Downtown--I'm Baack!

So what's downtown Los Angeles going to be five years from now, ten years from now? Will it be a 24-hour center? Will it seem Manhattanized in places? I don't know.

I don't know if downtown Los Angeles can become the next great downtown success story, the next mega mecca. Maybe the Gehry Grand Ave project will happen, maybe it won't. Maybe the downtown living trend will peter out, exhausted by a phalanx of re-use projects and unendearing start-ups, high wire financial acts, and indifferent market response. Maybe it won't.

The thing I'm convinced of: it will be different. Different than the grand--not Grand--plans? Probably. Different from what it is now? Unequivocally. There will be more people living downtown for starters. There will be more services as well.

If you build it they will come? Yeah pretty much. "At what price will they cease coming?" Now that's the question. Selling housing in California ain't exactly like selling 3-D glasses to the blind. For the right price you could sell igloos on an expressway.

Adam's Ten Cents

The big money downtown real estate people are close, they've got a good feel for the hustle, for the zeitgeist, canny strategies abound. Here's my ten cents (it used to be "two" cents, but then you know...): put in a charter school and bank roll the heck out of it. Make that your centerpiece, photograph the computer labs, the indoor rec facilities, the cultural-rich field trips. Then you're selling to everybody, not just athlete playboys and furniture designers. Everybody.