The Los Angeles Wilshire Project Thread

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I consider Los Angeles a third home for me. Here, I will post all of their projects along Wilshire

Wilshire Skyline (17 story residential tower)

NW corner of Wilshire and La Jolla Ave (stoplight intersection)

6401-6421 Wilshire Blvd, LA, CA, 90048.

www.wilshireskyline.com

Wilshire and Catalina (24 story residential tower)

3670 Wilshire (40 story residential tower)

http://3670wilshireblvd.com/

Cal Coast Developement Towers (two 20-story residential towers)

Wilshire and La Brea

Circa (18 story residential tower)

Wilshire and Virgil

Solair Wilshire (22 story residential tower)

Wilshire and Western

Avalon Wilshire

Wilshire & Vermont (northeast corner of Wilshire & Vermont)

Wilshire Center Project (southeast corner of Wilshire & Vermont)

9900 Wilshire

Beverly Hilton Condominiums

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Yes, Wilshire Vermont!

California Landmark is proud to produce the first mixed-use high-rise development in West Los Angeles. Situated at the prestigious corner of Barrington and Wilshire, this new luxury building will include a pedestrian friendly eatery/cafe, ample parking and 78 residential condominiums. Inspired by high-rise residential architecture in Vancouver, the project will set new design standards for future developments throughout Southern California.

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It involves a world-renowned architect and an incredible location. :yes: The only location in Beverly Hills, it will be better than the Casden's proposed mid-rise sandwiched between Barney's New York and Saks Fifth Avenue.

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Studies: Gentrification a Boost For Everyone

By Rick Hampson, USA TODAY

4/19/2005

Everyone knows gentrification uproots the urban poor with higher rents, higher taxes and $4 lattes. It's the lament of community organizers, the theme of the 2004 film Barbershop 2 and the guilty assumption of the yuppies moving in. But everyone may be wrong, according to Lance Freeman, an assistant professor of urban planning at Columbia University.

In an article last month in Urban Affairs Review, Freeman reports the results of his national study of gentrification — the movement of upscale (mostly white) settlers into rundown (mostly minority) neighborhoods. His conclusion: Gentrification drives comparatively few low-income residents from their homes. Although some are forced to move by rising costs, there isn't much more displacement in gentrifying neighborhoods than in non-gentrifying ones.

In a separate study of New York City published last year, Freeman and a colleague concluded that living in a gentrifying neighborhood there actually made it less likely a poor resident would move — a finding similar to that of a 2001 study of Boston by Duke University economist Jacob Vigdor. Freeman and Vigdor say that although higher costs sometimes force poor residents to leave gentrifying neighborhoods, other changes — more jobs, safer streets, better trash pickup — encourage them to stay. But to others, gentrification remains a dirty word.

"All you have to do is talk to people around here," says James Lewis, a tenant organizer in Harlem, New York's most famous black neighborhood. "Everybody with money is moving into Harlem, and the people who are here are being displaced."

Even residents who have survived gentrification tend to believe it forces people out.

Maria Marquez, 37, has slept on the sofa for 12 years to give her mother and son the two bedrooms in their apartment in Chicago's gentrifying Logan Square area. But eventually, she says, "we're gonna get kicked out. It's a matter of time."

In the two decades after World War II, government urban renewal schemes tore down whole neighborhoods and scattered residents. Gentrification, which appeared in the 1970s, was something else. Motivated by high gasoline prices, suburban sprawl and a new taste for old architecture, some middle class whites began moving into neighborhoods that had gone out of fashion a generation or two earlier.

Here's how it works: A dilapidated and depopulated but essentially attractive neighborhood — solid housing stock, well laid-out streets, proximity to the city center — is discovered by artists, graduate students and other bohemians. Block by block, the neighborhood changes. The newcomers fix up old buildings. Galleries and cafes open, and mom 'n' pop groceries close. City services improve. Finally, the bohemians are joined by lawyers, stockbrokers and dentists. Property values rise, followed by property taxes and rents.

To some urban planners, gentrification is a solution to racial segregation, a shrinking tax base and other problems. To others, it is a problem: Poor blacks and Hispanics, who've held on through hard times and sometimes started the neighborhood's comeback, are ousted by their own success.

Jose Sanchez, an urban planning expert at Long Island University in Brooklyn, says some changing neighborhoods stabilize with a mixture of people. But he says the poor — and the bohemian pioneers — can also be "washed out" by scheming landlords or government policies such as rezoning and urban renewal.

Freeman and Vigdor say gentrification has gotten a bad rap. When they studied New York City and Boston, respectively, they found that poor and less educated residents of gentrifying neighborhoods actually moved less often than people in other neighborhoods — 20% less in New York. For his national study published this year, Freeman found only a slight connection between gentrification and displacement. A poor resident's chances of being forced to move out of a gentrifying neighborhood are only 0.5% greater than in a non-gentrifying one.

So how do some neighborhoods change so dramatically? Freeman says it's mostly the result of what he calls "succession": Poor people in gentrifying neighborhoods who move from their homes — for whatever reason — usually are replaced by people who have more income and education.

Freeman and Vigdor say skeptics who view gentrification merely as " 'hood snatching" should remember three things:

• Many older neighborhoods have high turnover, whether they gentrify or not. Vigdor says that over five years, about half of all urban residents move.

• Such neighborhoods often have so much vacant or abandoned housing that there's no need to drive anyone out to accommodate people who want to move in. A quarter of the housing in one section of Boston's South End was vacant in 1970; the population had dropped by more than 50% over 20 years. Today, the population has increased more than 50%, and the vacancy rate is less than 2%.

• Rising housing costs in gentrifying districts may ensure that poor residents who do move leave the neighborhood, rather than settle elsewhere in it. Since their places usually are taken by more affluent, better educated people, the neighborhood's character and demographics change.

Vigdor argues that hatred of gentrification is largely irrational: "We were angry when the middle class moved out of the city," he says. "Now we're angry when they move back." He asks whether Detroit, which in 50 years has lost half its population and most of its middle class, would not have been better off with gentrification than it has been without it.

....One reason poor families make such heroic efforts to stay is because the quality of life is improving — partly thanks to gentrification.

In the Logan Square area, Marquez says, an influx of higher-income newcomers has coincided with what seems like more aggressive policing. "The gang bangers are not around as much, and you don't see the prostitutes on the corners like you used to," she says.

Idida Perez hates the rising prices but admits, "There are a lot more small cafes owned by people from the neighborhood, and I am a big coffee drinker." And new businesses mean new jobs: Someone has to pour those lattes.

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Beverly Hilton Hotel

Residential Condominiums

Beverly Hills, CA

Status: In design

Completion Date: 2009

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The Wilshire corridor of the Westside of Los Angeles has been the one district unique in the city that has supported high-density housing. Aligned along one street, each of the current buildings reach to an expression of palatial grandeur. In an effort to establish a more modern character to the housing choices for the market, this design seeks a quiet dignity not through pastiche forms and historical references but by scaling the texture of the fa

[Urbane]

The projects look nice, but because Wilshire is one of the main east-west arteries in LA, the traffic will be intense. The subway ends several miles west of the nice part of the corridor, so mass transit is not much of an option for many.

[krazeeboi]

I LOVE this!

[dgreco]

soem really nice projects, the lobby/room whatever is amazingly nice, so is that whole complex.

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Hopefully they will extend the Wilshire line farther west towards Santa Monica.

[davidzLA]

Hopefully they will extend the Wilshire line farther west towards Santa Monica.

[monsoon]

Are you guys talking about the Red Line?

[davidzLA]

Are you guys talking about the Red Line?

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Sure is.

[Cmuse]

Whatever color the proposed line has now, it will take years to be built. Officials recently interviewed on KCRW-radio's "Which Way, L.A.?" foresaw a completion date 8 to 10 years in the future.

The projects at Wilshire and Virgil and at 3670 Wilshire are interesting and would contribute to the ongoing rebirth of Mid-Wilshire and Koreatown. Since they're farther east than the other projects, they would already have Metro Red Line access via the Wilshire-Western and Wilshire-Vermont stations, plus the service from the city buses and the new rapid transit buses (twice the length of a regular city bus with a flexible center that facilitates turning).

A note on those large rapid-transit buses (I forget their official name): they're quite heavy and tear up the pavement something fierce. Since their inception, parts of Wilshire have become as deeply potholed as a neglected country highway--I know because I drive it as a commuter. A coworker who commutes via his vintage motorcyle was recently featured in Cyclist magazine--in the article he talked about the rough terrain quality of Wilshire Boulevard's pavement.

Without the completion of the Purple Line as well as massive street repairs and traffic-flow improvements on Wilshire (rerouting to other through streets, perhaps?), the projects farther west strike me as premature and ill-conceived--especially the high-rise at 6421 Wilshire. That stretch of Wilshire is one of the most congested; many organizations have offices nearby--several major publishers including Cond