Kotkin/jan11/27″/mark1st/mike2nd
Amid the strong recovery of Southern California, downtown Los Angeles has been the sore spot, with office vacancy rates still hovering between 15 percent and 20 percent over 30 percent in the many class B and C buildings despite the addition of over 300,000 jobs countywide since 1994. As much of L.A. booms, downtown, once envisioned as the imperial mega-center of a sprawling region, now more resembles a giant hole in an otherwise well-baked donut.
Back in the ’70s and ’80s when new towers reconfigured the skyline and yen jingled in the pockets of developers corporate moguls at places like First Interstate and Security Pacific looked through the mid-day smog at the future financial capital of the Pacific Rim.
Now the big banks are gone or shrunk to the size of peanuts, the once-burgeoning investment community has fled west, and even CB Richard Ellis, a traditional downtown linchpin, has been scouting new locations on the Westside, which, with 50 percent more total office space, stands as the region’s de facto corporate center.
This process continues despite major projects designed to breathe life into the center city, including the new cathedral, Disney Hall, Staples Arena and numerous smaller efforts.
Monumentalism certainly hasn’t done it in the past; after all, having the Music Center downtown all these years failed to slow the cultural hegira to the west. And unless there is some unforeseen change, within a few years the corporate presence in downtown L.A. may be reduced to a handful of loyalists, lobbyists, trial lawyers who need to be near the courts and perhaps some firms bottom fishing for cheap space.
Not that there isn’t life in the center city. A phalanx of specialized districts garments, textiles, flowers, food, jewelry, toys, and an emerging arts/multimedia/film community has driven industrial vacancies into the low single digits and even sparked new construction. The largely Latino and Asian weekend crowds in the fashion district, at Macy’s Plaza or the Grand Central Market already presage the creation of a thriving super-mercado, a uniquely L.A. prototype for the 21st century multi-polared, multi-cultural metropolis.
But downtown does not have to be written off as simply a barrio for immigrants or blue collars. It also boasts wonderful cultural assets the magnificent theaters on Broadway, scores of art deco buildings, the crumbling but historically significant area around Olvera Street, and the Central Library.
Some developers, like former New Yorker Tom Gilmore, see in these assets the lure for expanding the still small, but growing bourgeois downtown residential community. He’s bought seven classic downtown buildings and wants to turn them into market-rate rental apartments. Gilmore is gritty, tough, realistic and a self-professed “idiosyncratic maniac” in other words, just like the people who built L.A. out of the savannah a century ago.
To build on this new vision for downtown, L.A. will need more such “idiosyncratic maniacs.” At least such people are capable of original thinking, a rare commodity among what’s left of L.A.’s so-called business leadership.
The problem is pretty basic. Although they deserve praise for pushing a rash of new business improvement districts, the central city leadership still has trouble admitting that downtown is basically finished as a primary headquarters locale. Even worse, some influential downtown boosters now that they realize their longstanding Manhattan penis envy will never be sated seem to be opting for the kind of edifice-led strategy being tried in the central districts of second-tier cities like Baltimore and Cleveland.
Nothing could be more inappropriate, or damaging, to Los Angeles’ long-term prospects. Baltimore and Cleveland deserve praise for their inspired, and in some ways heroic, attempts to revitalize their dying center cities. But on close examination, their sports/entertainment-driven downtown “renaissance” actually resembles something of a Potemkin Village: elaborate staging that impresses tourists and traveling journalists, but which is barely relevant to the lives of most city residents.
Baltimore’s Inner Harbor development, for example, has helped spawn the growth of restored neighborhoods in at least parts of the city, but is doing little for the historic central business district just a two-minute walk away. The area lost up to 40 percent of its value in the first half of the ’90s and remains largely a bleak ward of the government, with the public sector accounting for nearly two out of five jobs.
Meanwhile, the kind of manufacturing and warehouse jobs that employ people who live around downtown Los Angeles have been disappearing in Baltimore, pushing its unemployment rate to twice that of the surrounding suburbs. The city’s rate of job creation has been consistently among the lowest in the nation, with Baltimore losing jobs and people every year from 1990 through 1997.
Much the same pattern can be seen in Cleveland. Its population has shrunk 30 percent since the revitalization campaign started in the late 1970s. Similarly, the city’s business-led, billion-dollar downtown redevelopment consisting of the usual array of sports, entertainment, retail and hotel development has failed to reverse the growing exodus of middle-class whites and younger people from the city, with the labor force shrinking by one-third since the 1970s.
Here, too, the city’s blue-collar economy critical to a not-well-educated urban population has declined markedly, dropping by some 25,000 since 1990, despite Ohio’s powerful economic resurgence. This has been particularly tough on the heavily black, working-class families, most particularly its children. A 1997 Anna Casey Foundation study ranked Cleveland 49th out of 50 cities in percentage of children living in distressed neighborhoods, 48th in youth unemployment, and 47th in infant mortality.
Of course, there are things to learn from Baltimore and Cleveland, particularly in the civic chutzpah department, but it would be farcical to believe building our own set of Potemkin Villages begins to address downtown’s or the city’s problems. Instead, L.A. must develop a strategy that keys off our downtown’s unique strengths, builds upon them, and then finds ways to link them to each other and the entire region.
A new strategy should start by recognizing that most of the suits won’t ever return from their refuges in the valleys or the Westside. Instead, we should look to the immigrant entrepreneurs, the Latino shoppers, the fashion industry, the jewelry merchants, even the nose-ring arty set, who see an opportunity for themselves in the central core. They are downtown’s best hope, and those who could make it one of the most interesting, vital and unique nodes in this multi-centered metropolis.
Joel Kotkin is a senior fellow with the Pepperdine Institute for Public Policy and a research fellow at the Reason Public Policy Institute.
