Author Archives: cmaddren

Gentrifying Hollywood

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Hollywood used to be for everybody.  Not so in recent years.  Around the time we slid into the new millennium, real estate agents and developers started paying a lot of attention to the area.  It used to be a place where people without a lot of money, musicians, artists, immigrants, students, could find a cheap apartment.  But for the past ten years or so rents have been rising steadily.  And the new units that have been built are geared towards people with money. There was a break in the cycle when the stock market crashed, but now it’s picking up again.

In short, the powers that be want to turn Hollywood into a gentrified enclave like Santa Monica.  The City Council and the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce are trying to transform the area into an upscale haven for club-hopping hipsters.    Anyone who makes less than fifty thousand a year is no longer welcome.

The LA Weekly recently ran an article on this trend.  I do feel the title, “Hollywood’s Urban Cleansing”, is too extreme, but the story does a good job of laying out what the politicians and the developers are doing to the area.  The link is below.

http://www.laweekly.com/2013-01-03/news/hollywood-latino-population-drop-12878-diaspora-gentrification/

Millennium Hollywood Project

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One of the things that motivated me to start this blog is the proposed Millennium Hollywood Project.  As a resident of Hollywood, I’m really concerned about this for a number of reasons.  While I support responsible, sustainable development, neither one of those adjectives can be applied to the project in its current form.  My main gripe is that two huge, high-rise towers will be erected next to the Capitol Records building.  My objections are based in part on aesthetics, since if the project is built these towers would completely overwhelm this Hollywood icon.  But the biggest problem with this project is that it will make traffic much worse.

The City of LA has been pursuing a policy of building high-density residential projects near transit centers.  In theory this sounds like good planning, and I used to support the idea.  But there have been a number of large residential projects built in Hollywood over the past several years, most of them less than a block away from subway stations, and traffic has only gotten worse.  The concept of having people live next to a subway so they won’t need to use their car sounds good, but the reality is that most Angelenos still take their cars most of the time.  The Millennium Hollywood Project will only make traffic worse, and the proposed mitigations are not sufficient.

I’ll write more later, but if you’re interested in finding out more about the project, here’s a link to an article that includes renderings of the finished development.

http://www.archdaily.com/290508/las-millennium-hollywood-project/