It’s an old story by Los Angeles history standards and a reoccurring one here in the
port town of San Pedro. Once every 20 years or so, the speculation on real estate surges
and developers and investors from elsewhere “discover” San Pedro and other parts of LA
and start to gentrify, over-develop and then change the face of a place promising that
“change is always good.” Los Angeles has always been the place where change comes to
reinvent itself, San Pedro has often been skeptical of it as it usually comes from the
outside and not from some organic need or desire.
There are two blocks near my office of once thriving retail businesses La Rue’s
Pharmacy, the Dancing Waters and then the block north, where Cruz Furniture and King’s
Bicycles once thrived until owners passed away and tenants moved out. Both of these take
up three-quarters of the block, perhaps seven parcels each, and have been bought up by
speculators for development and have been boarded up, broken into by the homeless and
sprayed with graffiti — in short a blight upon the street.
They are the sign of a deficit rather than economic investment as they wait for months,
years perhaps, for plans to be approved, and lawsuits settled (that could have been
avoided if the developers listened to the community). By the time the economic cycle has
changed or the developers get frustrated and give up, the projects get flipped as it is
called in real estate lingo.
I’ve seen properties languish for over a decade with such challenges as the initial
investors run out of money or patience and then either go bankrupt or sell at a loss. The
town is littered with the failures of development — The Vue apartments, the La Salle
Hotel and the Centre Street Lofts to name a few. Yes, they eventually get built, and yes
they eventually get bought up at a bargain if you know when to buy, but often in the
interim it is blight or the vacant lot syndrome like on Pacific Avenue these days. The loss
of economic activity for long periods can never be regained even after the developments
have eventually been completed.
Recently the historic Walkers Café out at Point Fermin is suffering the same fate. The
out-of-town developers scooped up a choice piece of property and promised to reopen it.
But then they raised the ire of the locals when they proposed a development on the back
end of the lot that was completely out of scale for the neighborhood.
The local neighborhood council land use committees have no real standing to fight
back against this development speculation. These committees and their respective
neighborhood councils are only “advisory” in Planning and Land Use, and the San Pedro
Chamber of Commerce hasn’t ever really opposed a development deal — at least not
since I’ve lived here.
Even the 16-story development on the tiny Nelson Street, that then Councilman Joe
Buscaino announced at a chamber state of the district event, that made most people gasp
for air, didn’t seem to phase chamber’s sensibilities. Fortunately, that developer was
revealed to be a real scoundrel — a criminal even — and the project was flipped. But you
never know if a dead project will rise again from the grave of bad ideas.
There is a certain logic to building more density in core areas of any city, but not at the
expense of either historic architecture or human scale at the street level. Rick Caruso,
whose properties at The Grove, or Walt Disney, whose creation of Main Street at
Disneyland, understood human scale in development and the concept of creating “place”
with architecture. None of what I’ve seen built over the past two decades does this except
for a few of the projects approved by the Community Redevelopment Agency with the
help of the citizens advisory committee, or CAC. There is no longer a Community
Redevelopment Agency or a CAC to work with developers to build better projects that fit
local needs or respect historic buildings. There should be a reinvention of this, as it’s
badly needed.
As the housing crisis in Los Angeles continues, nobody wants to be called a NIMBY
or risk the moniker of being anti-development because that implies we want people to be
homeless and unhoused. Yet, any qualified architect will tell you privately that building
to scale is more valuable than maximizing a property’s footprint. They are already
bemoaning the lack of creative thinking in current construction styles that is causing the
architectural character of LA neighborhoods to look like Soviet-era worker housing — a
poison shot to neighborhoods like San Pedro and 14 other places with historically unique
architectural profiles.
As much as we like to think of Pedro as being unique, we share a lot with Venice,
Watts, Huntington Park and others. And preserving historic storefronts and building to
human scale in appropriate areas is not a NIMBY position. It is an aspiration to have
better conscientious good design and a more livable city. Something we might learn from
many European cities and even a few places in North America.
That this city puts up with speculative blight is a tragedy of contemporary economics,
and even at that it isn’t even good business for the city, the people or the chamber of
commerce. Empty retail spaces do not generate taxes nor commerce — and it certainly
does not create jobs!
Oh, but the internet is killing brick and mortar businesses. And yet on nearly every street
corner there’s a “pop-up” taco stand and a market selling something or other that you aren’t
going to buy on Amazon. So how is street level retail dead?
What is needed is more affordable spaces for both work and living. And that has more to
do with the cost of money and the speculative value of real estate than anything else.