Downtown Los Angeles enjoys real estate 'renaissance'

Once residentially devoid area is now home to thousands
Inman News
About 7,000 residential units have been rehabilitated or built from scratch in the Los Angeles downtown area since 1999, according to a report prepared by the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp., with thousands more on the way.

"The Downtown Los Angeles Renaissance" report also states that about 26,500 residential housing units in the downtown area will be constructed by 2015.

About 100 residential and commercial projects are under construction or at the permitting or planning stages, the report states. "As the projects currently in the pipeline are completed, the downtown skyline will be dramatically transformed."

About 62 downtown development projects were completed between 1999 and 2005, another 59 projects currently under construction or in permitting and expected to finish up in the next two years, and 33 planned projects have estimated completion dates of 2008 or later.

"The estimated construction cost of all projects involved in the downtown renaissance is $12.2 billion," the report concludes. "Huge, one-time-only economic and revenue impacts are associated with such an enormous effort. The impacts arise from the creation of numerous construction jobs, from purchases made by the construction contractors (for building materials, supplies and equipment), and from spending by all of the employees involved for consumer goods and services."

The 154 privately funded adaptive re-use and new construction projects and 32 civic and cultural projects analyzed in the report will generate:

    • About 174,000 annual full-time-equivalent jobs;

    • $7 billion in wages and salaries and $25.9 billion in total (direct and
      indirect) business revenues;

    • $169 million in one-time tax and fee revenues;

    • $86 million in taxes, permits and fees for the City of Los Angeles;

$59 million for Los Angeles County (including the transit authority) and $24 million in sales taxes, to be split among other cities in the county.

According to the report, the analysis assumes that "the projects involved in the downtown renaissance will go forward as currently planned and … that the new space, once built out, will be occupied quickly. However, the actual outcome may well be different, leading to higher or lower impacts than we have projected.