Lured by the beach, a convenient dry cleaner and trendy restaurants, Mark Weinstein snatched up a condo in the mixed-use Venice Renaissance Building, famous for its ballerina clown facade, when it first became available in 1989.

At his third-floor unit, Weinstein had a loft, two bedrooms and an impeccable ocean view, with little disruption from retail on the street below. Lower-level tenants weren’t so lucky. Restaurant smells frequently crept into their units, and vibrations shook the walls every time weight lifters at a ground-floor gym dropped heavy dumbbells.

Weinstein, president of Santa Monica-based real estate company MJW Investments Inc., remembers that tenants griped so vociferously about the gym that it eventually left. Years later, when he developed his own mixed-use property, Santee Court in downtown’s Fashion District, he was careful to avoid similar problems. A small gym at Santee Court is insulated and tucked in a corner near a courtyard.

“The challenge is the mix of uses,” Weinstein said. “There are a lot of difficulties you have in organizing the spaces so that the uses don’t interfere with the tenants.”

Mixed use may be all the rage in Los Angeles, but the fact remains that putting together a successful project can be far trickier than erecting traditional and separate residential, commercial and office structures.

A good mixed-use project isn’t just about slapping retail square footage onto housing or vice versa. Instead, it’s about seamless convergence of the various uses a convergence that creates its own set of unique issues and can set residents against retailers and other tenants.

Also complicating matters: whether a mixed-use project is going up from scratch or adapting older structures.

The buzz of the city attracts people to dense mixed-use buildings. However, that buzz is a turnoff when it becomes cacophony. Restaurants, for instance, have to be situated in such a manner that kitchen and customer noises don’t travel into the units, and smells are properly ventilated.

Even in space that contains a bookstore, Weinstein said he added restaurant-quality ventilation. That way, if an eatery moves in at a later time, the space is already set up to handle restaurant odors. And trash placement is important: stinky dinner remnants can’t sit right outside units’ windows.

“You try to anticipate things. We do a lot of preemptive customer service,” Weinstein said.

Competing priorities


Still, concern for residents has to be weighed against the needs of other users.

Tom Cody, a principal with The South Group, which has three projects under construction at 11th Street and Grand Avenue, said retailers are especially finicky when it comes to how space is laid out. The South Group is a partnership of Portland-based developers Williams & Dame and Gerding/Edlen.

“Retail, like housing development or industrial, has its own sort of nuances that are critical. If you miss any one facet, it may be enough to lead to vacant space,” he said.

Cody said retailers frequently come to a project with specific ideas about signage, parking or the placement of entrances and exits. For retailers with a national reach, these details are analyzed almost scientifically. Where retail is placed within the development can also be an indicator of success.

Carol Schatz, president and chief executive of the Central City Association, said that some of the most prosperous downtown mixed-use developments are based on original, pre-World War II layouts that incorporated retail on the street with office units above that are converted into residential.

Mixed-use developments sometimes are worse off when they play with alternative layouts. At the Orsini downtown a new development retail that’s not directly on the street has had vacancies. It’s the same problem at the Sunset + Vine complex at Sunset Boulevard and Vine Street in Hollywood; retail on the thoroughfares has fared well, but side street space remains empty.

These problems reveal why, even under the best conditions, national retailers are cautious about moving into mixed-use developments. They typically want to be shown demographics. But mixed-use developments are often built in emerging communities, where retailers have to take a chance on an influx of moneyed residents.

“You are seeing retail, but you are not seeing the major department stores, you are not seeing the high-end clothing stores,” said Elizabeth Peterson, land use consultant and a principal at hospitality and entertainment company Sweet Freedom LLC, speaking about downtown. “That stuff is going to come last.”

The road to bustling retail can be particularly bumpy for pioneering developers going into an area without a strong residential base. For Tom Gilmore, manager of Tom Gilmore and Associates LLC, which has developed mixed-use properties in downtown’s Old Bank District, filling the retail space has been significantly tougher than securing tenants.

Across Gilmore’s Hellman, Continental and San Fernando buildings, 240 residential units have had barely any vacancies since they starting renting in 2001. By contrast, 40,000 square feet of the 60,000 square feet of retail still is unoccupied, although Gilmore will soon use the vacant space for his own projects.

In part, Gilmore said retail proceeded slower because he was selective about the entrants. Rather than going with a restaurant that wasn’t quite right, Gilmore opted to come up with the restaurant concept himself based on eateries in New York. He felt the area needed a joint that “was hip, but not tragically hip” with a good bar. In that vein, Pete’s Caf & #233; & Bar opened.

Cody stressed that mixed-use developments can fail if developers don’t have the patience to pick appropriate retailers. The difficulty is finding retailers that can mesh with the environment, the tenants and customers in the general vicinity.

Developers could go wrong if they put a Toys R’ Us in a building appealing to empty nesters or working singles, just as a nightclub wouldn’t be a good fit for a family project.

“Retail has the potential to add tremendous value, or tremendously devalue the use above it,” Cody said. “You have to be cautious about your retail because it can make or break your housing above.”

Ideally, a mixed-use development would include a blend of retailers that serve tenants and draw consumers from the surrounding community. Without both those elements, stores may not have enough foot traffic to survive.

“If they do token commercial, it tends to underperform. They have to make sure there is a market for the commercial on its own so it works,” said Jeffrey Lambert, a planning consultant and former planning director for Santa Clarita. “Having an empty storefront doesn’t work for a mixed-use project.”

To make retail work best, mixed-use developments should be situated in commercial corridors close to neighborhoods already with substantial foot traffic. Gerding/Edlen is going forward with a mixed-use development on Wilshire Boulevard and Vermont Avenue in Koreatown, right near a Metro subway station. That proximity drives traffic at the site and gives it flexibility to juggle a wide array of retail concepts. Cody expects a prominent anchor retailer plus a variety of other tenants, such as cell-phone shops, cafes and small markets.

Proximity to transit is consistent with mixed-use developments’ goal of getting tenants out of their cars. In the heart of the city, they can walk to work, walk to get their daily chores done and even walk to their nighttime amusements. If that is accomplished, traffic in and around the complex can be reduced.

Even with accessible public transit, residents need to hop in their cars if local retailers don’t meet all their needs. So parking can play a large role in a project’s success. And that can be tricky too. Mixed-used projects are unlike most where parking is set aside only for commercial or only for residential. At mixed-use projects, parking has to serve several uses.

The amount of parking needed for all those uses would be extraordinarily high and cost prohibitive. Cities have become more willing to adjust for mixed-use, but it takes work. “You have to do a lot of gymnastics and work hard for that flexibility,” Cody said.

In the end, Gilmore said that developers must grasp urban living. Otherwise, they risk creating mixed-use projects with suburban touches, like elaborate internal gardens and swimming pools, which limit tenants’ interaction with the outside environment. At mixed-use projects, he said, the city is the amenity, and developers must treat it as such.

“If you are going to do mixed use, real mixed use, you have to be an urbanist so that you love cities,” Gilmore said.