Tuesday, February 13, 2007

A lot riding on Anaheim housing vote

The council tonight may approve a big development — including cheaper units — that Disney strenuously opposes.
By Dave McKibben, Times Staff Writer
February 13, 2007

 

 

A proposal to build housing near Disneyland has escalated into a battle of wills between the entertainment giant and key Anaheim officials, who once could be counted on to follow Disney’s every lead.


Although some Anaheim City Council members see the project as a way to add needed housing to Orange County’s second-largest city, Disney says it would disrupt the tourist environment and street scene it has worked hard to create outside the gates to Disneyland and California Adventure.

Tonight, the council is expected to choose sides and vote whether to permit 225 apartments and 1,275 condominiums in the resort district. The area, directly across the street from where Disney may build a third amusement park, includes a site recently rezoned for upscale hotel-condominium projects, to which Disney has not objected.

The debate has left council members in an awkward position: whether to please Anaheim’s biggest employer and biggest tourist draw or create housing, including low-cost residences for the resort district’s workforce.

“People are really rallying hard,” Councilman Harry Sidhu said of the behind-the-scenes lobbying. “I’ve never seen anything like this. The troops behind the resort district, they are woken up.”

In a last-ditch attempt to derail the proposal, Disney officials sent an “urgent” e-mail to community leaders asking them to “help save the Anaheim resort area” by calling council members or attending tonight’s meeting.

Anaheim’s resort district has been greatly reshaped over the years. Hotels, upscale restaurants and tourist-friendly entertainment centers such as Downtown Disney have replaced the tacky retail outlets and cheap motels that once dominated the area.

Last month, the Anaheim Planning Commission unanimously rejected the housing plan, but some council members have expressed support for it. The debate pits lower-cost-housing advocates against Disney, which has publicly worried about the environment outside its gates since the days of Walt Disney.

Sidhu was one of four council members who voted to pave the way for the project in August; Mayor Curt Pringle was the lone opponent. But Sidhu is now searching for a compromise, proposing a boutique hotel and restaurants at the front of the 26-acre parcel off Katella Avenue with condominiums and low-cost apartments in the back.

“I’m looking for a solution,” he said. “There’s got to be some kind of happy medium. This would help create kind of a resort atmosphere and still allow residential and affordable housing.”

Sidhu said he would ask for a delay so his colleagues and city staff would have more time to study his proposal.

Disney has maintained that the dispute is not some referendum on lower-cost housing but about maintaining a 13-year-old plan that has revitalized the 2.2-square-mile resort district, more than doubled annual bed tax revenue and accounted for nearly half the city’s general fund.

“Residents and tourists have different needs that are not always compatible,” Disney spokesman Rob Doughty said in a recent e-mail on the subject. “Tourists like to stay up late and make noise, while residents need a quiet night sleep so they can get up to go to school and work in the morning.”

Lower-cost-housing advocates have argued that the plan for the resort district is antiquated and that building more hotels would exacerbate the city’s shortage of cheaper housing. The project, developed by SunCal Cos., would replace about 300 mobile homes. Hundreds of apartments are also nearby.

“This whole issue about what’s compatible doesn’t make sense,” said Eric Altman, who represents a coalition of labor unions and community groups. “There’re people living on that site now, and I don’t think there’s any glaring incompatibility with people living there and other functions that go on.”

david.mckibben@latimes.com
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A Neighbor Moves in With Ropes and Shackles, and Some Are Not So Pleased

Jim Wilson/The New York Times
Peter Acworth, the founder of Kink.com, inside the State Armory and Arsenal building in San Francisco, where he recently moved his company.
By JESSE McKINLEY; Published: February 12, 2007

SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 11 — It is hard to imagine a city prouder of its sexuality than San Francisco, a place with an active strip club district, a union for erotic dancers and an annual parade on Folsom Street where those not wearing leather and chaps are the odd ones out.

Jim Wilson/The New York Times
People gathered on Thursday to protest the building’s new occupant.

So it came as something of a surprise when a kerfuffle arose because of the newest addition to the city’s sexual landscape: the State Armory and Arsenal building, a 200,000-square-foot landmark in the Mission District that was just purchased by Kink.com, an online pornography company devoted to bondage and sadomasochism.

Peter Acworth, the company’s founder and chief executive, said he planned to turn the armory into a full-fledged film studio, with dirty movies shot in the basement and less-dirty ones shot upstairs.

“I want to make films like ‘Secretary,’ ” Mr. Acworth said, referring to the 2002 mainstream hit about a woman who has a kinky love affair with her lawyer boss. “But with more sex.”

But somewhere between his purchase and the first paddling, Mr. Acworth has run into strong opposition from a group of neighborhood activists who long feared that the armory, vacant since 1975, would be converted into something truly taboo: condominiums.

Some of the previous efforts to use the armory were derailed by anti-gentrification forces who wanted more affordable housing in the Mission, an economically and racially mixed area where hipsters and the homeless are represented in equal numbers.

But this time around, opponents insist they are not being prudish, just prudent, considering the building’s proximity to schools and families.

“Everybody thought it was going to be housing, and then mid-January, we get this bomb,” said Anita Correa, who runs an arts theater in the neighborhood. “Everybody was taken by shock.”

Ms. Correa added: “The new owner said they would create jobs. But what kind of jobs are we talking about here?”

Mr. Acworth said his business was totally legitimate, with safe working conditions, willing and well-paid models, and a “condom-only policy.” (As for those jobs, Mr. Acworth said he was mainly talking about production assistants, including people working in props, sets, lighting and photography. “We have a very low turnover,” he said.)

Mr. Acworth, a 36-year-old Briton and a former doctoral candidate in finance, started his company in 1997 out of his dorm room at business school, uniting his interest in business with other interests, namely tying people up. And his sites — nine are up and running, and four more are on the way — have apparently hit a nerve: in 2006, Kink.com had about $20 million in revenue and about 70 full-time employees, Mr. Acworth said.

“I think it’s something that many more people are into than would otherwise admit,” he said. “And we present it in a friendly way. You see women smiling. It doesn’t look like abuse, so it attracts people that are curious about it.”

Sure enough, a visit to Kink.com’s main Web site shows women in a variety of painful-looking rope ensembles. Some are naked, some are nearly naked and some are, indeed, smiling. (Some, however, are not.)

The company’s current downtown offices are filled with editors and Webmasters who sit before row after row of large-screen computers, while bored-looking crew members haul lights, cameras and cat-o’-nine-tails from set — dungeon, jail cell, suburbia — to set.

Mr. Acworth said he was looking to expand his fast-growing business and fell in love with the castle-like armory the moment he laid eyes on its lower levels.

“The basement had a series of rooms that looked like dungeons,” said Mr. Acworth, who bought the building from a private developer for $14.5 million. “It just has such character.”

The Kink.com plan is the latest chapter in the long and somewhat tortured history of the armory, which is on the National Register of Historic Places. Built between 1912 and 1914, the brick-and-mortar building has long been a redevelopment challenge for San Francisco, with its landmark status and the city’s famously vociferous activist set derailing plan after plan over the last three decades.

Among the possible occupants have been a nonprofit rehabilitation clinic; a mainstream film studio and sound stage; and a gym that would have taken advantage of the building’s 70-foot ceilings to install a rock-climbing wall. In 2000, a plan for a dot-com office was derailed, as was a subsequent idea to use the armory’s enclosed drill yard — itself the size of a football field — to house computer servers.

The most recent plan before Kink.com’s purchase was for a mixed-use residential and office project that would have built luxury apartments and some lower-income housing atop and alongside the existing building.

Tim Frye, a historic preservation specialist for the San Francisco Planning Department, said the architecture of the armory — small, narrow windows; no elevator; poor insulation — meant that any major conversion would most likely have been complicated by the building’s landmark status.

“It’s not a friendly building,” Mr. Frye said. “It’s really imposing, and a lot of the preservation board thinks that housing wasn’t a really good use.”

Planning officials said Kink.com had no major governmental hurdles because it planned to do very little to the building, aside from fixing some windows and installing some shackles. But there will be a public meeting in April, they said, to hear any concerns from the community, at the request of Mayor Gavin Newsom. (Mr. Newsom has had his own sex-related problems, having recently admitted an affair with his campaign manager’s wife.)

Mr. Acworth said he wanted to be a good neighbor — he recently appeared at a local merchants association meeting and has offered to hold the next one — while still being a naughty boy. Kink.com has already shot its first scenes in the armory, which has ready-to-use settings, including a shower room, a boiler room and a collection of horse stables.

Mr. Acworth also predicted that his neighbors would eventually embrace his presence. “It’s a company built here in San Francisco with San Franciscans,” he said. “I just think it needs time to register.”

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Sequel planned at iconic corner

Work begins today on a huge multiuse complex that may revitalize Hollywood and Vine.
By Roger Vincent, Times Staff Writer
February 12, 2007

Construction is set to begin today on a long-awaited $600-million hotel, residential and retail project at the iconic intersection of Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street in Hollywood.


The massive development is regarded by planners as a bookend to the glitzy retail and entertainment complex nine blocks away at Hollywood and Highland Avenue, which is the home of the Kodak Theatre and next to Graumann’s Chinese.

The new project calls for a 305-room W hotel with 143 adjoining condominiums that would receive hotel services, the first such complex in Los Angeles. Also part of the plan for the southeast corner of the intersection: 375 luxury apartments, restaurants, a nightclub, stores and a spa.

Major development is already underway at two other corners of the famed intersection.

“We’ll see a lot of activity up and down Hollywood Boulevard” prompted by the project, predicted one of the developers, Dennis Cavallari, senior vice president of Legacy Partners.

“Everyone is hoping for a renaissance that will make it a pedestrian-oriented retail district,” he added.

The project on a site surrounding a Metro Rail subway stop has been planned for about five years.

Some real estate industry observers were skeptical that it would ever happen because they doubted that there would be enough demand among travelers and buyers to support it.

The blocks around the intersection, once at the center of the region’s broadcasting industry, had fallen into disrepute by the 1980s.

“Hollywood used to be the last place you would think affluent people would want to reside,” said real estate broker John Tronson of Ramsey-Shilling Co. “I think a lot of people had doubts anybody would truly sign up to build a high-end product.”

The project is being developed by Legacy Partners of Foster City, Calif., and Gatehouse Capital Corp. of Dallas. Gatehouse President Marty Collins said the Hollywood “brand” had survived the down-and-out decades and still held global appeal that can be capitalized on.

By the time the project is completed in mid-2009, Collins hopes to attract buyers willing to pay from $600,000 to more than $1 million for condos. He expects the hotel to appeal most to business travelers in the fields of entertainment, fashion, art and design.

The builders have applied to the nonprofit U.S. Green Building Council for certification of the project as an environmentally friendly development.

“It’s going to be one of the very first full-service” green hotels, Collins said. For potential guests that W is targeting, “the whole idea of going green resonates.”

Most of the project will rise on land owned by the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which is encouraging dense development around more than 20 train stations in hopes of limiting traffic congestion and air pollution, said Roger Moliere, chief of real estate management and development for the MTA.

It will also surround the Taft office tower, a landmark completed in 1924 that once housed the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Also remaining on Vine Street will be the one-story Bernard Luggage store completed in 1928. Its owner, Robert Blue, successfully resisted the city’s eminent domain proceedings intended to remove his building to make way for the new project.

This project is the largest at an MTA station since the $615-million Hollywood and Highland complex completed in 2001 and is one of the most expensive in the history of the district.

Two other large projects are nearing completion at Hollywood and Vine: Palisades Development Group’s $50-million conversion of the former Equitable office building to condominiums and Kor Group’s $70-million conversion of the former Broadway department store also to condos.

The Broadway, Equitable and Taft buildings are links to the era when Hollywood and Vine was one of the city’s great crossroads. In the 1920s, it was the second-busiest intersection after Wilshire Boulevard and Western Avenue.

It was a gateway to the San Fernando Valley in pre-freeway Los Angeles and a draw for the movie industry from the beginning. Cecil B. DeMille shot “The Squaw Man,” Hollywood’s first feature film, at the nearby corner of Selma Avenue and Vine in 1914.

Later, radio and then television stations set up operations in the neighborhood and KFWB announcers repeated often that they were broadcasting “from Hollywood and Vine,” according to historian Marc Wanamaker. “It was considered the downtown of Hollywood,” he said.

Such mass appeal was a distant memory by the 1980s, when parts of the neighborhood fell prey to such activities as drug dealing, prostitution and panhandling.

By the early 1990s, the Community Redevelopment Agency had come up with a plan for improving Hollywood that called for commercial and residential development at the intersection. Changing political administrations, subway construction and real estate downturns kept builders at bay, however.

Finally, a city ordinance that simplified the conversion of commercial buildings to residential use, along with the Hollywood and Highland development and the recent housing boom, spurred developers to action.

roger.vincent@latimes.com
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