Inglewood's Game Changer: Hollywood Park Tomorrow

The Inglewood City Council recently approved the Hollywood Park Tomorrow project. How did your firm, Wilson Meany Sullivan, achieve unanimous approval for a 238 acre project?

I am proud that our project received such overwhelming support from the Planning Commission and City Council in Inglewood. We worked with the community for a number of years to refine the concept and create a program that reflects the residents' priorities: great retail, beautiful parks, and residential neighborhoods offering a mix of housing. We had literally hundreds of meeting and were as transparent with the local residents as any project could be. I am very proud of that outreach effort and the plan that emerged. This program transforms the heart of Inglewood, turning it from a large parking lot and racetrack into a community district the city has never had.

Now let's get to the "why." We are driven by the conviction that there are a number of relevant things to consider in these large infill projects in coastal California. Certainly, asset values in real estate had gone up too sharply and are now in the midst of a great correction. But that is only one thing to consider. A second thing to consider is that, unfortunately-and I emphasize that this is very bad for our economies and our region-it is incredibly difficult to get the right to build in the places where we should be building. Environmental, legal, and no-growth sentiments have blocked the creation of supply. Over the long-term, the markets where we should be building are going to be under-supplied. Therefore, assets are going to trade at premiums over what they probably should be valued at because of that scarcity factor. So, we come into a large project knowing that, over time, there will be demand for our product.

Hollywood Park Tomorrow is a $2.1 billion mixed-use development at the site of an iconic horse racing track. What is your vision for the build-out of this 238-acre development?

The core of the Boston Financial district could fit onto 238 acres. You could fit a couple of Vaticans on 238 acres. This is a very large piece of land just three miles from LAX. It now has a race track and acres of surface parking lots and a card club. We believe that horse racing in California is in decline due to competition from Native American gaming interests and other race tracks that have enhanced purses in other parts of the country. We see this as an opportunity to repurpose that 238 acres, which, again, is one of the larger sites in the Los Angeles area. While we wanted to repurpose it, it was important to come up with a plan that made business sense, dealt with market realities, and was embraced by the community. The entitlement battles common to California were a big obstacle. As I mentioned earlier, our top priority was engaging local residents. We wanted to bring the community in and have them participate in the process so that our process goes smoothly.

Beginning in 2005, almost four years ago, we began meeting regularly with city leaders, community folks, and our market researchers to define what the major elements of the project should be. The first idea that came out was to address the lack of retail in the surrounding area by creating a new retail district. When we went out and looked at the raw numbers, from a market standpoint, what is most impressive is the incredible density of people. There is absolute support for a retail project of 500,000-600,000 square feet. The community is hungry for it because they have dollars to spend on retail but have to drive to other communities to spend it. There is a real desire to support retail within the local communities.

Once we establish the quantitative goal of coming into a very dense population area that is under-served by retail and creating a retail product, the question then becomes qualitative. What form should it take? We are driven by the sense that Los Angeles-which is really one of the world's great cities-is a big, sprawling place. There are areas or nodes or villages within the greater metropolitan area, many of which have their own retail districts. This part of Los Angeles County that doesn't have that feature.

There's no Santa Monica Third Street Promenade, or a Pasadena Old Town, or a Larchmont Village for that matter. We can go a long way by crafting the retail district to be an authentic retail main street for this new neighborhood.

We will have 500,000 square feet of retail at the corner of Century and Prairie, organized around a couple of intersecting streets. The architecture will look and feel like what we all associate with L.A. - a mix of different styles influenced by Mediterranean and Art Deco so that it looks like a district and not a project. The balance of the project, besides the commercial, then becomes the supporting neighborhoods. We see an opportunity to create a new series of neighborhoods that are built with modern sensibilities, meaning that they share great public space. There are some 25 acres of park planned in Hollywood Park Tomorrow. There will be parks of all different types, including playing fields, soccer fields, a swimming club, and a tennis club. There are also smaller, more intimate parks, appropriate for concerts and small performances, and meandering walking trails that lace throughout the series of neighborhoods to link people together and encourage people to walk from one neighborhood to the next.

We can accommodate about 3,000 homes within the project. Homes will range from detached single-family homes and attached town homes to a limited number of four-to-five story condominium buildings.

We are entitled to build 620,000 square feet of retail. Initially, we will build about 500,000 square feet so there will be room for expansion. At the corner of Century and Prairie we will have a multi-screen theater, which will have its front doors, its public face, to a great plaza with a pretty dramatic fountain that will be one endpoint to a retail street. It will be about a 1,200-foot-long street.

The analogy I would make, from a design standpoint, is the Third Street Promenade-a street designed with sidewalks, curves, and drive lanes, but we anticipate that most of the time this street will be a pedestrian-only street crossed by streets occupied by cars. There will be a couple of blocks lined with retail on both sides. That street-Lake Street-will cross a secondary street called Hollywood as a principle intersection. On the corner of Hollywood and Lake there is a second plaza that fronts a market hall, which would be a second anchor for the project in addition to the movie theater.

Then, as you continue on, at the end of the street you will come to a third plaza that is called the Lake Plaza-a great plaza at the end of the pedestrian retail streets that fronts onto an eight-acre lake with two levels and a dramatic 12-foot waterfall. It will be one of the more dramatic backdrops for a retail district. Lake Plaza is lined with a series of restaurants that have indoor seating but also take advantage of the lovely plaza overlooking the lake and waterfall. We see that as the third anchor of the project-a concentration of restaurants. In addition to those, we can accommodate two larger, traditional anchor stores. We are waiting for the economy to improve before we market to major retail chains.

Wilson Meany Sullivan spent about $254 million to buy Hollywood Park from Churchill Downs. What are your hopes for returns to your partners and your investors?

We believe that Hollywood Park is going to offer a fine return for our investment. I say that somewhat more confidently today than I would have two months ago because if we had failed to get entitlements I probably wouldn't have had any confidence. In July we were able to get the master plan endorsed by the city of Inglewood. Our entitlements are augmented by a 15-year development agreement that can be extended to 20 years. We have a great plan and an opportunity to thoughtfully implement it over time. Because we received those entitlements and because we do have the protection of a long-term development agreement, I am confident that we will achieve a good return for our investors.

Let me not be misleading here. We bought the property at the end of 2005. There are very few people who can say that they got a bargain price on anything in 2005 or 2006. That was then, and now we are executing. Thankfully, we have been successful with our entitlements and will get decent returns.

It's always, as your suggest, a challenge to do large, planned infill projects. With that preface, what does the Inglewood City Council, who voted 4-0 with one abstention, expect from your project?

They have been great; they participated in the process from the beginning. The most recent project before ours in Inglewood did not succeed. Wal-Mart owns 60 acres of land and came forward and tried to get a project approved. They side-stepped the public, they wouldn't deal with the City Council, and ultimately they tried to get their entitlements at the ballot box with an initiative that failed.

At the beginning there were people who wondered if these large developments could be done collaboratively with the developer, the property owner, and the community-or does it have to replay the Wal-Mart story? Does it have to be an adversarial process? Process is terribly important-can we work together? We literally had 150 meetings in various public settings throughout the community, getting people on board and meeting their expectations. The process was important. Inglewood has demonstrated that they are thoughtful, they can turn a project down that doesn't work for them, and they can bring projects forward that do work for them.

In terms of the goals of the project, Inglewood wanted something that was going to be fiscally positive. They did not believe that they could move a project forward that would be a drag on their general fund. And, equally as important but harder to define, Inglewood was losing iconic, central parts of the community. The Lakers used to play at the Forum and then moved on. Hollywood Park had its heyday 25 years ago but it moved on. Would there be something that would come in its place that would be as vital and important and be their iconic landmark? It was also terribly important for the community to stop driving out of town to spend retail dollars in other communities. There was a desire to create a retail corridor that would allow city residents to spend locally and draw other people's spending into Inglewood.

As the plan was actually executed there was an expectation, at an appropriate level, that there be business opportunities for local residents. For example, as construction begins there will be additional outreach programs that will make local youth aware of apprentice programs in various trades so that they are ready to work and access construction jobs.

Increasingly, local governments require developments to be green. What is planned to make Hollywood Tomorrow sustainable and green?

It is our conviction, as I said earlier, that it is evermore difficult to create infill projects. That said, it is also true that for our region's future we must learn to do that because we have to be smarter about how we conserve resources or we are simply going to run out. We have to change how we do it-that involves thinking in a sustainable way. We think of that as green. The reason I expand that a little bit is because green is not just looking at what certification you can get through some point system. Sustainable development is development that is environmentally appropriate, but also socially appropriate and economically sustainable. When you think about and approach a project that way, the decisions that make it sustainable get the most leverage and accomplish the most when you're thinking of them from the very beginning. You're not trying to add on technological fixes, you're baking sustainability into the DNA of the project-how the land is used.

In the case of Hollywood Park, we had a project that's conceived so that the people in the Los Angeles region, who are famously anti-pedestrian, now have neighborhoods where homes, parks, and retail services are linked by beautiful, tree-lined, walkable streets that feel safe and approachable because of the very properties that constitute their design. Cooper Robertson & Partners did the master plan, and Mia Lehrer & Associates created the parks plan. They are two of the planning and landscape firms in the country that really do a terrific job of creating sustainable places.

With that established land plan being the most important element of sustainability, we then approached some of the systems, such as storm water. Right now, more than half of Hollywood Park is surface parking lots, which collect oil and dirty rain water. In the new plan, the storm water system is routed into dry creek beds that actually lace through our beautiful park system. Those dry creek beds, when it rains, fill up and flow into check-dams that allow for natural bio-filtration of the storm water. The water is then are taken to the lake that I described to you, where it is ultimately cleansed.

In addition, we are designing our buildings to be very sustainable and energy-efficient and incorporating a drought-tolerant landscaping plan with extensive use of reclaimed water for irrigation to reduce potable water demand. We will also employ a recycling program for nearly all waste generated by demolition and construction activities to reduce waste to landfills.