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Thursday, Mar 28, 2024

Commons in Noho Takes on Suburbia

Commons in Noho Takes on Suburbia By SHELLY GARCIA Senior Reporter On December 1 the first shovelful of dirt will be cast from a plot of land near Lankershim Boulevard and Cumpston Street, finally breaking ground on a project that has been more than two decades in the making. The symbolic gesture will mark the start of construction of Noho Commons, arguably the largest residential complex built in the San Fernando Valley in 20 years and the culmination of years of planning, wrangling and politicking to redevelop a blighted and underutilized portion of land in the center of North Hollywood. Developed by J.H. Snyder Co. at a projected cost of about $180 million, Noho Commons is on the cutting edge of the so-called New Urbanism movement, a brave new world where elevators replace backyards, rail and bus lines stand in for autos, the affluent rub shoulders with the working class and the neighborhood lies within walking distance. The Commons will be something of a testing ground for a growing movement to staunch the flight to suburbia and reinstall the city as a center for living and working. The question is, can it change a community hounded by years of neglect and a Valley built on a backyard and barbecue mentality? “It will really take a lot of time to transition North Hollywood into a totally gentrified area,” said David R. Diaz, assistant professor of urban studies and planning at Cal State University Northridge. Lying between Magnolia Boulevard to the south, Cumpston to the north, Lankershim to the west and Blakeslee Avenue to the east, the Commons will wrap around the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences and fan out into residential, retail and office buildings. When completed, the project will include more than 700 residential units 438 one- and two-bedrooms and 278 loft apartments ranging from 600 square feet to 900 square feet that will rent for $1,100 to $2,200 per month. A portion will also be set aside for low income tenants. The section housing the lofts, to break ground in the first quarter of next year, will also include 60,000 square feet of ground floor retail space fronting Lankershim and another 20,000 square feet of storefronts designed as live-work spaces along Weddington Street that can be used for a host of businesses from graphic design studios to financial planning services. A third phase, to include an office building, additional retail space and a community clinic and daycare center, will be added later. Designed as an urban village, parking will be hidden from street view, and walkways, gardens and sitting areas will connect the residential portions to the retail amenities, including supermarkets and restaurants, that create a self-sufficient neighborhood. High-rise apartments Across from the Commons development site, JSM Construction is building Noho Tower, a $43 million, 191-unit high rise apartment building at 5445 Lankershim, and a 78-unit building on McCormick Street, both luxury residences with features like 50-square-foot patios, granite kitchen countertops and hardwood and tile flooring. The high rise will have a sixth floor deck with a gym, spa and media room and a rooftop garden. The developers and others who have watched Los Angeles become swallowed up in suburban sprawl believe such projects will gain unstoppable momentum. City traffic has grown intolerable and, for the first time in decades, the scarcity of available land, the demand for residential units and the financing terms available are providing ample incentive for developers to build apartments instead of office buildings. North Hollywood, with its Metro Rail stop connecting the area to downtown and the planned busway that will link it to the western end of the San Fernando Valley, along with the availability of density bonuses that allow developers to build more units than they could in other areas, may prove an ideal test of the New Urbanism movement, they say. “If you don’t get housing built there, I don’t know where it will be built,” said Craig D. Jones, JSM president. The Community Redevelopment Agency of the City of Los Angeles, which first set its sights on North Hollywood in 1979, managed to complete a retail project and the Academy building and it made some inroads in creating the Noho Arts District before the economy stalled. But for the most part, North Hollywood remained a working class neighborhood with aging homes and apartment buildings. Late in the 1990s, as the last recession was ending, a developer came forward with a proposal for office buildings, sound stages and a hotel on the site, but the development proved too complex for the company, and Snyder acquired the rights to develop the site. “I think this may be just what the area needs,” said Tim Dagodag, chair of the urban studies and planning department at CSUN. “It needed the residential component to turn this area around.” With a population of largely professional residents, the Commons will likely foster new commercial investment, and it has the potential to increase land values. Tough task But restoring the community’s lost luster may take even more than the ambitious Commons development and the ancillary projects underway. “The issue is whether the gentrification is actually going to move into the interior residential zones or if the projects are going to remain on the perimeter close to the Lankershim area,” said CSUN’s Diaz. The new residents expected will constitute only a fraction of the population, many of whom live, two families apiece, in surrounding apartments. And the businesses expected to move there are too few in numbers to significantly impact employment opportunities for those residents. Indeed, in other cities where such gentrification efforts are underway, the results have been mixed, said John McIlwain, senior fellow for housing at the Urban Land Institute, a not-for-profit research and education group. “It won’t have an impact unless the project itself is viable,” said McIlwain. “There are experiences from almost no impact to extremely positive impact, and again, it depends on the design and the targeting of the retail.” Nor is North Hollywood’s train and bus access guaranteed to get residents out of their cars. While the transit access will surely be attractive to those who work downtown, the city’s transit infrastructure has not yet reached a level where these alternatives can be used efficiently by a majority of workers. Mostly though, the biggest obstacle to remaking North Hollywood and Los Angeles may be the city itself. In cities like New York or San Francisco, neighborhoods are small enough so that a single development can make a difference, but L.A.’s population is too dispersed to have the same effect. “It’s much more difficult to gentrify L.A. because we’re so spread out,” said Diaz.

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