Reach for the skies! Downtown LA growing up

The City of Angels — the expansive, unwieldy web of avenues and enclaves synonymous with urban sprawl — suddenly is standing tall and shoulder to shoulder in its own downtown. It’s been years in the making, but Los Angeles, once a lights-out financial services hub that all but closed after hours, is now undergoing a transformation of a magnitude seldom seen by other U.S. cities.

Lofts. Apartment and condominium towers. Restaurants and cafes. Galleries. Hotels. Office buildings. Mixed-use projects. All are present and accounted for now in a stunning turnabout that has only come about in just the last few years. Between 1992 and 2012, just one major downtown high-rise was built — the 54-storyL.A. LIVE tower. Today, more than 100 projects of all sizes — high-rise, medium-, and low — are either underway or in the offing, according to the Los Angeles Downtown News.

By comparison, “downtown in 1990 was 9 to 5 — you drove in, you drove out,” recalled Carol Schatz, CEO of the Downtown Center Business Improvement District (DTLA), speaking to L.A. Confidential magazine. “It was dark… it was blighted, and in many places, dirty and uncomfortable,” she added.

To some degree, the renaissance mirrors efforts among cities nationwide to create 24/7 downtowns — places to live, work, and recreate — in a reverse sprawl that is tipping the nation’s demographic back toward a more “urbanized” future. In LA, as elsewhere, financial consultant Ernst & Young (EY) fixes the downtown revival to “the increase in residents who want to live, eat and shop close to where they work,” according to its Outlook on Downtown Los Angeles Real Estate 2016.

Full story here: http://www.builtworlds.com/news/2016/8/1/all-grown-up-downtown-la-like-youve-never-seen-it