate advisor to and negotiator for the Joint Powers Authority, which consisted of the city of Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency and Los Angeles County. The Joint Powers Authority oversaw the Grand Avenue Project, which includes the Broad museum, expansive Grand Park and the $1-billion Grand LA hotel, apartment and retail complex designed by Frank Gehry.
“To have somebody of his experience and his capacity to understand all sides of an issue to talk with was not only unusual but critical,” said Bill Witte, chief executive of Related California, the primary developer of the Grand Avenue project. “The consistent theme was his ability to deal with both the public and private sectors, to understand all sides of an issue but to be focused on getting things done. I think no one was ultimately better at getting all of those things done than Nelson.”
Rising is survived by his wife of 59 years, Sharon; sons Christopher and Matthew; three grandchildren; and a sister, Charlotte Conway. His daughter, Corinne, died in 2018.
California is in the midst of a building boom for accessory dwelling units, which accounted for almost one-fifth of the housing units permitted and built in 2022.
The number of unpermitted ADUs already in existence is jaw-dropping too.
Studies done between 2010 and 2020 found that 11% to 66% of the single-family homes in selected parts of Los Angeles, Oakland and Berkeley had unpermitted units. In fact, one researcher who examined the communities between Long Beach and downtown Los Angeles found that more than 75% of the housing units added between 1991 and 2010 were unpermitted. A UCLA professor estimated in 2018 that Los Angeles had at least 50,000 unpermitted secondary units on single-family lots.
Unauthorized ADUs proliferated in large part because many California cities made it well-nigh impossible to get permits for them. Those barriers did nothing to reduce the demand for living spaces, particularly from lower-income households whose members spanned multiple generations. “If people don’t have housing, they will create housing for themselves and their families,” said Renée Schomp, former director of the Napa Sonoma ADU Center.
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But owning an unpermitted ADU carries risks, especially if you rent it out. You’ll face fines, insurance problems and, potentially, lawsuits from tenants.
The incentives for complying may not be enough, though, to persuade you to get the necessary permits. It can take almost as long to get them as it would for a new ADU, and the cost of bringing your unit into compliance can be quite high.
That’s because unpermitted ADUs can have hidden problems in their foundation, framing, wiring and plumbing that can be expensive to fix. “If it’s a gorgeous unit, that doesn’t mean anything,” said Avi Levi of Levi Design Build, a developer who does most of his work these days on ADUs.
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Common compliance issues
One reason people build dwelling units without permits is that the time-consuming process of getting approvals can raise a project’s price tag by thousands of dollars. But with no inspectors to ensure that the work complies with city codes, nothing stops a contractor from falling short of the local standards — inadvertently or not.
“People don’t get it,” Levi said. “When they’re doing work without a permit, they’re basically letting the person that did the job get away with whatever they wanted to get away with.”
Steven Frasher, spokesman for L.A. County Public Works, offered a list by email when asked what problems the county’s inspectors observed most often. “Improper exiting, improper venting of heating devices, undersized wiring, or improper electrical grounding, to name a few, can lead to life safety issues that are both long-term [chronic] or short-term [acute] exposure risks,” Frasher said. “Most people are aware of acute risks such as fire, but they tend to not pay enough attention to the chronic risks such as headaches, nausea, and breathing problems can be caused by unpermitted building materials, poor ventilation, and mold caused by improper construction methods.”
And even if the contractor did everything by the book, that may not be enough to bring your unit into compliance years later. Although a state law passed in 2018 allows local officials to judge your ADU by the building codes that were in place when it was built, they have the discretion to insist that you upgrade to newer, more stringent standards.
a free, comprehensive guidebook for bringing an ADU into compliance, including descriptions of common problems, cost estimates, and the programs certain cities offer to make the process easier.
City of Los Angeles
The city of Los Angeles, for example, requires unpermitted ADUs to comply with the 2022 state building codes and at least two mandates that probably didn’t exist when your ADU was built: the state’s energy efficiency standards and the city’s Green Building codes.
Builders and the Casita Coalition, a housing advocacy group that backs ADUs, outlined eight compliance issues frequently encountered by homeowners seeking permits for existing units:
Foundation: Most ADUs are converted garages that have a concrete slab foundation that is not stable enough for dwellings — and if the garage was built before 1940, they may have no foundation. In addition to a foundation supported by a sufficient number of footings, these units may need a layer of vapor retarder — a feature not required in garages.
Framing: Unpermitted ADUs often are missing some of the structural safety features that dwelling spaces require, such as the full complement of ceiling joists and braced wall panels. Converted garages may also have kept the garage door as an exterior wall, which is a no-no, said Danny Shuster of Los Angeles-based Construction & Consulting Services.
Wiring and plumbing: In 90% of the unpermitted ADUs he’s seen, Levi said, the wiring and plumbing aren’t up to building-code standards. And in Los Angeles, ADUs must have a separate electrical panel and their own water shut-off valve, along with a source of heat that’s not a portable space heater.
Utility connections and meters: Depending on your city’s requirements, you may need to have separate meters for your ADU’s utilities (which you might want anyway for a rental unit). More significantly, jurisdictions have standards for how and where the ADU’s sewer line connects to the main sewer in the street, and unpermitted ADUs rarely comply, Shuster said.
Energy efficiency: The state’s standards for energy efficient buildings, known as Title 24, are designed to cut electricity and gas use by sealing buildings off better from the elements. But they could force you to replace old windows that leak heat.
Emergency egress: Every bedroom must have an alternate way out in case the door is blocked by fire. As a result, you may have to install a bedroom window large enough for an adult to climb out of.
Water heater: If your ADU’s gas water heater is in a bedroom, it will need to be enclosed in a closet that meets state rules. It will also need to be at least five feet from the property line, as will any heating or cooling appliances, Shuster said.
Firewall: Any exterior wall of an ADU that’s less than 5 feet from the property line must be built to suppress fire for at least 1 hour. Unless your ADU was built fairly recently, you’ll probably have to retrofit it with fire-resistant boards on the inside of the wall.
It’s conceivable that your ADU may not even be permittable, thanks to a noncompliant feature that would be prohibitively expensive to fix — for example, a ceiling that’s too low or the lack of a separate entrance. Another issue for converted garages, Shuster said, is that the exterior walls may have been extended to allow for a larger ADU. If the ADU is closer to the property line than current zoning rules allow, he said, only the portion representing the original garage’s footprint will be grandfathered — the walls and roofline for the additional space will have to be moved back. Ouch.
The path to permits
Not too long ago, there was no way to bring an unpermitted ADU into compliance if it violated setback requirements, limits on lot coverage or other zoning rules. If code enforcers cited your unit, you’d probably have to decide whether to return the space to its original use (e.g., a garage) or dismantle it.
Senate Bill 1069, which lawmakers passed in 2016 to make it easier to build ADUs, forced cities to issue permits “for any existing structure that had been or could be converted to an ADU, so that informal units had a path to safety,” Denise Pinkston, president of the Casita Coalition and a key proponent of the bill, said in an email. Now, Pinkston said, the main impediments are the cost of upgrades, the shortage of financing options, and a general mistrust of government, including fear of rent control among ADU owners, she said.
Nevertheless, contractors say they’re being approached more and more frequently by owners of unpermitted ADUs who are thinking about applying for permits. Levi said he gets at least two such calls a week — sometimes from people who were buying or had bought a lot with an unpermitted ADU, but mainly from property owners who had deliberately built units without getting permits.
About 80% of the time, he said, the ADU is a converted garage. And most of the calls are coming from people who’ve already gotten a citation from local authorities or who know they’re about to get one, Levi said.
How to get started
If you own an unpermitted ADU, chances are good that you’re well aware of the problem. Either you decided to forgo permits when you built it; or, if the ADU was on the property when you bought it, the seller’s agent and the reports you received from the inspector and the title insurance company told you that the space wasn’t legal. But if you have any doubt, your local government’s planning and building-and-safety departments will have records of any permits or certificates of occupancy obtained for your ADU. Many cities, including Los Angeles, enable you to do this online.
Seeking permits retroactively for an ADU will put you in an uncomfortable spot, Levi said: Once you reveal to the city that you have a potentially unsafe dwelling, you’ll have to either bring it into compliance or stop using it as a living space — and maybe even demolish it, depending on how severe the safety problems are.
So the first step is to find out as much as you can from your city before outing your noncompliant unit. Some jurisdictions, including San Francisco and Milpitas, will try to help you figure out how much work you’ll have to do to meet current codes before you seek the necessary permits. And a few, such as Santa Cruz County, will allow you to keep renting out the unit without meeting all of today’s building codes, as long as your unit meets health and safety standards.
Pasadena has even offered local homeowners financial assistance to bring existing ADUs up to code through its Second Unit ADU Program, but it’s not taking new applications at the moment. According to the Pasadena Department of Housing’s website, “The application window is tentatively scheduled to open back up in summer 2023.”
The city of Los Angeles offers a preliminary plan check service (for a fee of at least $227) that can identify building and zoning issues in your plans up front, as well as a call center to answer your questions about local codes, Frank Lara of the L.A. Department of Building & Safety said via email. He also said that merely seeking permits won’t cause an ADU owner to be cited for code violations — the city issues citations in response to complaints, not permit applications.
(To ease the path to permits, the L.A. City Council approved a motion in April to allow owners of unpermitted ADUs to get city approvals without first having to return the unit to its original use — for example, turning a converted garage ADU back into a fully permitted garage. The motion also called for the development of an amnesty program for legalizing unpermitted ADUs, although it set no deadline.)
Looking behind the walls
Next, you’ll want to get some professional help (for your project, not for you personally — at least not at this juncture). You’ll need a licensed architect or structural engineer to sign off on your plans and a licensed contractor to do the work, but first you may want to consult with a pro who can give you a rough idea of what your ADU might require. That way you’ll at least know the scale of what you’re getting yourself into.
The process of obtaining permits starts with you submitting for review an “as built” ADU plan that hews closely to the current structure. “The city’s going to give their own comments about what they want us to comply with — what they will allow and what they will not allow,” Levi said, adding that the plans will go through several revisions and reviews before they’re approved.
How long that process takes will depend on whether you’re in a historic preservation overlay zone, an environmentally sensitive area or other locale that requires extra layers of scrutiny, Shuster said, adding, “It could take a few short weeks; it could take months.”
Once the plans are approved — and remember, this hurdle is significantly lower than it used to be — building and safety inspectors will come out to see how much work needs to be done to bring your unit into compliance. This preconstruction inspection is also a deconstruction inspection, as inspectors will want to tear up walls to check the condition of the wiring and plumbing behind them, as well as looking at the footings under the foundation and other important and potentially inadequate features.
Shuster said these inspections play out in one of three ways, the first being that the unit has to be gutted to expose the framing and foundation because the inspector thinks everything’s out of compliance. He’s seen this happen to maybe 10% of the units he’s worked on, and it came as no surprise because they were in such bad shape. The second possibility is that the inspector says the unit appears to be largely in compliance and pokes the minimum number of holes in the walls. That happens less than 10% of the time, Shuster said.
The most common scenario, he said, is that inspectors will say the unit looks OK but still want to look at the foundation and the framing, measure the insulation, inspect the plumbing and piping, check the wiring and the electrical panel. They may start by pointing out four or five locations where they want the frame or foundation exposed, then ask for more based on what they see.
How much is this going to cost?
Shuster said that bringing a converted garage into compliance would cost $20,000 to $30,000 under the best-case scenario, and possibly more than $100,000. Levi pegged the cost of legalizing a garage ADU at $50,000 to $130,000.
The least expensive job is still pretty costly because of the up-front expense of developing plans and getting them approved. The Casita Coalition estimated that the price tag for plans and permits started at $10,000 and went up from there.
In addition, once your ADU is officially on the city’s books, its value will be added to your property tax assessment, increasing your property taxes.
On the other hand, an unpermitted ADU can prove costly too.
It’s not just the prospect of getting hit with one or more citations for code violations if someone reports you to the city. It’s also what happens after the citation is issued.
If you have tenants, the Casita Coalition says, you may have to cover their relocation costs and reimburse them for the rent they’d paid. And even if you aren’t cited by the city, your tenant may sue you for providing seriously substandard housing, potentially collecting extra damages in addition to recovering their rent payments.
Another issue is that your insurer could exclude unpermitted structures from your coverage, said Janet Ruiz, a spokesperson for the Insurance Information Institute. If there’s a fire or some other kind of damage to that property, you could be on the hook for the entire loss.
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I used to resent the synecdochical use of the word town. As in, this town. As in, Hollywood. As in, Los Angeles, meaning, this is the part of Los Angeles that stands in well enough for the whole. I used to love citing the Bureau of Labor Statistics figure stating that the motion picture industry accounts for only 3% of the entire Los Angeles County workforce. I used to leave out a telling addendum, that this tiny sliver represents the largest concentration of industry labor (“industry” being the slightly more focused synecdoche for “motion picture industry”) in the United States. In my previous lives — aside from catching a glance of rushed PAs and wardrobe people whenever a film or TV set bloomed in my neighborhood, or on the periphery of my commute to a nonindustry job — I couldn’t tell you where, exactly, this town was located.
The industry, like the 3% of Angelenos who make it happen, is scattered across the topology of the city, a lace network of social and economic bonds. The Netflix building in Hollywood, the Directors Guild building further west on Sunset, the old CAA building in Beverly Hills (“old” being the operative word here, as the Los Angeles Conservancy-dubbed historical site now houses the corporate offices of — checks notes — Alo Yoga), the Writers Guild of America West building in the Fairfax district.
So much of what we call history is what happens when the abstract ideals of hard buildings meet the actual needs of soft bodies. That visual drama is more obvious and all too real now, as the smooth lines of Hollywood studio buildings are set against active rows of people marching to halt productions. From Netflix to Paramount to Sony, industry town structures share an affinity for bleached stone, unbroken slabs of marble and glass volumes set at unconventional angles. Call it corporate-askance: smooth reflective surfaces that project instructability and power, but with curvilinear façades and insistently interesting textures that keep a hand in the arts. They represent a fundamental paradox of the television and motion picture industry: the smooth, reflective surface of the American superego, set at an increasingly uncomfortable angle against the people who create it.
On May 2, the Writers Guild of America, failing to reach a deal with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers that would ensure ongoing living wages for writers, declared a strike. The synecdoche of their struggle stands in for the whole intractable precarity of any kind of writing life (less than a week into the strike I noticed a contingent of picketing poets, bearing signs like “Poets in solidarity with the WGA” and “Do not go gently into that bad contract”). I write for television, but I am not in the WGA. The writers rooms I’ve done have taken place on Zoom, in-house at smaller production studios, in private homes and, once, in a cabin in Lake Arrowhead — that showrunner having somehow convinced the studio to sequester us in the mountains in exchange for a shorter room. I didn’t know then how my experiences were already reflecting a massive shift in how certain people wanted to organize the labor of people who write. I also didn’t know that many of my writing jobs then were credited as “consulting” or, ingeniously, “devising,” in order to skirt certain requirements. I was happy to be making TV. I still am. This town is many places to me, not the least of them being a freezing lake at dawn.
I tried to articulate this hard-buildings-soft-bodies tension to another showrunner friend. We were picking out snacks for the carpool to the picket line at the Netflix building. I offered to drive, buoyed by the double task of solidarity and research, homemade signs in hand. I asked, perhaps rhetorically, what could possibly be said about the industry writ large by a group of buildings that look alike but nonetheless represent such disparate entities within. Maybe, he said, it’s important for the unions to have big shiny buildings that say, “Hey, we’re one of the big boys.” True.
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Since the latter half of the 20th century, the surest shorthand for power was a giant glossy skyscraper. The DGA and old CAA buildings were completed in 1989 and 1988, respectively. What I love, and the WGA building does this too, is how they pay a flash of obeisance to this idea on the surface while undermining it in their geometry. They have the gloss of mere office buildings but they are not the kind of boxy, anonymous towers we associate with less glamorous industries.
Architectural historian Dell Upton wrote, “The flow of money makes buildings possible and desirable […] Raw, economic power is filtered through the beliefs of builders and users, giving the landscape a variety that would not exist were it a simple vector of monetary forces.” That sounds abstract, though Upton’s point is that buildings are anything but. What does it mean, then, to view buildings not just as a concretized form of money but concretized beliefs about money?
I’ll use a smaller, vernacular detail to illustrate. I, like many Angelenos, have lived in apartments so rapidly, so literally whitewashed, that hinges, electrical outlets and light switches have been painted over past the point of utility. It’s an architectural motif nicknamed “the landlord special,” and Upton would agree — the landlord special doesn’t say anything about how much money a landlord has, so much as where a landlord believes money should go.
In a 1988 L.A. Times article on the construction of the DGA building, project architect Deneys Purcell talked about the split-cylindrical shape of the building in both practical and symbolic terms, pointing out that roundness is conducive to office planning, but also associating it with a stack of film cans and the need for a bit of personality in the design. “The committee’s main stipulation was to have a distinctive building that would not be easily mistaken for a spec office structure that lacked identification.” The Los Angeles Conservancy declares that the old CAA building’s interior finishings “serve to reinforce CAA’s message of stability and grandeur without being overly ostentatious.” The kernel of this genteel copy contains a coded value statement about power, or at least the expression of it. (Never mind that CAA outgrew these headquarters nearly as soon as they were finished. Buildings are slow. Life is fast.) The glass-barrel volumes of the union buildings seem to inhabit, or at least acknowledge, this tension.
By contrast, Netflix’s ICON office tower coheres like a wobbly offset stack of skyscrapers on their sides (or, as someone pointed out to me, like a stack of VCRs, which is too cynically poetic to be intentional). As we picket, my friend points out that the Netflix building is more of a compound, as the streaming service owns the neighboring Midcentury Sunset Bronson Studios (at times formerly known as Old Warner Bros Studios., KTLA Studios and Tribune Studios) along with the low, neoclassical office building and a few random apartment buildings. The pastiche of its sprawl sets it apart from traditional studio compounds like the current Warner Bros. and Paramount lots, self-contained minicities more readily identifiable as places where this town exists.
Architecturally, a compound like that represents profits metastasizing faster than architecture can express. The fact that writers in this town cannot sustain a living wage among all this growth means that writers, more so than CEOs and executives, are intimately acquainted, more so than buildings, with the unsustainable beliefs about where money should go.
Two years ago, policymakers at Los Angeles City Hall came up with a plan to dramatically increase the number of new homes that could be built in downtown L.A., part of their larger strategy for addressing the region’s rapidly rising housing costs.
The city’s planning department released DTLA 2040, a 20-year road map for growth that, if approved by the City Council, would increase downtown’s housing supply by up to 100,000 units. That’s enough to satisfy one-fifth of the need citywide, planners say.
But a key element of that plan has drawn fierce opposition from some of downtown’s lowest-wage workers, who fear that new condominiums and apartment towers will push out garment businesses. Those workers, and their allies in organized labor, succeeded last week in adding new language to the plan in the hope of securing “no net loss” of sewing factories and other fashion-related businesses.
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Organizers with the downtown-based Garment Worker Center say those last-minute changes will protect thousands ofjobs, in an industry fueled by working-class Mexican and Guatemalan immigrants.
Business leaders, on the other hand, warn the new restrictions would render as many as 12,000 residential units in the DTLA 2040 plan financially infeasible, at least for the immediate future, undercutting efforts to expand the housing supply and make headway on the region’s affordability crisis.
“Each one of those 12,000 units matters,” said Nella McOsker, chief executive of the Central City Assn., a downtown-based business group. “If we begin chipping away at [the plan] piece by piece, with these last-minute decisions that undermine the larger goals of the plan, we reduce downtown’s ability to alleviate this crisis.”
Daisy Gonzalez, campaign director at the Garment Worker Center, said L.A.’s fashion sector has been neglected for too long and deserves the type of care and attention that policymakers have devoted to the entertainment industry. Gonzalez, whose group seeks to safeguard the wages and working conditions of apparel workers, resisted the notion of housing and jobs as an either-or proposition.
When it comes to downtown, Gonzalez said, keeping workers in their homes means keeping them employed.
“Garment workers are really in need of their jobs in order to pay for housing. The two things are interconnected. We’re not trying to pit the two things against each other,” she said.
That back-and-forth reflects the city’s larger ongoing debate over how to build more housing without also triggering serious displacement. And it has focused attention on a sector of the economy overshadowed by the entertainment industry.
The City Council is scheduled to vote on the DTLA 2040 plan on Wednesday, along with a second, major growth strategy: the long-delayed update to the Hollywood Community Plan, which was blocked by a judge in 2013 and later rewritten.
Those two documents will set out the rules for developing new homes, offices, sound stages and other projects in Hollywood and downtown. Both plans have new provisions aimed at reducing displacement, boosting the production of affordable housing and extending the life of those affordable projects.
The downtown plan stretches from the Convention Center east to the Arts District and north to Chinatown. However, much of the debate in recent days has focused on the Fashion District, home to an estimated 20,000 garment jobs. The most contested terrain is a slice of the Fashion District bounded roughly by 7th Street on the north, 17th Street on the south, Crocker Street on the east and Santee Street on the west — an area city planners now call the IX3 zone.
The DTLA 2040 plan would prohibit industrial buildings in the IX3 zone from being converted into lofts or hotels. However, developers would be permitted to construct mixed-use development — buildings that have both apartments and space for “productive” uses, such as sewing factories or other types of light manufacturing.
Until recently, the proposal called for developers in the IX3 zone to provide 5,000 square feet of productive space for every 10,000 square feet of land. But last week, the Garment Worker Center — working closely with Unite Here Local 11, the politically powerful hotel workers union — persuaded a City Council committee to rewrite that provision, doubling the amount of required manufacturing space.
Those groups argued that such changes would help protect communities from “luxury commercial development.”
“Hospitality and garment workers need more affordable housing, not more development that could threaten where we live or we work,” said Juan Muñoz-Guevara, a researcher with Unite Here Local 11, at a rally last week.
Hours later, the council’s Planning and Land Use Management Committee voted to double the amount of manufacturing space required in new residential projects proposed in the IX3 section of the Fashion District. The five-member panel also endorsed a provision requiring that new development projects in that area include freight elevators, loading docks and loading bays — the kind that can accommodate heavy machinery and large rolls of fabric.
Councilmember Curren Price requested the increase in required manufacturing space. Councilmember Kevin de León pushed for the inclusion of the freight elevator requirement, saying in a letter that it would “ensure efficient business operations” for garment manufacturers.
Those two changes, if approved by the council, would make about 12,000 of the planned housing units in the DTLA 2040 plan financially “infeasible” — at least for the near future, according to the city’s planning staff. Although market conditions for residential development could eventually change, the expanded elevator and manufacturing space requirements would prevent builders from achieving a “reasonable profit,” they said.
McOsker, the executive at the Central City Assn., said as many as 2,000 of the 12,000 units sought by the city in the IX3 zone would have been designated as affordable. She also argued that the DTLA 2040 plan already had safeguards to protect garment jobs, striking a balance between housing and industry.
“We don’t have any evidence that changing the [plan] saves jobs,” McOsker said. “We do know, and strongly believe, it will kill housing projects before they even begin.”
Anthony Rodriguez, executive director of the L.A. Fashion District Business Improvement District, also spoke against the changes to the downtown plan, saying they will risk the loss of residential units amid a citywide housing crisis. Manufacturing and warehouse space in the IX3 zone already has an 18% vacancy rate, which shows a lack of demand for new garment-related businesses in downtown, he said.
Price spokesperson Angelina Valencia-Dumarot said Tuesday that her boss learned only this week that some of the late changes to the DTLA 2040 plan could result in a reduction in new housing. The council member intends to seek a report on the issue while the city attorney’s office conducts its legal review of the downtown zoning plan, Valencia-Dumarot said.
“Fact is, we have anywhere between six months to a year before the plan is finalized,” she said in an email. “There is still plenty of room for the conversation to evolve.”
Gonzalez, the campaigns director for the Garment Worker Center, said she already views the downtown plan as a compromise, since council members did not agree to all of the changes requested by her group.
“We understand that housing production is extremely important,” she said. “But so are jobs. So we need to really strike a balance.”
In the days before Los Angeles’ “mansion tax” took effect, the luxury market moved at hyperspeed.
Prices were slashed, escrows were rushed and million-dollar deals were closed as panicked sellers offered exotic cars and lucrative bonuses to anyone willing to buy their properties by the end of March. It was a manic, desperate attempt at avoiding Measure ULA, a new transfer tax that levies a 4% charge on all residential and commercial real estate sales in the cityabove $5 million and a 5.5% charge on sales above $10 million.
On April 1, everything froze.
Sellers, now faced with paying the tax if they sold, yanked their properties off the market. Discounted prices, which were valid only if the deal was done by March, shot back up. The luxury goodies were off the table. Bye bye, Bentley.
A market slowdown was expected, but the night-and-day difference between March and April sales was unprecedented.
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In March, when the luxury market reached the peak of its frenzy, there were 126 home and condo sales above $5 million in the city of L.A., according to the Multiple Listing Service.
In April, once Measure ULA took effect, there were two.
One sold in Brentwood for $5.7 million, and the other traded hands in Venice for $7.5 million. Together, they raised $528,000 for the city to use for affordable housing and homelessness prevention programs. So far, that’s it.
The slowdown makes sense. Sellers were economically incentivized to close deals before they would have to pay the tax, so most of the sales that were going to close already closed. L.A.’s luxury market won’t remain frozen forever, and deals will eventually pick back up, especially once the courts rule on two lawsuits arguing that the tax is unconstitutional. Many sellers are holding off listing while they wait for a clear ruling one way or the other.
But for a city grappling with a housing crisis, funding is needed as quickly as possible, and early signs indicate that the once-lofty projections for how much Measure ULA would raise might be much, much lower — especially for the first few months.
When Measure ULA was on the ballot in November, proponents estimated it would generate roughly $900 million a year, based on real estate sales data from 2021 to 2022.
In March, a report from the City Administrative Office lowered that number significantly, projecting $672 million in revenue from July 2023 to June 2024. The projection was a response to a real estate market that slowed dramatically because of rising interest rates.
Then in April, Mayor Karen Bass unveiled her first budget proposal, a $13.1-billion plan that included $1.3 billion to address homelessness. However, the budget projected only $150 million in revenue from Measure ULA.
The city is walking a tightrope. It needs to spend as much as possible to address housing and homelessness, but if the courts decide the measure is unconstitutional, the city will have to pay back all the money it generated from the tax. An L.A. County judge recently consolidated the two lawsuits challenging the measure into a single case, but the timeline for a ruling is unclear.
In this legal limbo, the city had to choose a budget number big enough to make an impact but small enough to pay back if necessary. The planners landed on $150 million because they felt confident that the city could make that back through federal reimbursements from organizations.
“The $150-million number takes into account the risk of losing litigation, but it’s also reflective of the urgency of the housing and homelessness situation,” said Greg Good, a senior advisor on policy and external affairs for the Los Angeles Housing Department. “This is an amount we feel comfortable that we could refund, if necessary.”
The ULA money can be spent only as it comes in, meaning that the city won’t be able to use the $150 million until the tax generates $150 million, Good said.
If luxury sales stay at the pace they are right now, that may take awhile.
“We anticipated the market slowing down. It’s logical economic behavior,” Good said. “But it’s still real estate in L.A. Eventually, transactions will get back to normal.”
Sellers are sitting on the sidelines in hopes that the tax will be overturned. The Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn., one of the groups filing a lawsuit against the tax, published a page on its website with instructions on how to file for a refund if the suit is successful.
“Sellers are taking their properties off the market, and there are some developers who won’t buy anything in the city,” said Compass agent Sally Forster Jones. “There’s hope that it gets overturned.”
Jones handled one of the final sales before Measure ULA took effect, helping a client sell a 1930s mansion in Brentwood for $16.2 million. Because it sold before the deadline, the seller saved $891,000.
The commercial market has cooled as well, said Oron Maher of Maher Commercial Realty. He said that most sellers listing properties post-ULA will be the ones that have no choice.
“These are mom-and-pop owners of real estate. People going through death, divorce, partnership dissolutions or retirement who are forced to sell as soon as possible,” Maher said. “If you don’t need to sell in ULA, you won’t. This will be a tax on people already experiencing difficult situations.”
In the last days of March, Maher closed the sale of a 16,000-square-foot apartment building on behalf of an elderly client who chose taking a lesser price over paying the tax. At $11 million, the sale price was $1.5 million less than the asking price, but it avoided a tax bill of $605,000.
Maher said that over the last month negotiations have become a game of hot potato, with sellers and buyers both asking the other to cover the tax.
“Buyers are saying it’s a seller’s tax, but sellers are saying they can’t sell unless the buyer can raise the price,” he said. “It’s all leading to less transactions.”
Even if the measure is upheld in court, there’s a chance sellers will find ways to skirt the tax. Shortly after the measure passed, The Times reported that wealthy sellers were already eyeing ways to avoid paying, such as breaking properties into pieces and selling them separately.
Legal resource outlet JD Supra recently published an article headlined “Nine Ideas to Avoid the Effect of Measure ULA.” Its suggestions include selling stakes in the entity that owns a property rather than the property itself, selling a house and the land it occupies separately, or taking the broker’s fee out of the sale price to get it under the tax thresholds.
City officials, meanwhile, are beefing up staff to help manage and administer the tax. The Los Angeles Housing Department is requesting six new hires to help launch ULA spending effectively, and the City Council confirmed 15 people to sit on the Citizens Oversight Committee, a volunteer group that will supervise spending and make program recommendations.
Among those named to the committee were Steve Diaz, deputy director of the L.A. Community Action Network; Deepika Sharma, a professor at USC‘s Gould School of Law; and Alan Greenlee, executive director of the Southern California Assn. of Nonprofit Housing, who worked on the United to House L.A. coalition that drafted the measure.
The group will convene for the first time in early May.
“I’m excited about the prospect of ULA,” Greenlee said. “It creates considerable and ongoing resources that the city can use not only to protect low-income residents so they can stay in their homes, but also creates certainty that there will be resources available for developers to build affordable housing.”
Good said both groups will play a crucial role — should the measure survive litigation.
“We’re in an extraordinary dual crisis with housing security and homelessness, and this measure was passed by nearly 60% of voters,” Good said. “This is a genuine opportunity to move the needle, and we’re hopeful and committed to seeing it through.”