Paved Paradise by Henry Grabar

Author:Henry Grabar [Grabar, Henry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2023-05-09T04:00:00+00:00

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To really grasp the impact of parking minimums, you had to see what happened when they disappeared. In 1999, Carol Schatz got Los Angeles to pass an Adaptive Reuse Ordinance (ARO) for downtown. This law was supposed to make it easier to renovate the area’s aging, vacant buildings. It proposed an alternative seismic code. It granted a by-right exemption from the city’s difficult permitting process. And it freed builders entirely from the obligation to provide parking when they turned commercial buildings into residential ones. Expectations were low. Just as early parking requirements had been viewed as an incremental solution to downtown’s woes, so too relief from the requirements was seen as a half measure. “We had to make chicken salad out of you-know-what,” Schatz said.

But just like that, the walls of the Forbidden City came crashing down.

The first builder to bite was an Israeli-born subdivision developer named Izek Shomof. Shomof came to California as a kid and worked for a spell flipping burgers downtown. It was a ghost town after dark. How dead was downtown LA? In 1991, Shomof was able to buy the former Los Angeles Stock Exchange, a twelve-story tower, for $2 million in 2020 dollars. It’s probably worth twenty times that today. In 2001, Shomof’s Spring Towers Lofts was the first building renovated under the ARO to open. Its three dozen apartments had fifteen-foot ceilings. Shomof carved a garage out of the first floor and the basement, though he was only able to get about twenty-five spaces—dozens short of what the code would have required. Some of the tenants parked downstairs; some parked a block away, and some didn’t own cars at all. “Without the ordinance easing parking, downtown would be as dead as it was in the seventies, eighties, and nineties,” Shomof said.

Then came Barry Shy, a secretive, quarrelsome builder who turned Shomof’s model into a system. Using private equity, Shy was able to buy and renovate faded, vacant commercial buildings faster than anyone else. His apartments were relatively affordable, too—in part because the price of parking was never folded into the lease. Shy let tenants figure it out themselves. By 2010, a decade after the ARO, Shy was the second-largest residential landlord downtown and had created more than 1,500 new apartments.

But the guy who got the glory was Tom Gilmore. Shomof saw an opportunity; Shy was an operator. Gilmore was a true believer. There he was on the cover of the Los Angeles Times Magazine in October 1999, glowing in the setting sun, standing against the granite facade of the 1905 Farmers and Merchants National Bank. Gilmore bought it for $100,000, one one-hundredth of its original construction cost. Headline: reclaiming the badlands. In the spread, there was Gilmore again, looking like Bruce Wayne, tie dangling over the fire escape railing on the top floor of the Continental Building, with its Corinthian columns, cornucopias of terra-cotta fruits, and cornice of lions’ heads. For many decades, this was the city’s tallest office building. Now it was at the center of Gilmore’s plans to revive downtown: the Old Bank District.

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