(Nergis Alboshebah • The Student Life)
As a lifelong Los Angeles resident, I often wonder what my new classmates imagine when they talk about “going into LA.” In exploring our city, one gets a distinct sense that many of its most visible areas were self-consciously constructed to satisfy travelers and migrants’ preconceptions of what Southern California should look like. LA is great because it hosts a diversity of interests — but amid this urban collage, the original gateway to it all, Downtown Los Angeles, is experiencing a deepening identity crisis.
This year, property crime, protest-related looting and curfews, politically motivated military deployments and immigration raids that terrorized majority-Hispanic areas and a wave of bankruptcies and restaurant closures have pushed leaders into a panic. In September, the Central City Business Association published a report decrying Downtown’s “higher vacancy rate than Detroit” and suggesting that Downtown Los Angeles’ government should take urgent steps to prioritize safety and maintenance through the city budget in order to bring people back to downtown. These recommendations have fallen on deaf ears, with the city instead agreeing to go hundreds of millions of dollars into debt to expand the aging Convention Center on the edge of the neighborhood. But if officials really want to stop the bleeding, they’ll have to learn to woo actual people to downtown streets, rather than appealing solely to deep-pocketed businesses and special interests.
Downtown has undergone many transformations in the past century: As Los Angeles rapidly matured, Downtown suddenly had to define its role within a city that seemed to have outgrown its need for a center. By the 1970s, redevelopment efforts paved over many of its Victorian neighborhoods with high-rise office buildings suitable for its new role as a nine-to-five corporate center. Once-glamorous theaters, hotels and restaurants were demolished or reused as discount shops or storage space. Hemmed in from the city by freeways and parking lots, the area became famously desolate on evenings and weekends.
In time, city leaders saw the need to make Downtown LA a real attraction once again. The construction of the Staples Center (now the Crypto.com Arena), which opened in 1999, and of the adjacent LA Live entertainment district ten years later, were major turning points that enticed reliable flows of visitors to a formerly industrial area with the appeal of concerts, events and major league sports. Further north, the city and county joined with high-profile donors to inaugurate the world-famous Walt Disney Concert Hall in 2003 and The Broad art museum in 2015.
These government-led projects were outstandingly successful in making Downtown a vibrant neighborhood before the pandemic — but only because the area was increasingly attractive to prospective residents as well as businesses. In the year 2000, less than 30,000 people called Downtown home; today, that figure has more than tripled.
However, the COVID-19 pandemic destabilized the area’s economy. Today, the office complexes that remain at the heart of Downtown are less than half full, attracting fewer customers to surrounding shops and eateries. At the same time, inflation and changing financial habits have led to a downturn in the broader city social scene, evinced by a spate of restaurant closings, a retail vacancy rate consistently above the national average and reduced crowds across the entirety of downtown.
Yet, as the Center City Association’s September “Revive DTLA” report points out, LA has systematically diverted funding from maintenance of area’s streets and public spaces in recent years, and the effects have been impossible to ignore. The deepening housing crisis is partly to blame — skyrocketing prices and largely corrupt or incompetent relief efforts have left thousands of Angelenos to reside on the streets in and around Skid Row. Meanwhile basic maintenance is often deferred by the city. As the report notes local Business Improvement Districts and large employers have been forced to pick up much of the bill for what repairs do get done.
LA politicians have continued to focus instead on more flashy construction projects to put their names on — while neglecting the less impressive preliminary or preservatory steps necessary to make them usable for actual people. For example, the city spent nearly $600 million to replace the long Sixth Street Bridge crossing the Los Angeles River from the hills of Boyle Heights into Downtown, dubbing the new bridge a “Ribbon of Light” because the majestic street lighting from its arches was meant to double as an icon of the area.
Shortly after the new bridge’s opening, though, copper wire thieves managed to disable all of the lighting along the entire bridge, leaving half a mile of Sixth Street completely dark every night since. The city estimates that it will cost millions to repair the lighting, and currently hopes to complete the project by the 2028 Olympics, over five years after the wiring was stolen. With no temporary lighting solutions announced to enhance safety in the meantime, it is clear that LA prioritizes optics over serving its residents.
The Center City Association’s report recommends addressing these issues by increasing city services for Downtown: more patrols, more street lighting repairs and graffiti removals, more services for the homeless (per the report, almost a quarter of the city’s shelter beds are located downtown), and streamlined regulatory processes to encourage businesses large and small to locate themselves downtown.
On the contrary, Mayor Bass and the City Council hoped to draw headlines by breaking ground on the troubled and long-delayed expansion of the Los Angeles Convention Center to the south of the Crypto.com Arena, which will add a new wing to the space and significantly increase its capacity at a cost of over $2 billion.
This project won’t even finish in time for the Olympics — instead, construction will have to be paused during the games, since multiple Olympic events will happen inside the half-renovated Convention Center. Meanwhile, the city will have to pay back between about $90 million and $110 million a year for more than 30 years to service the debt from the project.
More fundamentally, as the city falls further behind on basic maintenance of Downtown, the approval of the Convention Center project shows that LA leaders don’t understand that what makes Downtown attractive is initiatives that welcome everyone to participate in its vibrant culture. The Convention Center walls off one of LA’s few truly urban-feeling neighborhoods from the rest of the city while sitting nearly empty most of the year. The local government can’t fix Downtown by building a taller wall; it has to create policies that encourage people to come back to the community.
Nicholas Steinman CM ’28 had a parasocial relationship with Downtown Los Angeles in his youth and frequently finds himself there late at night after leaving his dorm for a quick study break.
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