$44M Paramount Project Gets Green Light

LOS ANGELES—The City of Paramount has green lit a massive $44.4 million redevelopment project that will transform the City of Paramount into a regional mall with several national tenants. The project began pre-recession with funding from a municipal redevelopment agency, and was subsequently stalled during the recession. When the economy recovered, redevelopment agencies had been eliminated, leaving the City to seek private funding to complete the project.

“There is a site that had been marked as a redevelopment site where the city was committed to doing a sit-down restaurant, and they were committed to doing a sit-down restaurant because there has never been a national chain restaurant in the City of Paramount,” James Rodriguez, SVP at Colliers International, tells GlobeSt.com. “Their hopes were to redevelop the site, and they did so using redevelopment funds, and they had some interest from restaurants. Then, the recession hit and that interest evaporated. Years later when the economy started improving, there were no longer redevelopment agencies and the City then had another challenge to overcome because they had to go through the process of disposing of the site and working with a developer.” Rodriguez assembled the development partnership on behalf of the city.