By HOWARD FINE
Staff Reporter
With industrial space at a premium these days and most of the sites in the city of Los Angeles built out, it is rare to have an entire 100-acre industrial business park being built from scratch.
But that’s what’s happening at the 100-acre Cascades project in Sylmar, best known as the site of a 70,000-square-foot Frito-Lay Inc. distribution center.
The project is located within the city limits of Los Angeles not exactly the easiest town for developers, at least compared with more business-friendly locales like El Segundo and Burbank.
Indeed, when the project was first proposed in the ’80s, developer Tom Clark said he faced a dizzying array of regulatory hurdles, and no one at City Hall was particularly helpful in helping him overcome them.
But Clark had a different experience later on, when he revived the project in the early ’90s. By then, L.A. was in the midst of a recession and hungry for jobs. It also had a new mayor, Richard Riordan, who had promised to streamline the approval process for new development.
In 1995, when he was ready to develop, Riordan’s Business Team played a major role in shepherding the project through City Hall, Clark said and even helped land Frito-Lay as a tenant. It’s a refrain that’s being heard often in recent years, as the city finds its reputation much improving on the development front.
“Everyone was much more cooperative and interested in getting this project completed as fast as possible,” said Clark, a principal with Royal-Clark Development Co. “The mayor’s office, the City Council, the Planning Department, the Building and Safety Department they all worked with us to get it through in about 18 to 24 months.”
With a total of 1.9 million square feet of space zoned for commercial, light industrial and retail use, the Cascades project on the north side of the junction of the Golden State (5) and Foothill (210) freeways is one of the largest single industrial tracts to come on line in Los Angeles in recent years.
“A lot of areas of the city are already developed and all that’s left for industrial development are infill sites,” said Jocelyne Henry, business development representative with L.A.’s Business Team. “But this is a huge tract of land where there was practically nothing.”
So far, two buildings totaling 110,000 square feet have been built and have tenants: the Frito-Lay facility and a 40,000-square-foot building housing MS Aerospace Co. Two more buildings totaling 210,000 square feet are due to break ground in the next couple of months.
The site is expected to be completely built out within the next two or three years.
The Cascades project has been in the works for 11 years ever since Royal-Clark bought the property from the Symonds family, which had operated a horse ranch and picnic grounds there.
Clark said the early going was slow because of the need to get zoning approvals and community support. “We needed to get a general plan amendment and a zone change from agriculture to a business park,” he said.
Residents were concerned about traffic, which resulted in plans to widen Foothill Boulevard on the south side of the project.
The project got its name “Cascades” from the nearby L.A. Aqueduct cascading into the San Fernando Valley. The remoteness of the site meant there were few roads, no sewage pipes and almost no electrical and phone cabling.
“It meant having to get permits from a large number of city and regional agencies,” Henry said.
But the main reasons for the delays had little to do with the city’s permit process or the concerns of nearby residents, according to Clark. The project was put on hold for four to five years because of the recession, which lowered demand for new industrial or commercial space. Also, midway through the process, Royal-Clark decided to reduce the size of the business park and add an 18-hole championship golf course, which meant that the company had to go back and get another set of approvals.
As part of the development agreement, Royal-Clark Development extended Balboa Boulevard through the site; it is now the main access road for most of the lots.
Later on, Royal-Clark went to get grading and building permits; Clark said that’s when the newly formed L.A.’s Business Team helped expedite the process, primarily by setting up meetings with high-level managers at the various city departments, which had to issue the permits.
The Business Team also hooked Royal-Clark up with Frito-Lay in late 1995.
The project’s second tenant, MS Aerospace, came through CB Richard Ellis; that deal, for a 40,000-square-foot facility, closed last year.
Clark said the Cascades project is close to signing up its third tenant, for an 85,000-square-foot building that is due to start construction next month.
“That building, along with another 122,000-square-foot building, was initially done on spec,” he said. “These are some of the first industrial buildings being done on spec in the San Fernando Valley in several years.”
With these four buildings, Royal-Clark will have 322,000 square feet constructed, which leaves more than 1.5 million square feet to go until total build-out of the site.
Clark said he expects the process to take another two or three years.
Los Angeles real estate consultant Larry Kosmont said he expects the site to build out quickly as well.
“This is some of the first completely new industrial product available in the San Fernando Valley,” Kosmont said. “It’s got the kind of ceiling-to-floor heights of 30 feet or more that industrial companies need. It will handle the overflow from the rest of the Valley, where there is a lack of new quality product.”
