New City Group Targets Industrial Land

LA Mayor James Hahn has named seven members to the Industrial Development Advisory Committee. The first meeting will be held Tuesday, according to Timi Hallem, a Downtown Los Angeles partner specializing in real estate with the law firm of Luce, Forward, Hamilton & Scripps.

Hallem tells GlobeSt.com that the group's assignment is to "optimize the use of industrially zoned land and make it easier for that land to be appropriately used." Both she and Jack Kyser, chief economist for the Los Angeles Economic Development Corp. and a member of the new committee, cite the under-used and unused land in the city as potential sites for industrial development.

"This will help us immensely," Kyser says of the new committee. "I'm glad that someone is focusing on keeping this as industrial land." He tells GlobeSt.com that many firms are interested in locating in Los Angeles, but the city has relatively little easily developed industrial land to offer. Both he and Hallem noted that much of what could be developed for industrial use is so-called "brownfield" land with potential pollution problems.

Hallem, who does much of her work on the developer side of acquiring and developing land, says the committee and the city will need to work with state and regional agencies to address clean-up standards for brownfield tracts so that the land can be used. There also may be some issues of who has title to the land, she says, and the city can be helpful in "tracking down who the owners are or condemning property or assisting in some way to assemble a large enough parcel of land that it can be used or re-used effectively."

Assembling larger tracts, Hallem says, could create industrial areas rather than isolated industrial parcels, providing a critical mass that would help to attract industrial development. The targeted land is dispersed throughout the city, she says, but much of it is east and south of Downtown LA.

Kyser points out that developing the industrial land "will go quite a way in solving some of the issues of the fading middle class" because a strong manufacturing base is crucial to a healthy middle class. "LA County, despite our shrinkage in manufacturing, is still the second-largest manufacturing center in the nation, right after Chicago," he says.

Kyser says the land targeted by the committee could ultimately house facilities providing a wide variety of jobs, not necessarily in traditional heavy-duty manufacturing. "We have a lot of companies here who are importing goods from Asia and then processing those goods further," he explains. "They do things like adding labels or hang-tags to them or doing further assembly. These are better-quality jobs than some of the simple warehouse operations."

Kyser says despite the current economic slowdown, he expects the economy to begin improving in 2004 so there could well be companies ready to occupy the targeted land when it becomes available.

Besides Hallem and Kyser, other members of the committee are Roberto Barragan, president of the Valley Economic Development Center; Raphael Bostic, director of the Casden Real Estate Forecast at USC's Lusk Center; Steve Cauley, associate director of the Ziman Center for Real Estate at UCLA's Anderson School; Mitchell Menzer, a partner at O'Melveny & Myers law firm and president of the LA City Planning Commission; and Stephanie Shakofsky, executive director of the California Center for Land Recycling.