Reseda High Students Learn Real-Life Development Issues

The community doesn’t want any more development. The budget is tight and existing retailers are angry at being displaced from their longtime locations. It sounds like something developers face every day in Los Angeles. But this time, it’s a group of high school students grappling with the problems. UrbanPlan 2006, a program sponsored by the Urban Land Institute Los Angeles, gives about 200 Los Angeles Unified School District high school students a chance to tackle the very problems that real estate developers face in the real world, and the winners in this year’s competition came from Reseda High School. The team of five, who called themselves The Visionary Company, took first place for best overall project in this year’s competition, with each member winning a $1,000 scholarship for their efforts. This is the third year that Reseda High School has participated in the competition, and the second year in which one of the school’s teams took home first place. “It was really, really difficult to pick a winner,” said Phil Friedl, vice president for operations for Dreyfuss Construction and lead judge for the competition. “What Reseda was able to do more than the others is to be solid in every aspect of the competition.” Reseda High School entered about 10 teams, each with five students drawn mostly from the school’s Urban Studies class. A second Reseda High team won in the category of best written presentation. Their teacher, Chris Monaster, gave the class some basic instruction, such as why retailers locate where they do, and provided some examples of how different communities approach development, but from there on, it was up to the students to make their way through the project. “I’ll critique them and ask them why do you have this here? Who will you attract with this?” said Monaster. “I’m trying to get them to think about why they are doing what they do. But I don’t work with them as far as developing the plan.” The teams each formed a development company and responded to a hypothetical request for proposals, in this year’s case, to redevelop 152 acres near Crenshaw and Martin Luther King boulevards. The students were given a budget and some parameters for the project, which included building at least 975 housing units with 20 percent dedicated to lower and middle-income families; no more than 100,000 square feet of office space and another 150,000 square feet of retail space. The budget was $269 million, and ULI provided formulas for estimating costs and revenues. Appeasing the community Their job was to design a project that would meet the city’s parameters and appease the community, which, the students were told, was opposed to the redevelopment. “We created a little acronym, SPACE, Specialized Projects Advancing Community Empowerment,” said Richard Ruiz, a senior who acted as CEO of The Visionary Company. “With that we were trying to portray the fact that we were on the side of the community and we wanted to help them instead of trying to change (the neighborhood) into what the city wanted. We wanted to try to marry the demands of the city and the community.” In an effort to win back the good will of the small business community, some of which had been displaced by the development, the team devoted some of the outdoor retail area to small retail shops, locating them where they would be visible to traffic along Martin Luther King Boulevard. The students developed a low-emissions busway that would traverse the site and help to promote pedestrian use. And they placed a public park with basketball courts and other amenities between the churches and community centers to provide a gathering place. Two presentations The students then went through two sets of judging, making verbal and written presentations on their development proposal. “Throughout the setting up and creating of this plan, not only did we run into dead ends financially as well as not being able to fit some of the buildings together,” said Ruiz, “we also had conflicts in personality.” Ruiz was the only one of his teammates, who also included Rajit Khanna, Philip Martin, Chris Henriquez and Jessica Crabb, who had been through the process before, and his teammates picked him to lead the effort as a result. But that didn’t mean the other members didn’t have their own ideas of how the project should look, he said. “I consider myself to be a control freak, and there were other people with that personality, so it was tough trying to find a compromise,” said Ruiz, who will be attending California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo in the Fall. He said he isn’t certain whether he’d like to be a CEO in the future, but Ruiz has already learned a significant management lesson. The program required many late nights and extra hours, and two of the students on the team had part-time jobs and were unable to stay after school to work on the project. “It was hard trying to compensate for the lack of manpower,” Ruiz said. “And balancing this project and keeping up my grades in school and studying and spending time with friends and family. This was a good opportunity.”