"The Lost City": Downtown Los Angeles Comes of Age

By Vanessa Okoth-Obbo

For decades, Los Angeles seemed to be missing a clear city center. But that could now be changing, as real estate developers flock to a rapidly reviving downtown to cash in on the the neighborhood’s renaissance.

In late September, plans were announced for the development of an InterContinental hotel in the Wilshire Grand building, at Wilshire and Figueroa. Currently under construction, it will house the 900-room hotel as well as office and retail space when it is completed in 2017. The finished hotel will be the largest InterContinental property in the Americas - with the building set to become the tallest skyscraper in the West of the United States.

The addition of a new hotel shouldn’t seem abnormal in the downtown area of a large, cosmopolitan city, but an announcement like this makes waves in the City of Angels. It represents another milestone on the neighborhood’s long journey to recovery.

Revival, rebirth and rejuvenation are just some of the words being used to explain what’s happening in downtown L.A. currently. A lot has been written about the area’s attempts to reclaim it’s former glory after years of decay and stagnation. But it is not widely known how the area fell into such disrepute in the first place.

“Downtown Los Angeles from 1900 to 1955 was a completely functional, normal, pleasant, busy place that looked like the downtown of any large city in North America,” said David Jackson. “It had every form of business in it. There was nothing wrong with downtown,” he continued.

Jackson is a former television news anchor who worked for KABC Channel 7 and KCAL Channel 9 in Los Angeles for over 20 years. In the mid-90s he was one of the first broadcast journalists to cover the neighborhood’s downfall in a series about “The Lost City,” as he describes it.

“It began to decline from 1955 to 1965, mostly because all the businesses that were established [downtown] decided that it was going to be easier and more efficient to move where the customers were,” Jackson posited. The advent of the automobile and the development of Southern California’s famous freeway system meant that living in the suburbs was an increasingly viable option. And so, as the county’s outlying cities and areas developed and attracted more and more residents away from the urban center, businesses began vacating downtown L.A. in droves.

As they fled the area the businesses left everything behind, including office furniture and merchandise. Jackson and his camera crew found many interesting artifacts intact - untouched since they were abandoned in the 1960s.

“We’d go through banks where all the records and valuable items from safety deposit boxes had been taken out, but the bookkeeping and the desks and the phones still looked like the [original] bank,” he recalled.

These former office buildings remained largely untouched for thirty years until 1995, when developers started to buy them up. The upper stories remained empty for the most part, while the street-level space was rented out to vendors who paid rents that were high enough to keep the buildings profitable for their owners. But it soon became obvious that something needed to be done with the rest of the available square footage.

Aside from the desks, telephones and other interesting trinkets one of the most important things that the businesses left behind was office space. Yet the buildings’ owners couldn’t do much with it since it was illegal to live in these units at the time.

Ira Yellin, a civic leader and early advocate for the downtown L.A. cause, understood that in order to bring the area back to life it was necessary to encourage people to live in there. Due in part to his efforts the city passed the Adaptive Reuse Ordinance in 1999, a measure that allowed for abandoned office space to be converted for residential use. The move marked a watershed moment in the restoration of this once forgotten neighborhood.

In the 15 years since the adoption of the Adaptive Reuse Ordinance, downtown L.A. has been responsible for 20 percent of new real estate development in all of Los Angeles.

Shane Phillips, a graduate student in public administration and urban planning at USC’s Price School, authored the study which revealed these stunning statistics. He runs a blog called Better Institutions, which focuses on city planning and tells tales of urban development through personal stories and data-driven writing.

“I was looking at the Downtown Center Business Improvement District (DCBID) website and they have a lot of really interesting demographic research that they’ve done for downtown. That’s where I got the [figure] that there have been about 20,000 new units since the Adaptive Reuse ordinance,” Philips explained.

“At the time, I thought that was a lot of units but I didn’t know how it compared to the rest of the city, and that [information] was a little tougher to find. It took me a while to find those numbers but once I had them, I looked at how much had been built since 1999 and I saw that it was only 100,000 or so. It kind of blew my mind,” he recalled.

Understandably so, since downtown Los Angeles only represents about one percent of the city’s total land area.

Popular thought in urbanist circles right now is that a lot of the problems with affordability in cities like Los Angeles and New York stem from the fact that construction doesn’t even begin to match the demand for housing.

“100,000 units in 15 years in a city of four million people is obviously not enough, even with the ups and downs that L.A. has faced over the past few decades,” Phillips said.

Brigham Yen, founder and editor of the successful DTLA Rising news blog, feels that downtown is one of the only places in the city where the prospects for housing development are better. This is due not only to the availability of open lots on which to build new property, but also the attitude of the neighborhood’s residents.

“There is still a very suburban mentality outside of downtown,” he said. “The rest of L.A. is very much against development and is very car-oriented [and they] don’t really understand the dynamics of how transit relates to the built environment… People think that by building denser, it’ll increase traffic,” he said.

Yen, a self-confessed urbanist, joined DCBID 10 years ago in the early stages of their effort to reverse the neighborhood’s poor economic fortunes. Since then his passion for the area has grown several fold and he has emerged as an expert on real estate in the neighborhood, as well as one of its most vocal champions.

“In downtown Los Angeles there’s a whole different mindset. We want it bigger, we want more development. We embrace density and I think that is the reason why we’ve built 20 percent of the housing [over the past 15 years],” Yen continued. “There’s not the kind of resistance here that you’ll have in other locations, where people will take developers to court and sue them to try to stop them.”

The “Not In My Backyard” or NIMBY attitude in the rest of the city is a barrier that slows down Los Angeles' ability to develop enough new housing in line with its increasing population.

“If the community comes out and says ‘we don’t want a six-story apartment complex in our neighborhood’ you’re going to end up with nothing, or maybe a four-story complex and just less housing. We’re not building enough places that are like downtown,” Phillips said.

While it might become necessary for the rest of L.A. to adopt the downtown approach to expansion, one should not ignore the notion that growth in this once crippled neighborhood might eventually hit a wall - or several. It has been suggested that developing residences at the core of a city with such a decentralized workforce is illogical. Fears of over-expansion also linger in the background. But Yen thinks it will be a long while before the neighborhood has to worry about these demons.

“We’ve hit a critical mass no doubt, and we’re on the cusp of something big. But we are still far from being over-saturated because there is still so much room to grow,” Yen said.

Forecasting growth trends is a tricky science. Although downtown’s real estate market is booming currently, it did come up against a few obstacles along the way - the biggest of which was the great financial crisis of 2008. It might even be prudent for discussions of the neighborhood’s revival to be broken down into two sections: pre and post crisis.

One salient feature of the area post-crisis is its emergence as a destination for tourists. Unlike in many other urban centers, visiting downtown was not necessarily part of the plan for visitors to the city in years past. The addition of the Staples Center, as well as the L.A. Live entertainment complex and a burgeoning restaurant and bar scene are helping the neighborhood to shed that legacy.

“Back in the old days, [visitors] would get here and they’d want to look for a downtown and people would have to correct them. Now it’s a little different,” says Karl Vangelisti, a leasing agent at the The Met apartments.

Vangelisti’s first brush with the neighborhood came in 1999, when he worked for a bank in Bunker Hill. He remembers the neighborhood being very seedy back then, both in the daytime and at night. Vangelisti recalls being able to tell back if people were lying to him about their L.A. knowledge when they would say that they used to “party downtown all the time.”

“In my mind I thought ‘that’s not true, there are no parties there’,” he said, laughing.

Downtown Los Angeles of 2014 seems to have something for everyone - whether they are looking to live, work or play. These days there would be no shame in confessing a preference for the area’s nightlife, as a burgeoning bar and club scene continues to take shape.

For some, the neighborhood’s drastic transformation since the late 90s is so staggering that it makes them question if it’s too good to be true.

“It was so bad, I remember when people would call my phone and 213 (the downtown L.A. area code) would be on my caller ID, I would wonder ‘who is calling me from there?’” Vangelisti recalled, marveling at the fact that a neighborhood he used to frown upon is now the one that he calls home.

Today, Vangelisti feels more pride about the neighborhood and is happy to show his guests around whenever he has a chance. The construction of the new hotel space could serve as affirmation that downtown Los Angeles is cementing it’s reputation as a place to visit.

“DTLA is tourist-worthy now. The history behind what it used to be is still unknown by many. Even I - as a native Angeleno - don’t know much about it. But if you take a good look at the buildings around you, they tell stories,” said Christine Chang by e-mail, in reaction to the announcement of the new hotel development. Chang, a recent downtown L.A. transplant, feels that the neighborhood’s charm should be a big draw and hopes to see a revival of the arts and culture scene - especially in the old theater district on Broadway.

She has high hopes for her neighborhood and as far as she is concerned, downtown L.A. “will be the better version of Manhattan soon. Especially because we have awesome weather!”

With several hundreds of housing units scheduled for construction over the next few years, the neighborhood has just the kind of fertile ground from which an urban center can grow. Improvements in safety and walkability will make it an attractive destination for those who are living car-free in Los Angeles - or those who want a break from the hassles of finding parking.

Worries of rising costs and crowding will always be there, but those are normal growing pains in any city. What is clear is that the hard part is over.

“I think everything is more positive now. It can’t be as bad as it was when I first started here in 2004. It was a ghost town.” Yen said. “Downtown is a relevant place again.”

People from the rest of the county and beyond now have a downtown hub to look forward to. If nothing else, it will be interesting to watch as The Lost City continues to find its soul.