Arts & Culture, DTLA's Next Big Driver

LOS ANGELES—Arts and culture tenants are becoming an important driver in the growing Downtown Los Angeles market. According to Nick Griffin, director of economic development at the Downtown Central Business Improvement District, arts and culture tenants are a huge driver of retail in the market and help pull together the community—and more and more arts- and culture-related tenants are planting roots in the downtown market.

"We see some really interesting parallels between retail and arts and culture," Griffin tells GlobeSt.com. "In a lot of ways, retail, particularly the innovative and hip brands and the luxury brands, wants to be proximate to dynamic arts and culture. They want to be in a place that is socially and creatively progressive and exciting. They want to associate themselves with those things from a brand perspective, but they are also targeting those customers; the customers that want to go to art galleries or who want to go to the Broad. As the arts and culture in downtown and really boomed, both artists and art institutions are gravitating there. We feel like there is a critical mass of arts and culture that is just hitting a tipping point now."

A slew of blue chip art galleries and the massively popular Broad Museum are among the recent tenants to head downtown, but Griffin says that there are more to come, including the Santa Monica Museum of Art. "We have been in negotiation to bring the Santa Monica Museum of Art downtown. They have come to us and said, 'we don't feel like Bergamot Station and Santa Monica are going in the same direction that we want to go as an organization,'" he says. "They want to be more cutting edge, the want to be more engaged civically and they feel like what is happening downtown is what they want to be associated with. We have been helping them look at properties. They haven't signed anything yet, but they are actively in the market, and they actively want to be there."

To push the importance of arts and culture users in the market, the DCBID is launching an initiative in the coming year to spread the word. "The initiative in 2016 will focus on arts and culture as an economic driver and how it is an economic driver for retail, residential, creative office and technology companies," says Griffin. "We have really seen a parallel. We are focusing on that because we hear it from retailers, especially the luxury brands and the independent brands. That is what they are associated with; that is what they want to be associated with; and that is how they want their customers to think of them. This is a trend that builds on itself."

Just like retail and multifamily, this trend is the next evolution of millennials moving to urban neighborhoods and wanting an urban lifestyle, according to Griffin. "People want to be in cities for a certain lifestyle," he says. "When people come to the Los Angeles region for whatever reason, they very quickly gravitate toward Downtown Los Angeles because it is the only place where they can have a dynamic urban lifestyle. If you stack up Downtown sales versus the county or the region, we are trending way ahead. I think that is because we are the beneficiary of those lifestyle choices."