Blog: Updates on Urbanology

Playa Vista Approaching Peak Silicon Beach

WSJ capture.JPG

JSPR was fortunate to work with Wall Street Journal Mansion reporter Katy McLaughlin on a major story about the culmination of development at Playa Vista. The community's approximately 3 million square feet of creative office space will approach its cap this fall when Google moves into the restored, historic Spruce Goose hangar, originally created by Howard Hughes. Brookfield Residential, implementing Playa Vista's master plan, is filling-in the community's final neighborhoods with dramatic residences that rival the custom homes next door in Venice. And synergy between the community and surrounding entertainment industry (including in Culver City) is also reaching its peak. 

Yes, Playa Vista is approaching its apotheosis ! (Apotheosis: noun: the highest point in the development of something; culmination or climax.)

CNN International Zooms in on Playa Vista: L.A.'s Innovative Neighborhood.

We worked with the excellent producers of CNN International's series "One Square Meter" on this story about Playa Vista, the heart of Silicon Beach. Story zooms in on the robust, 3 million-square-foot creative office campus, its new residences, parks and open space, and retail destination, Runway. This piece ran worldwide.

Silicon Beach Homes Get Apple HomeKit Standard

Brookfield Residential unveiled its latest Playa Vista neighborhood, The Collection. It's the first new hood in L.A. to have smart-home technology included standard. Brookfield Residential COO Adrian Foley spoke to ABC 7 Eyewitness News and the Los Angeles Times about why the company chose Apple HomeKit and how it works in the tech hub of Playa Vista, Silicon Beach. 

LAT The Collection.JPG

A Year in Urbanology, 2016

Jack Skelley and JSPR thank colleagues, clients and cohorts for another inspiring year. For a 20-second highlight reel click below...

Los Angeles Times on Green Development

The latest L.A. Times "Hot Property" looks at new energy-efficient and eco-friendly community design:

At Brookfield Residential’s expanding Playa Vista development, new additions to the community adhere to the same eco-conscious principles as the existing homes’, said Alison Girard, the company’s director of marketing.

The new homes are LEED-certified; the fitness center was built with large windows, which allows the building to be cooled without air-conditioning. Girard estimates that a LEED-Platinum certified home can add up to $30,000 to the value of a property.

Helen Park, who recently purchased a 2,500-square-foot house in Playa Vista, said she was drawn to its sustainable attributes. Although the cost was “a little higher” than expected, it was an investment she and her husband were willing to make.

“I’m in the tech business, so I always look for progressive and new innovation,” said Park, the CEO of tech talent firm UXTalent. “I like the solar panels so we can conserve energy and avoid waste, and that the dog parks have dirt instead of grass, to cut down on watering.”

A Year of Urbanology

Jack Skelley and JSPR thank colleagues, clients and cohorts for another inspiring year. May 2015 be even more awesome! This super-speed video grabs just some of the highlights of the year. 

ULI Comes to Playa Vista

ULI Los Angeles also hosts a site tour of Runway at Playa Vista, November 20. The retail/office/residence experience opening early next year includes a Whole Foods market and Cinemark theaters. Among the presenters at the case study event will be Alison Banks, Director of Marketing, Brookfield Residential. She will contextualize Runway within the dramatic scope of Playa Vista. One of the largest construction projects in California, Playa Vista is building 2,800 residential units – yes, 2,800 — for West L.A., including for the many Silicon Beach, creative-space workers currently commuting from other parts of the city.
 

Urbanology Updates: UCLA to 'The Art of Go'

UCLA’s Alarming Rent Report: When it comes to rent, Los Angeles is the most unaffordable market in the country – worse than even San Francisco and New York. This dire situation has been growing for decades, as affordable housing dwindled and wages stagnated. UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs and UCLA Ziman Center for Real Estate published a paper summarizing the data on this crisis. The news has been covered in Los Angeles Business Journal, Curbed LAKPCC, and major financial media. 


Creative Cooperation: There is a natural synergy between good PR and good branding. However, many marketing firms are missing in-house PR. JSPR is filling the gap. Since launching just over a year ago, JSPR has collaborated with SoCal’s best marketing teams in the realm of placemaking. These alliances are propelling high-profile developments in the region: With HEXA (L.A.’s top Asian media agency), JSPR helped make The Ritz-Carlton Residences at L.A. LIVE the best-selling highrise in Southern California. InterCommunicationsInc and JSPR are highlighting the innovative Elevon office masterplan in El Segundo. With Greenhaus and Sandra Kulli, JSPR is establishing a strong identity for the revitalization of downtown Anaheim. And with Gunn Jerkens we are building a whole new level of buzz for Playa Vista. Other collaborators are Urbana and Looking

 

 

 

Elevon: Be honest. Are you excited about going to work? Maybe more people would be if their offices were – you know – exciting. That’s the concept underlying Elevon at Campus El Segundo: SoCal’s only new work environment allowing businesses to own their space. (A huge financial advantage, at today’s interest rates.). The innovative design is by Steven Ehrlich, the renowned residential architect. It translates how people love to live to how they want to work. The for-sale spaces of Elevon are moving quickly.

 

 

 

 

Transit-Oriented L.A.: JSPR continues its affiliation with Urban Land Institute Los Angeles and its ToLA events – Transit-Oriented Los Angeles. Last year ToLA made news when Mayor Eric Garcetti announced his Great Streets initiative: transforming city boulevards through creativity and economic power. Here is a video from the event. ToLA will host world-famous names in transportation design, November 12, at Japanese American National Museum in Downtown L.A. The event is themed: The Art of Go: Active Transportation for Healthy Cities. Here is a quick preview.

 

 

 

 

Huffington Post: In New York, biking is a contact sport. That’s the takeaway from a recent NYC visit comparing bike infrastructure in Manhattan and L.A. Both cities are lacking and that’s dangerous for all of us. You can read my monthly HuffPo column here.

Lots of awesome going on

The Vermont, street view

The Vermont, street view

For example, JSPR is excited to announce superb new clients:

The Vermont: Wow, here's L.A.’s largest, new luxury highrise, with 464 for-lease residences. The Vermont has astonishing views, sleek design by Jerde Partnership, in one of the city's most vibrant settings (above the Wilshire/Vermont subway, with a superior “walk score”). Opening in April.

Playa Vista: Home base to L.A.'s Silicon Beach, Playa Vista opens six Modern-styled neighborhoods on February 22. They signal the final phase of the advanced community that also houses YouTube, Facebook, 72andSunny and The Clippers. JSPR has developed stories with The Hollywood Reporter, and more.

We continue working with other exciting places and people. Stay tuned…

On February 19 I host an Urban Land Institute panel discussion: “Can L.A. Streets Be Great? Urban Activism, Mobility and Socially Engaging Places.” The event includes representatives of Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti’s office and Downtown L.A. City Councilman Jose Huizar. There will updates on new plans for Broadway, and on the “controversial” My Figueroa street plan. (I put controversial in quotes because this enlightened proposal really should be embraced by all!) It happens in the cool Gensler “jewel box” space on – where else? – Figueroa.

If you want to know how I really feel about the My Figueroa plan – and the need for public spaces designed for the 100% of us who walk – see my latest column in the Huffington Post.

As they sing in the new Lego movie: Everything Is Awesome!

Home Base for Silicon Beach

Trevion, a new neighborhood in Playa Vista, by Brookfield Residential.

Trevion, a new neighborhood in Playa Vista, by Brookfield Residential.

On February 22, 2014 Playa Vista officially continues its history of innovation with the opening of six new neighborhoods. These are the first of an eventual 2,800 new homes. The new neighborhoods include architectural advances unique to Los Angeles, yet designed precisely for Playa Vista’s Westside setting. The community is especially suited to residents who also work at its red-hot commercial campus.

This “home base” for Silicon Beach already includes YouTube Space L.A. and 72andSunny (Ad Week’s Agency of the Year), with more tech and creative firms continually flocking here… like fowl to Playa Vista’s restored wetlands. Community highlights arriving within the year include Runway (with Whole Foods, restaurants and theaters).

Media are taking notice of the completion of one of L.A.’s best urban masterplans. The Hollywood Reporter’s Alexandria Abramian broke the news last month. And this week L.A. Business Journal’s Bethany Firnhaber has a complete rundown of Playa’s final phase.

Here is the complete LA Business Journal story (for those of you without a subscription):

 

Playa Vista In Home Stretch

Real Estate: Developers launch the project’s final phase.

By BETHANY FIRNHABER

Monday, February 10, 2014

Nearly four decades after developers first began dreaming up plans for an idyllic L.A. community near the beach called Playa Vista, construction there has begun in earnest on its second and final phase.

Thousands of homes are in early stages of construction, with the sales effort for the master-planned community, which is nestled between Westchester and Marina del Rey, slated to begin later this month. The mix of single-family homes, condominiums, apartments and senior living facilities, will bring an additional 2,800 residential units to Playa Vista. The majority of the first phase, with 3,100 units, was completed six years ago.

Canadian homebuilder Brookfield Residential Properties Inc., which in 2012 bought Playa Vista developer Playa Capital Co. for about $250 million, will build two of six total for-sale communities. One, called Trevion, will offer the largest and most expensive options in Playa Vista, with a series of two- and three-story detached homes with small private yards and two-car garages. The other, dubbed Camden, will offer the smallest and least expensive floor plans in a series of sixplex condominium buildings, also with private two-car garages.

While Brookfield Residential has held on to some parcels, it has sold off pieces of the sprawling site, once owned by Howard Hughes, to KB Home of Westwood, Irvine Co. and Tri Pointe Homes of Irvine, Lincoln Property Co. of Dallas and the Los Angeles Jewish Home of Reseda, all of which have begun developments.

Marc Huffman, vice president of planning and entitlements for Brookfield Residential, said the homes are a necessary component of the overall plan for Playa Vista, which aims to provide residents a unified live-work community. Covering roughly two-thirds of the site’s developable area, the nearly 6,000 homes will complement approximately 3 million square feet of office space already built at the east end of the project, including the Hercules Campus and the Bluffs at Playa Vista. Those Class A office campuses have become home to technology companies such as YouTube, Facebook and Belkin. And so many ad agencies have moved into the area that people are beginning to refer to it as a mini-Madison Avenue, as reported in the Business Journal’s Jan. 6 issue. Employees at those companies are squarely in developers’ sights.

“West L.A. is very jobs rich; you’ve got something like three jobs for every housing unit out here,” Huffman said. “People who want to live closer to where they work can’t, so we’re making that possible.”

Hughes history

Efforts to develop Playa Vista on what was then the largest undeveloped plot of land in the city of Los Angeles began in 1978, just two years after Hughes’ death. The 1,076-acre expanse of oceanside property, largely grassy wetlands, was where Hughes built his aerospace empire, including the legendary Spruce Goose jumbo jet.

In the years that followed, the site passed through the hands of a series of developers, from Maguire Thomas Partners to Playa Capital – a venture of Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and Oaktree Capital headed by current Los Angeles Police Commission President Steve Soboroff – which was sold in 2012 to Brookfield. Previous owners’ plans were stymied by both poor economic times as well as lawsuits and protests by environmentalists who worried about wildlife, native tribes who worried about ancient burial sites and residents who worried about traffic, to name a few.

Construction on Playa Vista’s Phase 1 finally began in 2001 and the majority was completed in 2008. Six years later, Phase 2 is under way.

Alison Banks, marketing director for Brookfield Residential, said plans for the second wave of homes to be built in Playa Vista evolved over the years as the development company recognized that the community was changing. The first wave of residents to move into Playa Vista largely consisted of single people, childless couples and empty-nesters. Now, the wide sweeping streets are dotted with parents pushing young children in strollers.

“When people first moved in here, they had dogs, but most didn’t have kids,” she said. “But we’ve had a baby boom here over the last five years and now there are families on their third child.”

While housing options in Phase 1 included smaller one- and two-bedroom condominiums, apartments and homes, Phase 2 will put more emphasis on detached single-family homes with three- and four-bedrooms.

With options coming in at less than $590 a square foot, the housing in the latest phase will be above Los Angeles County’s median price but still below that of most nearby Westside communities.

The smallest, least expensive single-family option, in a residential development by Tri Pointe called Woodson, will start around $1.2 million, or about $561 a square foot. The smallest and least expensive condo option, in Brookfield Residential’s Camden project, will start around $950,000, or about $593 a square foot.

By comparison, in Venice, a hot Silicon Beach market a short jaunt north of Playa Vista, the median square-foot price of the 27 single-family homes sold in December was $955; the median square-foot price of the three condominiums sold in that period was $613, according to Seattle brokerage services firm Redfin. In Westchester, which borders Playa Vista to the south, home prices are significantly lower. The median square-foot price of 26 single-family homes sold there in December was about $489, with the median square-foot price of six condominiums about $305.

Banks said Playa Vista offers an independent small-town feel neighboring communities might lack. In addition to having its own ZIP code, Playa Vista has its own school, fire station, parks and a free shuttle service to and from the beach. Furthermore, Lincoln Property is expected to open Runway, a 220,000-square-foot retail center with a Whole Foods, a nine-screen Cineplex movie theater and at last five restaurants, before the end of the year.

“In the morning you can see hundreds of little kids streaming across the street to the school with their mom and dad on their little scooters, which they just lean up against the bike rack without even locking it,” she said. “We’re in the city, yet we’ve got sweet, small-town charms.”