Seeking to capitalize on the growing population and bulging buying power of Latinos, two Korean brothers from the San Gabriel Valley are spending nearly $20 million to turn their Lynwood shopping plaza into what they claim will be the country’s largest and most authentic Mexican mercado.
Donald and Min Chae, who own LTC Development Inc. in Lynwood, plan to convert their Lynwood Marketplace and Lynwood Town Center into what they’re calling Plaza Mexico.
The neighboring retail centers sit on a 35-acre site bounded by the Century (105) Freeway, Long Beach Boulevard, Imperial Highway and State Street. Together, the centers have 225,000 square feet of space. The Lynwood Marketplace is an indoor mall with 126 tenants, the Town Center an outdoor strip center anchored by a Food-4-Less grocery and a Rite-Aid drugstore.
The proposed mercado would combine the existing retail areas with an alameda, or public park and walking area, to create an overall development covering 400,000 square feet.
Luis Valenzuela, executive vice president at NAI Capital Commercial Real Estate Services, the leasing agent for the property, said prospective tenants, many of them Latino-owned businesses, are lining up for leasing opportunities. The indoor mall already has a 200-tenant waiting list, according to Valenzuela.
The Chaes could not be reached for comment.
To clear the way for the alameda, a couple of warehouses on the site will be torn down and replaced with 175,000 square feet of new construction linking the existing retail structures. All of the remaining buildings will get Mexican-inspired facades, and a structure to house the newest tenant, Hometown Buffet, will be built on a freestanding pad in the mercado theme, Valenzuela said.
Construction plans also call for a huge electronic billboard to be erected at the intersection of the 105 Freeway and Long Beach Boulevard. The sign would offer all tenants the opportunity to post ads visible to the estimated 230,000 vehicles that pass the intersection each day.
The location makes the development the most important project in the city, said Lynwood Community Development Director Gary Chicots, who refers to the development as “the Hispanic CityWalk.”
Lynwood has struggled in past years to keep business at home, Chicots conceded, so the city played a role in encouraging redevelopment of the site by receiving preliminary approval for a $7.9 million grant-and-loan package from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development.
“We have a bad leakage problem. Many people go out of town to shop,” he said. “We are one of the lowest sales-tax-producing cities in the county, per capita.”
If the Chaes are successful, they could rescue Lynwood from the missed opportunities of the past.
“What they’re doing is repackaging an old shopping center that never was done right,” Chicots said.
To ensure authenticity in the project, he said, the Chae brothers traveled through Mexico, taking pictures of tiles, doors, archways, columns and the Mexican color selection and layout strategies.
Phase-one construction is slated to begin in June, according to Valenzuela, and the project is scheduled for completion 18 months later.
Stacked Retail Greenlighted
Cross another site off the Genesis L.A. Economic Growth Corp. project list.
Local development company LCOR Public/Private Inc. recently earned city approval on an $80 million development project at Genesis L.A.’s 12-acre site at Pico and San Vicente boulevards.
The project, a 440,000-square-foot, double-deck project sporting a Home Depot atop a Costco store, will involve the on-site relocation of a bus terminal shared by Metropolitan Transportation Authority and Santa Monica’s Big Blue Bus. Plans also call for restaurants and peripheral retail attractions.
To secure planning approval, LCOR agreed to lower the building’s height from 71 to 65 feet and add more hedges as buffers The developer also agreed to set aside $300,000 to pay for traffic signals, signs and speed bumps after Pico Plaza opens.
A Sound Deal
The company that started by making loudspeakers for jazz-funksters Steely Dan has signed a $2.1 million lease for 55,563 square feet in Chatsworth.
M & K; Sound Corp., which has become a speaker manufacturer trusted by filmmaker George Lucas, ran out of room at its original Culver City home and will move its 90 employees on May 1 to 9351 Derring Ave., according to Scott Caswell, a leasing agent with Delphi Business Properties. Caswell represented the speaker company and the landlord, Gary Siegel.
M & K; needed new space, but could not find affordable accommodations on the Westside, according to M & K; Executive Vice President Chuck Back.
The company was born in 1974 when Walter Becker and Donald Fagen of Steely Dan asked Ken Kreisel to build them a dual-driver subwoofer for production of their “Pretzel Logic” album.
The privately held company designs and builds high-performance loudspeakers for the commercial market, but specializes in cutting-edge technology for multi-channel recordings.
Staff reporter Christopher Keough can be reached at (323) 549-5225 ext. 235 or at [email protected].
