Richard Hartog / LAT

THE PLAN: If the L.A. City Council votes yes, parking meters will be installed along such busy streets as Sunset Boulevard in the Sunset Junction area. Silver Lake would get 500 more meters.

First came the trendy clothing boutiques and vintage furniture stores that opened next to laundromats and liquor stores on Sunset Boulevard in Silver Lake.

Then came the upscale eateries and patio cafes.

Now comes the parking enforcement officer.

The city is moving forward with a plan to quadruple the number of parking meters in all of Silver Lake, mostly along the burgeoning business districts of Sunset, Glendale and Silver Lake boulevards.

Some merchants cheer the idea of adding 500 meters, saying it will help customers find parking in an area notoriously short on spaces. But some residents worry that the meters will mean less parking for them — and pressure on the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood.

“It seems like it is becoming like every other place that becomes bourgeois,” said Tristan Saether, 24, a bartender who lives and works in the meter-free Sunset Junction neighborhood in the heart of Silver Lake. “It’s one more step toward high rent.”

Merchants and residents say parking problems have reached unbearable levels in Silver Lake. Along Sunset Boulevard, the competition for parking is fierce, causing motorists to travel up residential side streets in search of spaces.

“Parking is so bad already,” said Kelly Van Patter, who opened an environmentally themed home and garden shop in Sunset Junction two weeks ago. “It’s tough to find a spot as it is.”

Sean Eisele, 22, said he had to park 10 blocks from his home on Sunday. He arrived home at 9 p.m., forcing him to compete with visitors to the area’s restaurants.

“You have to dance around with your car,” said Eisele, a recent transplant from Philadelphia.

There’s a lot to attract shoppers to the new Silver Lake, with its heart in Sunset Junction — so named because it served as the rail car junction that once connected Sunset Boulevard and Santa Monica Boulevard.

On a recent evening, next to a Salvadoran pupuseria, a line of people filled Pazzo Gelato, with its huge windows and bright facade acting as a beacon for Sunset Junction. Farther east were boutique shops filled with shoes and a comic books store with shiny hardwood floors that doubles as an art gallery.

Diners chatted at an upscale microbrewery, an Indian restaurant that offers valet parking, and a packed organic vegan restaurant and deli.

Store owners say the problem is that workers or residents sometimes park on Sunset Boulevard for hours, making it difficult for customers to find street parking.

“These cars end up sitting for hours on end,” said David Ritchie, a co-owner of Secret Headquarters, a comic books store and gallery.

He admits he also has sometimes parked for several hours on Sunset.

But for the customers’ sake, he said, “It’d be nice if we got some turnover out there.”

That’s why merchants say they asked the City Council to add parking meters. The city’s transportation committee approved the idea Wednesday, with the council to vote on it in coming weeks. Under the proposal, the meters would operate from 8 a.m. to 8 or 10 p.m., Monday through Saturday.

Peter Choi, a past Silver Lake Chamber of Commerce chairman and owner of Serifos, a gift shop, said he often hears customers say, “I meant to stop by the other day, but I couldn’t find a spot, so I just went home.”

One- or two-hour parking limits aren’t rigorously enforced by the city. Parking meters are expected to make it easier for shoppers to get a shot at street parking, Choi said.

“They’ll have a better chance of stopping in front of a business and picking up a gift, a bottle of wine or a hunk of cheese,” Choi said.

In Silver Lake, much of the parking crunch is caused by new shoppers and new residents who, Choi said, are living in homes built in the 1920s or ’30s that might have only a one-car garage.

When the neighborhood was built, he said, most residents took the now-defunct Red Car trolley line to jobs in Hollywood because automobiles were unaffordable.

“You have all these little cottages packed in Silver Lake and there’s no parking for a lot of them,” Choi said. “Now you have exponentially more cars coming in as the neighborhood got more gentrified after the ’90s. It went from bus riders to gentrified couples with cars.

“The neighborhood was not really designed for cars. It was designed for Red Car trolley-riding 1920s Angelenos and not for the post-millennial double-car garage culture,” Choi said.

But the prospect of meters worries Fred Davis, a 60-year-old apartment manager who has lived in Silver Lake for 12 years.

“I don’t go for the parking meters; that’s like downtown, the Westside, Hollywood or around Santa Monica,” Davis said, adding that he enjoyed the area’s laissez faire attitude toward parking.

Sarah Dale, who runs Pull My Daisy, a clothing boutique in Sunset Junction, agreed. She said there is something to be said about Silver Lake as an off-the-radar neighborhood, an alternative to the glitz of the beach culture — home to gay businesses, musicians and eclectic, independent stores.

“The less the parking meters, the better the world,” Dale said. “I do think our little drag is really sweet. . . . I think there’s something great about parking your car, going to get lunch,” and then browsing at shops along the street — “without being under the gun to come back and feed the meter.”

Whatever may come, resident Anja Gardner fears that the neighborhood is losing its edgy distinctiveness.

“It’s not quite as quaint as it used to be,” said Gardner, 25, as she headed into a gelato shop on a recent warm night. “More money means less hip. That’s the way it is.”

ron.lin@latimes.com

The high-design luxury residential towers marching across Manhattan pose a problem for an architecture critic. What if I should fancy one? Isn’t that just what its developer is hoping? A critic can’t help but feel a bit queasy, teetering on the edge of becoming a real estate promoter.

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Bernard Tschumi’s new residential building at Norfolk and Delancey Streets.

Yet I can’t get the Blue Building out of my mind. Amid the old brick tenements of the Lower East Side, the glittering exterior of this structure, Bernard Tschumi’s latest building, will strike some as another step in downtown Manhattan’s relentless pace of gentrification.

But the 17-story building, which is to be finished later this month, avoids the ostentatious self-importance that infects the design of so many of the new luxury towers. Encased in a matrix of blue panels, its contorted form has a hypnotic appeal that is firmly rooted in the gritty disorder of its surroundings. It reminds us that beauty and good taste are not always the same thing.

This is partly because of Mr. Tschumi’s sensitivity to the neighborhood’s changing identity. Towers are sprouting all over downtown, and most of them are awful. The cheerless facade of the new Hotel on Rivington, decorated in bands of aqua-colored panels and glass, is visible a few blocks away. Just beyond it stand several generic brick residential towers, displaying the kind of superficial historicism that remains the norm among many mainstream developers.

By contrast Mr. Tschumi’s interests lie in an older vision of the neighborhood: the mix of old tenement buildings, public housing complexes and rusting infrastructure that extends down Delancey Street to the foot of the Williamsburg Bridge.

Seen from a distance the Blue Building’s crystalline form seems to twist and bend as it rises. The exterior bulges out on one side so that its form leans over a lower commercial building next door. A big penthouse terrace is cut out of the west facade; the top of the east facade is sliced off at an angle.

These contortions are a sly expression of the various forces that this architect had to contend with while designing the building: the tight site, the restrictions imposed by the zoning envelope, the developer’s desire to squeeze out as much rentable space as possible.

But the effect also sets the entire composition wonderfully off balance. As the eye intuitively follows the lines of the building down to the ground, its tapered form gives the impression that the tower has been squeezed to fit into the site’s tight footprint, so that from certain angles the building appears to be on the verge of tipping over.

This sense of a building both rooted in and straining to escape from its context is reinforced by the quality of the exterior surfaces. A matrix of dark and pale blues, the window pattern evokes the shifting rhythms of Mondrian’s painted ode to New York, “Broadway Boogie Woogie.”

Much of the inspiration, however, comes as much from the gutter as from museum walls. The building’s milky blue colors bring to mind the cheap illuminated plastic signs still found on some old East Village storefronts. Air-conditioning units are punched through the facade. Flowered drapes hang in some of the windows.

I mean this as a compliment. Part of the problem with so many of the new luxury towers is that they look so self-consciously refined. “Look at me,” they seem to purr. “Aren’t I sooooo sophisticated?” Mr. Tschumi’s building is less self-conscious, more playful.

As you reach the upper floors, for example, the apartments get increasingly idiosyncratic. Exterior walls tilt backward or forward; rooms are tucked into what seem like leftover spaces. Big canted columns are set just inside the facade, as if bracing the rooms against some invisible force.

The tension between the tautness of the walls and the weight of the columns vaguely evokes the 1970s-era houses designed by Kazuo Shinohara, whose muscular concrete structures seemed to strain to preserve a tiny oasis of tranquillity amid the chaos of postwar Tokyo.

Unlike Shinohara’s houses, the Blue Building is not a major work of art. But it nonetheless captures an aspect of the city that is slowly fading from view: its role as a sanctuary for misfits and outcasts, a place full of dark corners and unexpected encounters. If only such people could afford the price tag.

Herman Wouters for The New York Times

Houseboats on Princes Canal in Amsterdam, once a low-cost alternative to living on land, have gone upscale in recent years.

AMSTERDAM, Aug. 8 — On a recent Saturday during the confusion of this watery city’s annual Gay Pride Parade along the majestic Princes Canal, a beach umbrella was knocked into the water from the foredeck of Jackie Wijnakker’s houseboat, so she dove into the water to fetch it, unsuccessfully. It was only the second time in 17 years that she had jumped into the canal, and she cannot recall what she was trying to retrieve the first time. At any rate, she said with a laugh, “I’m too old to be diving into canals.”

She told the tale as a testament to how clean the water is, despite its murky, khaki color. “The canals are flushed regularly,” said Ron Van Heukelom, a neighbor who lives on dry land and has never ventured into the canal.

The flushing is necessary because, while most of Amsterdam’s 2,800 houseboats have running water, electricity and gas heat, few are connected to sewerage systems and continue to spill their waste into the canals.

The houseboats’ lack of toilet training is their dirty little secret, one that sits uncomfortably with a new generation of wealthier, more demanding owners who are leading a gentrification of the houseboat scene. In the process, they are displacing the less affluent boat people, many of whom are relics of the 1960s and 1970s era of flower power now struggling to pay the upkeep on their boats.

“The water is cleaner than it looks,” said Monique J. M. Jacobs, an official of the city agency responsible for water and the boats. The canals, she explained, are flushed by opening and closing locks about twice a week, and in summer more often. “Small fish are coming back, and also birds that feed off the fish,” she said. “In the old days it was awful. It stank in summer.”

The city wants to go further. It plans to install sewage pipes along the canals for the boats to hook into. This poses a threat to boat people like Ms. Wijnakker, who will have to pay about $28,000 to link up to the new system. The threat is not imminent; boat owners will have until 2017 to hook up.

Houseboats were traditionally the refuge of people without the means to live on dry land. After World War II, working-class families took to the water when housing on land was unavailable, and old canal barges were cheap, as the Dutch renewed their fleet.

“It’s difficult to find a good house on land,” said Pom Dupré, who has lived for 20 years on a 65-foot boat, the Nova Cura, along the canal. “And of course, this is a fine neighborhood,” she added, glancing at the stately 17th-century homes along the canal, many of them law offices or professional services.

There are drawbacks, she admits. Every four years the boat has to be hauled to a dry dock to have its hull checked for canal-worthiness. The family must find a place to stay, or live on the boat in the wharf; water pipes, which are exposed to the air between boat and canal wall, often freeze in the winter.

To make ends meet, or simply to enjoy onboard company, some boat owners have transformed their boats into bed-and-breakfasts. Ms. Wijnakker began taking in guests three years ago and now does a busy trade in summer.

Two years ago, Luc Couvée, 51, a graphic artist, and his wife, Laura Tollenaar, bought a canal freighter on the canal, then added two showers and two bedrooms to take in paying guests. “I’m a very boat-minded person,” Mr. Couvée said. “And it’s cheaper than an apartment, though not by much.”

The couple paid about $420,000 for the boat, which they renamed Vreiheid, or freedom. An apartment in the neighborhood would have cost about $700,000. They have solved the sewage problem, installing the necessary plumbing and a cesspool that can be emptied regularly. When the city’s plumbing is in place, they will be ready.

The popularity of houseboats reflects a general awakening in Amsterdam to the beauty of water. “Up to the 1970s and ’80s, Amsterdam’s water was forgotten,” said Maarten Kloos, an architect who runs Arcam, an independent foundation that promotes architecture. “Now, not only houseboats, floating has gained currency.”

Indeed, the architecture of some new apartment buildings near the center of Amsterdam suggests huge houseboats. “Talking about water is now the topic,” Mr. Kloos said. “People used to say, ‘With the beauty of our 17th-century canals, why can’t we get rid of those boats?’ ” he said. “Now, like all of Amsterdam, the boats are more and more bourgeois.”

Mr. Kloos might have been thinking of a squat, sleek houseboat on the River Amstel that suggests Mies van der Rohe more than Peter Stuyvesant. Five years ago, Steven Westerop, a personnel executive, left his home in Leiden, a short train ride from Amsterdam, to buy a dilapidated boat on the Amstel from an elderly German who came to Holland during the flower power days. With an architect’s help, Mr. Westerop, 46, designed and built a split-level home on a hull that was essentially a reinforced concrete shoebox.

“There are many kinds of boats I didn’t like,” he said. “I wanted people to say, ‘O.K.!’ Maybe even a little over the top.”

“It’s now a yuppie market,” he said. “You need a good job, otherwise you can’t afford it.” The old boat people, like his German, are selling, he said, and all of the houseboats on both sides of his have changed owners in the past five years.

“Sometimes, though, I still feel like a Gypsy,” he went on. “But I have a big mortgage.”

Lake Balboa is awash with angst as residents living around it find themselves suffering from a bizarre identity crisis.

Homeowners in the community near the center of the San Fernando Valley have been stunned to learn that “Lake Balboa” doesn’t exist — even though city signs designating that name for the area have been posted for the last five years at their neighborhood’s boundaries.

City leaders acknowledged this week that the Lake Balboa community designation was never officially authorized. Instead, City Councilman Dennis Zine merely instructed street workers in 2002 to post the blue community signs as a courtesy to residents.

Councilman Richard Alarcon, chairman of the council’s Education and Neighborhoods Committee, warned that those who boast of having a Lake Balboa address could risk fraud charges if they list that location when selling their homes.

“There is no Lake Balboa, ” Alarcon told residents at a community meeting this week.

Adding to the controversy, the real Lake Balboa — a 27-acre Sepulveda Flood Control Basin pond filled with treated wastewater — isn’t in Lake Balboa either.

Or in Van Nuys, for that matter.

It’s in Encino. And residents there are none too pleased that Van Nuys homeowners have attempted to appropriate the Lake Balboa name.

The debate marks another twist in the long tradition of neighborhood name changing that started in the San Fernando Valley in the 1980s.

In many cases, the changes involve upscale neighborhoods trying to shed what residents consider the unwanted baggage of older communities. Valley Village and West Toluca Lake broke off from North Hollywood, while Valley Glen seceded from Van Nuys and West Hills from Canoga Park.

Lake Balboa would be another secession from Van Nuys. Residents living in an area roughly bounded by the 405 Freeway on the east, the Los Angeles River on the south, Roscoe Boulevard on the north and White Oak Avenue have lobbied for the name change as a way of unifying the area politically and improving property values.

They contend that the freeway effectively cuts their neighborhoods off from the rest of Van Nuys, the site of the Valley’s first subdivision. A Lake Balboa address would distance them from the gritty reputation that Van Nuys sometimes suffers, they argue.

But it is drawing complaints from Van Nuys residents and business owners such as Ron Feinstein, who have labeled the attempted breakaway as “divisive and disheartening to those of us who give so much time to clean up our community.”

Steven Leffert, a retired science and math teacher who has lived in Van Nuys since 1969, organized what began as the bid to join the Lake Balboa neighborhood. He said real estate sales statistics show that homes with a Lake Balboa address have escalated in value at nearly twice the rate of those with Van Nuys addresses.

“The overarching factor was real estate values,” he said.

Several real estate agents were in the crowd of about 100 attending Monday evening’s hearing at the Van Nuys Civic Center.

Alarcon suggested that they exercise caution in using the Lake Balboa name when selling homes.

“The legal name is not Lake Balboa. I’d talk to my lawyer if I were you. I believe it puts you in jeopardy” to advertise homes for sale as being sold there instead of Van Nuys, he said.

Alarcon said he supports the concept of residents defining their communities by renaming them. But he said the new approval system requires a broad public consensus.

With the name change proposal now in limbo, city officials will work with residents to produce a satisfactory compromise, Alarcon said.

In the case of Lake Balboa, Zine — whose council district at the time included part of Van Nuys — asked the city’s Department of Transportation to erect the name signs, and a ceremony commemorating them was held in April 2002 at Balboa and Victory boulevards. But Zine never entered a motion before the council to make the name change official, said Sharon Sandow, his chief of staff.

L.A. is famous for renaming neighborhoods, often at the request of residents who believe that living in, say, North Hills rather than Sepulveda might boost property values.

There are now nearly 180 designated neighborhoods in L.A. — but there is a growing feeling at City Hall that the name game needs to be tamed.

City rules now require the City Council to approve neighborhood name changes — something that didn’t happen in the case of Lake Balboa and perhaps other neighborhoods.

It’s far from a new trend — but officials said neighborhood naming is growing in popularity.

In the last decade, dozens of Los Angeles-area communities have adopted names — some historic, others made up.

Also, city officials have posted signs designating parts of some communities by their original subdivision names. There are hundreds of the old subdivisions such as Silver Lake, neighborhoods originally built with such names as Ivanhoe Hills, Manzanita Heights, Primrose Hill, Sunset Heights, Capitol Hill, Childs Heights and Crestmont — the tract that advertised itself 80 years ago as “the Smiley Heights of Los Angeles.”

The actual Lake Balboa, which is part of the city’s Anthony C. Beilenson Park, is not located within the Lake Balboa area designated by Zine’s signs. Leffert said his proposal would cure that by designating Sepulveda Flood Control Basin land between Victory Boulevard and the Los Angeles River “Lake Balboa.” That nonresidential area is currently part of Encino.

Losing the lake doesn’t sit well with Encino community leaders.

“We are vehemently opposed to anyone stealing part of Encino,” said Sherman Gamson, secretary of the Encino Neighborhood Council.

Olivo Barbieri for The New York Times

At Another Crossroads Goa has long been a mix of East and West. Now the ornate style of old Goa meets the rebar and concrete of the new.

One afternoon in December, Roy Patrao peered through a sturdy iron gate and scanned the gnarled roots of a tree embracing the ruin of an old stone house. Only a shell of the house survived, with thick columns holding up a portico. A window shutter made of seashells and slatted wood was visible amid the overgrown bush. On this plot of land, Patrao saw his dream.

Olivo Barbieri for The New York Times

No Taller Than the Nearest Palm Builders can get around such old-fashioned restrictions, and new construction looms over a church in Mapusa, a town in northern Goa.

Olivo Barbieri for The New York Times

To the Sea The region was once a bohemian getaway, with many beaches like this one in southern Goa. Today the Indian version of the Hamptons crowd is putting its money into condos and renovations.

Olivo Barbieri for The New York Times

To the Hill A country house is no longer just for Indian blue bloods. The sales brochure for the new gated community Aldeia de Goa, above, declares, “Invest in the lifestyle you deserve.”

He would build a villa here, with cool limestone floors and a modern kitchen. The upstairs windows would open to a view of the river that meandered through the village. In the backyard, he pictured a family gathering around the barbecue, as they might on a summer’s evening in Southern California, where Patrao once lived. But this time, the domestic scene would take place in Goa, the sliver of a state on India’s western coast.

The site was perfect. On the adjacent property was a paddy field, which by law was off limits to construction. The river view was a bonus, for in the real estate business, river views are nearly as lucrative as Goa’s legendary ocean views, which have become virtually impossible to attain. The village itself, called Aldona, was long on Goan charm, surrounded by rolling hills with the beaches of the Arabian Sea less than an hour’s drive away. Across the road from the old house stood a small white chapel. The fishmonger did the rounds each morning. The charm factor was sweetened by local lore: Patrao told me there were tales of two ghost sightings in the house.

Patrao hadn’t bought the plot yet, but he was already picturing that this would be the first of 10, maybe 20, houses that he would build across Goa. He would use his own money and that of friends, who likewise would be banking on the appeal of Goa’s lore. One day, he imagined, a community of Indian-Americans like him might spend holidays in their Goan homes or eventually retire here. He was born in Mumbai (formerly known as Bombay), but when he spoke of homecoming, he meant Goa.

Goa, like much of India, is in the midst of a real estate frenzy, and Patrao, a man nearly 60, a veteran of the construction business in California and New York, is nothing if not an entrepreneur. His ambitions were fueled as much by his canny business sense as by Goa’s enticements. The houses he imagined building would sell for at least $180,000, he reckoned, or more than twice the investment in the land and construction costs. Real estate, he figured, was the way to go in India. “One billion people. Limited land supply. It’s a no-brainer,” he concluded.

With that plan in mind, Patrao and his girlfriend, Sundiv Kaur, known as Sunny, were devoting their days and nights to the quest for land. They drove from village to village, eyeing ruins and plots, inspecting views, making drawings and, in the evenings, plotting their findings on a flowchart to see how well the math worked.

Theirs was also a personal venture. Goa is where they both came to recover from their old lives. Both had left their previous marriages — she in Singapore, he in the United States. They met in Goa, became friends, fell in love, rented an apartment together and decided to put down new roots. One day, they said, they would build themselves a house in Goa. “This is a second-chance place, baby,” was Patrao’s verdict.

As Patrao drove through Aldona on the warm December afternoon, Kaur sat next to him, quietly smiling. The next morning, they planned to put down money on their dream ruin.

In popular culture, Goa has long embodied qualities hard to find in India — it is quaint, laid-back, libertine — and its real estate boom may be more about mythology than location. It is the kind of place, you repeatedly hear, where a woman can go out of the house in shorts, or where people are reasonably tolerant of a situation like Patrao’s living with Kaur, who, at 34, is much younger, and not even his wife. An acquaintance of mine in Delhi who owns a house in Goa put it bluntly: If you want to get out of India, come to Goa.

Goa has long been a crossroads of East and West. It was conquered by the Portuguese in the early 16th century, just after Vasco da Gama reached India (he landed a bit farther south) and effectively planted the flag for European rule in India. Chilies came to India through Goa, after the Portuguese ferried them from the Americas, and forever changed Indian food. The echoes of Portuguese rule are still felt in the houses with their frescoed walls and wraparound porches.

In a 1964 essay called “Goa the Unique,” Graham Greene wrote, “Outside Goa one is aware all the time of the interminable repetition of the ramshackle, the enormous pressure of poverty, flowing, branching, extending like flood water.” In Goa, he recalled attending a party where he was offered a Benzedrine tablet at 4 a.m.

Sudhir Kakar, a psychoanalyst and novelist, says that in the Indian mind Goa has long signified freedom, particularly of the sexual kind. It is an association advanced by Hindi movies of another era, he said, in which Goan women were often portrayed as sexually available and Goan men as drunks. “Goa is associated with free sensuality,” he said by way of explaining its real estate lure. “That I think is a very big attraction — and the keeping up with the Joneses. It’s a party place, a place to let go of your inhibitions.” Kakar himself let go of his two homes — renting out one in “aggressive” Delhi, in his words, the other in “cold” Berlin — and moved to Goa four years ago. He and his wife, Katharina, set about restoring an old Portuguese-era house.

The makeover of Goa into an upscale vacation spot — the Hamptons, if you will, for the upwardly mobile Indian — began in the late 1960s, when hippies came to conquer Goa’s beaches. Over time, it became a mandatory stop on the Israeli post-military-service circuit. A string of five-star resorts opened in the 1990s. Onetime visitors, both Indian and foreign, began restoring old houses. Then, over the past few years, as private airlines added new flights to Goa, affluent urban professionals from Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and elsewhere began coming in droves. The economy was soaring. People suddenly had money to invest. They started buying Goan real estate.

The Goa phenomenon has been fueled by India’s economic rise. There is more money swirling around than ever before, including more foreign investment for real estate. Drive along any major highway in India and you are likely to see earth being moved day and night, laborers carrying cement on their heads, steel pilings pointing up to the sky like so many skinny fingers of ambition. Once unremarkable small towns now see a rush of high-rise apartment blocks under construction. Erstwhile fields of wheat and mustard are fenced off, with giant billboards announcing the arrival of new townships.

There is a genuine demand for some types of development: office buildings are absorbed in cities like Bangalore as quickly as they are built. But there’s also a breathless quality to some of the forecasts. One report from Deutsche Bank of Germany predicted in January that 600 malls would be under way across India in the next three years. In recent months, in an apparent effort to temper soaring real estate prices, Indian banks have gradually raised interest rates on home loans.

In Goa, the boom started, naturally, with tycoons. Eight years ago, Vijay Mallya, who owns Kingfisher Beer, hired Dean D’Cruz, one of Goa’s best-known architects, to design what Mallya dubbed the Kingfisher Villa, spilling down to the Arabian Sea. “When people walk into my house, I want them to go weak in the knees,” is how D’Cruz recalled his instructions.

Somewhat less wealthy seekers followed, but their real estate fantasies burned just as hot. Gated communities with clubhouses and pools began to go up. Hillsides were carved out for condominiums. Cashew groves were cut for a road. Recently, some of the country’s biggest developers have put forward plans for apartments, golf courses, hotels, shopping malls and a software park.

Prices have swiftly climbed into the stratosphere. In April of last year, DLF Universal, one of India’s largest builders, bought a patch of land near the capital, Panaji, for more than $1,100 a square yard. Just two years ago, the state government, which owned the land, could not dispose of the property for a sixth of that price. DLF plans to build a mall and office complex on the site.

This construction has not been greeted with universal joy. Last fall, after the Goan state government approved a five-year regional plan that opened new swaths of land to development, some of it hillsides with coveted views of river and sea, residents of laid-back Goa were roused to action. Builders welcomed the plan as relief from what they deplored as overly stringent restrictions on construction, including a ban on buildings taller than the nearest coconut palm. But critics in Goa, who included D’Cruz, saw it as an open invitation to destruction. Where would all the garbage go? Where was the clean drinking water for all the newcomers when the village wells were running dry or salty? Goa’s ecology would be destroyed, the critics cried, its magic would be gone.

Protests were organized, and a campaign, called Save Goa, was established. One protest in December drew thousands of people to Panaji. Amateur photographers fanned across the state snapping pictures of supposedly illegal construction. The Catholic Church put its weight behind the campaign. Save Goa took state officials to court. “Paradise Lost,” its Web site warned.

By mid-January, the campaign could claim a substantial victory. The government of Goa, ruled by the Congress Party, voted to scrap the regional plan and draft a new one. Menino Peres, the director of the department of information and publicity, said it was because of the “sentiment of large numbers of people in Goa, and on environment and congestion considerations.”

Roy Patrao watched the controversy closely, and not without self-interest. He regarded the debate as unnecessarily polarized. In the anti-development lobby he saw tendencies of Nimby-ism. But during the week of the big protest in Panaji, he sent me an e-mail message saying he was glad he had refrained from big projects and what he called “controversial lands.”

“I had a powerful feeling that something smelled here — and that I did not want to be part of the stench,” he wrote. “Having said that, I also believe that many of the luminaries of Goa feel slighted because {lsquo}outsiders’ want to develop mega-projects in Goa. They want Goa to remain as it always was. I feel they would like to be the ones in charge.”

Spread across 140 acres along a wooded ridge on the edge of the water some 11 miles from Aldona, Aldeia de Goa, a lavish gated community, bears little resemblance to the rest of India. Irvine, Calif., might be a closer cousin. There are no potholes. There are street lamps and around-the-clock water from the tap. Sewage is treated and not left to fester in a septic tank. Terraced lawns lead down to a clubhouse under construction, along with a gym, tennis courts and a swimming pool. A five-star hotel will be built on the beach. Where the ridge bends, a section has been cleared for the construction of another cluster of bungalows and condominiums. The views face west onto the widening mouth of the Zuari River as it pours into the Arabian Sea.

The rest of the hill tells you what Aldeia de Goa once was — shrubs and trees formerly zoned as orchard land where no development was allowed. The developers argued for a rezoning many years ago and managed to relax Goa’s strict coastal regulations for the patch of beach where they are putting up the hotel. They convinced local authorities that since the property abuts the mouth of the Zuari, the 200-meter buffer that applies to hotel construction on the seacoast should not apply; they have been allowed to build closer to the water.

Aldeia is the postcard for a new Indian aspiration — the country house, which had been the province of Indian blue-blood families, and even for them it meant a cottage in the hills, bought from the departing British. In Aldeia, completed houses can go for as much as $700,000. Prices of bungalow plots have more than doubled in two years. All told, about half of the roughly 250 properties in Aldeia have been bought by people from Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore. The rest are Indians who live abroad. “Invest in the lifestyle you deserve,” the cover of the sales brochure declares.

The owners at Aldeia also include local officials who at one point or another have smoothed the way for building permits and rezoning. Among them is Goa’s most famous politician, Atanasio Monserrate, who until recently served as the minister for town and country planning and was a chief architect of the repealed regional plan. One of his most controversial acts of rezoning was to allow for a road to be built through paddy fields in order to connect two of his houses. At Aldeia, he has a corner plot with a prime view of the water. Monserrate declined several requests for an interview, but in December, when a private Indian television news station, NDTV, asked him about charges of graft, Monserrate said flatly that such accusations were impossible to prove. He resigned in January, saying that he had been unfairly blamed for the new regional plan.

One afternoon a few months ago, a few miles north of the capital, Dean D’Cruz drove across a narrow bridge and pointed to mangroves that had recently gone up for sale. We were headed to check on a hotel in Calangute that D’Cruz had designed, and along Aguada Bay he showed me a gentle slope that leads down to the water. It had been shaved off, and a new house was under construction; D’Cruz suspected it was a violation of the coastal regulations.

As we continued our drive north to Morjim, where there has been a flurry of real estate deals, we saw a bulldozer burrowing a road through a wooded hill. These activities distress many Goans. Kalu Ganesh Shetgaonkar, the 75-year-old patriarch of an extended family of 60 in Morjim, said he regularly wards off buyers and brokers who come to inquire about his property on the hill. There’s nothing up there, not even water, Shetgaonkar said — just cashew trees. “It’s our ancestors’ land,” his son, Ganesh Kalu, injected. “Why should we sell it? We didn’t buy it.”

As attached as many Goans are to their ancestral lands, the money can’t always be so easily declined. Saba Bhiva Shetgaonkar, another Morjim resident, said he was compelled to sell 1,200 square yards of his cashew hills, so poor and indebted had the family become. The sale paid for the weddings of some of his eight daughters. Shetgaonkar said he would have to dispose of another parcel soon, for the weddings of his two youngest daughters. His only consolation was that prices had nearly quadrupled since he last sold.

As an architect and a Goa native who grew up in Mumbai, D’Cruz has had a front-row seat to the transformation of Goa. A few years ago, he designed a house for a friend from Mumbai, who in turn sold it for a small fortune and asked D’Cruz to design a dozen more. D’Cruz has since built his share of hotels and private houses, even some small apartments. He welcomed the settlers who came to rescue the crumbling Portuguese-era houses.

“It’s nice to see people buy in villages, because the old houses are crumbling,” D’Cruz said. “A fair number of people restore them nicely. But they don’t participate in the community. It helps architecturally. It doesn’t necessarily help the community.”

Lately he has also reluctantly come to see tourism as better fuel for Goa’s economy than the rush to build private houses. At least, he says, tourism creates a few more jobs. What scares him, he says, is the specter of sprawl on these hills. He sent a text message to my cellphone on the day of a vital court hearing on the regional plan. “Pray for us,” he said.

Roy Patrao and Sunny Kaur were keenly aware of the roiled waters they were entering as they searched for perfect plots on which to build. They would build small. They would win over the neighbors.

On the December afternoon I spent with them, having given up finding anything close to the coast, they were in a village not far from Aldona, inspecting an overgrown plot of land that appeared to have been used as a public toilet.

“Roy, you should come see this,” Kaur called out from the bushes. Through the brush, you could make out a winding river, snaking through paddy fields. The village was still undiscovered, in real estate terms, and so the plot was still reasonably priced — about $50 a square yard. A dilapidated house that stood next door, Patrao guessed, would go on the market as soon as construction started on this plot. “It’s gentrification,” he said. “Remember TriBeCa?”

They drove down to the river. There was a white cross, decorated with a garland of marigold and a daub of yogurt, an emblem of the entangled Christian and Hindu practice common in Goa.

As they were learning, Goan real estate was also entangled in its own particular ways. It is not easy to confirm which lands are actually zoned for construction, nor to get a clean title deed, nor even to follow building codes. A local builder told Patrao that if he built by the rules, government inspectors would get mad. “They make their money from {lsquo}mistakes,’ ” he told me.

That afternoon, they drove on to Aldona, to show me the old house behind the gate. “The ruin I’ve got my eye on,” Kaur said, eyes twinkling.

They would reorient the house, turning an overgrown front garden into the backyard. They would keep the portico on the side. The slatted seashell windows, they weren’t sure about. They could easily double their investment, they said, even with the bribes they assumed they would need to pay to local officials for building permits. They had already increased their initial bid on the plot. They expected the owner’s blessings the next day.

But then, the reality of Goan real estate hit them. First, their broker told them the owner had chosen another buyer. Then the buyer backed out, because, as Patrao explained, two of the owner’s sisters refused to relinquish their claim on the family property. Under Goan law, which dates back to Portuguese times, the sisters could lay claim at any point in their lifetimes, bungling any future owner’s plans. Six weeks later, the place was still on the market. The agent said the asking price had nearly doubled. The family, he reckoned, would eventually sell.

Somini Sengupta is chief of The New York Times’s South Asia bureau.

WHEN Morgan Lyons and Martha Harris refer to themselves as “city people,” which they frequently do, they aren’t speaking abstractly about L.A. They’re talking specifically of its urban core, the downtown district where they’ve lived since 1988, when they left their Pasadena home for a condo at 9th and Flower streets.

They were urban adventurers, believers in downtown even then, when the area was still pretty gritty. But the couple envisioned a soon-to-come hub that would rival Paris or New York: a place where shimmering clusters of corporate towers would be matched by equal numbers of elegant high-rise homes anchored by upscale boutiques, sidewalk cafes, locals pushing prams and walking dogs.

It didn’t happen quite that way. Or that soon.

The lull didn’t shake their faith. They were already hooked on a freeway-free life filled with nearby cultural and gastronomic delights, still a secret to most of stolidly suburban L.A.

When Harris, 59, and Lyons, 64, heard of the South Park community planned around 11th Street and Grand Avenue — five residential towers with parks, restaurants, shops and pedestrian paths — they’d lived in their old place 18 years and were ready to take another leap. But before signing the purchase agreement for a top-floor penthouse in the first of those new buildings, they consulted with Team HC, interior designer Hannah Lee and her husband, architect Clarence Chiang Jr.

Harris and Lyons wanted to explore design ideas for the space that would be so unlike any they had ever owned. All exterior walls would be floor-to-ceiling glass, leaving little wall area for traditional furniture placement.

The couple, married 28 years, moved into their new digs seven months ago with their two cats. Now it’s just a three-block walk to Lyons’ office (he’s president of Lodestar Management/Research Inc.), and a two-mile drive to Harris’ work as senior vice president of university relations at USC.

Their new 3,100-square-foot home has two master bedroom suites, four baths, bamboo floors, 11-foot-high ceilings, and all those walls of glass. The public space is one huge, undivided area that includes living room, dining room and kitchen.

Harris and Lyons kept everything personal they loved, but gave away the furniture, leaving Lee and Chiang to start from scratch. Both couples agreed that the downtown skyline would be the star of the décor; furniture would be a supporting player.

The design team came up with a color scheme of beiges and browns with occasional spikes of color for wood and upholstered pieces designed with quiet, contemporary flair.

The main seating area, in front of the fireplace, includes a massive beige L-shaped sectional, a burgundy chaise and a beige, upholstered side chair. All sit on a custom-designed area rug of beige with burgundy detail.

“We kept it simple, so as not to compete with the dynamic setting,” Lee says. The dining table, side tables and a carved screen are espresso-tinted oak, all designed and manufactured in China by Lee and Chiang, who divide their time between Hong Kong and L.A., where they first hit the spotlight when they designed interiors for the renovated Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel.

To bring the kitchen into sync with the rest of the open space, Lee stained the original blond wood cabinets espresso brown, and built what she calls an “appliance garage.” It has aluminum roll-up doors that handsomely convert what had been a wet bar into a port for a coffee maker, toaster and other appliances, as well as shelves for china.

The master bedroom suites had walls but no doors. Harris and Lyons wanted a bit more privacy for themselves and potential guests. So Lee and Chiang designed and built what they call sliding barn doors: massive ash wood panels with a distressed finish and a black, galvanized-steel edge. Their rustic simplicity blends perfectly with the other textures — concrete, wood, glass, steel — throughout the apartment.

Even the cats have a new kind of privacy. A cat door in the unit’s large laundry room leads the felines into a small enclosed bathroom of their own, a kind of closet with louvered door built into, but completely hidden from, one of the humans’ bathrooms.

BOTH owners say one of the biggest differences between the old condo and the new is their expanded city (and sky) views.

“It’s remarkable, and it changes by the hour. We can see South Park and the downtown skyline continue to build out. We can see the mountains, people walking their dogs, or going to and from Staples. We love downtown so much. And now we have this huge view of it all, and can see almost everything being built,” Harris says.

She has long been a fan of local artists. The couple’s walls are filled with works that depict L.A., including photos by Julius Shulman, purchased from the photographer in the 1980s. Panoramic photo views of the city are by Pete Jackson, and a pastel by Nancy Popenoe shows an L.A. skyline with the bright red “Jesus Saves” sign, which Lyons and Harris can actually see in the distance from their windows.

Glass doors open onto the broad balcony that wraps around the entire apartment and provides a kind of observation post from which to scan the ever-expanding cityscape. Indeed, the sky is dotted at that very moment with huge crayon-colored cranes at construction sites near and far, one of them right outside their bedroom window. “That’s L.A. Live over there,” Harris says, pointing across the street to where a $2-billion complex of apartments, restaurants, theaters and 1,100 hotel rooms is rising adjacent to Staples Center. “And more condos going up there and there,” she says pointing east and north. “The ambience is so much livelier and vibrant now than even just two years ago…. The energy is amazing.”

Yes, but what about the apartment itself? Lyons answers with a chuckle: “We love it, of course. But we still spend most of our time in that area,” he says, pointing to the only room in the house with no windows: an entry foyer, which they’ve lined with bookcases and turned into a TV room and den.

Although some New Orleanians still express skepticism that it will happen, especially in the wake of Hurricane Katrina’s body blow to the city’s economy, one of the lead developers of the proposed 70-story Trump International Hotel & Tower on Poydras Street promised last week that the project is going to become reality.

With New Orleans City Planning Commission approval in hand, Florida developer Cliff Mowe said, “we don’t see anything at this point” that could derail the construction of what would be Louisiana’s tallest building.

The City Council still needs to approve the plans, but that is considered almost certain. With no opposition to the project having surfaced, Mowe said, council approval “should be pretty smooth.”

Mowe said he hopes to break ground this summer, with construction expected to take 28 months, putting completion in late 2009. “We’re very excited about moving forward,” he said.

The 1.6-million-square-foot tower, estimated to cost about $400 million, would fill most of the largely vacant block bounded by Poydras, Camp, Natchez and Magazine streets. It would be 716 feet high, plus a 126-foot spire, and would contain 734 luxury condominium and hotel units and a 715-space garage.

Mowe said the developers want to shift “in the very near future” from taking reservations for the building’s condos to signing sales contracts for them.

Traffic impact studied

The Planning Commission approved plans for the tower 6-0 last week, after getting the results of a traffic impact analysis from the developers. The commission had delayed voting on the project last month until the traffic study could be reviewed.

City planners said the staff of the Department of Public Works “agreed that the additional traffic generated by the proposed structure would not likely decrease the level of service on the surrounding streets below what is acceptable to the city.”

New York real estate magnate Donald Trump announced on Aug. 25, 2005, that he would join a team of Florida developers in building a 70-story tower in New Orleans. Hurricane Katrina hit four days later, but within two weeks Donald Trump Jr. said the developers would go ahead with the project.

Although financing has not been nailed down, “we will have no issues with financing,” Mowe said last month. “There are several large lenders that want to do the deal,” in part because of Trump’s involvement, he said. That remains the case, he said last week.

No one spoke against the proposed tower at the Planning Commission’s public hearing, and the planning staff said it thought the structure would “become a landmark for the city.”

Edward Suffern, an attorney for the developers, said the Poydras site is ideal for the building that would replace One Shell Square as the city’s tallest structure because the Poydras corridor is widely recognized as “the place to concentrate high-intensity developments.”

No 13th floor

Although Trump Tower would have almost 20 stories more than any other office or hotel building in the city, it would be only about 20 feet taller than the 51-floor One Shell Square, which is 697 feet tall. The 52-story Place St. Charles rises about 650 feet.

The new building’s first two floors would contain restaurants, retail space and a public arcade cutting through the building from Poydras to Natchez. Floors 3 through 15 would be used for parking. Vehicles would enter the garage from Camp and exit onto Magazine.

Because is planned with no 13th floor, the building would contain 69 floors but would be numbered through 70.

Floors 18 through 32 would be a condo hotel, or “condotel,” offering 435 units — 29 to a floor — that would be sold as condos but could, when the owners agree, be rented out on a nightly basis like hotel rooms. Owners of the condotel units would get a percentage of the room revenue. The hotel’s lobby would be on the 17th floor.

Above the condotel would be 299 conventional condos. Floors 39 through 56 would have two-bedroom units, with larger units on floors 58 and above. Pools, lounges and other amenities would be offered on floors 38 and 57.

Mowe said most of the condos are being offered for $575 to $675 a square foot, with many units selling for $390,000 to $500,000. Penthouse units on the top-most floors are going for $700 to $725 a square foot. Those units would be reached by private elevators that would bypass the hotel and smaller condo floors.

Zoning waivers needed

Although there is no overall height limit at the site, construction of the tower would require several waivers to city zoning laws. One would give the developers a waiver of the maximum permitted floor-area ratio, a measure of a building’s total mass, from the allowed 14 to 17.2.

Another would let them build the portions of the building touching Camp and Magazine streets to a height of 85 feet, 35 feet higher than normally allowed.

The Planning Commission’s staff recommended approval of the waivers, saying the project “will both complement and enhance the high-intensity urban environment in which it is proposed and will become a landmark for the city.”

The tower site is in the Picayune Place local historic district, and there are two three-story historic buildings in the block, both on Natchez Street. One would be incorporated into the project and the other would be maintained as it is.

One of 15 provisos the Planning Commission attached to its approval would require the developers to get Historic District Landmarks Commission approval “for all exterior design components.”

Suffern said the Landmarks Commission’s staff is “comfortable” with the height and mass of the proposed tower but has requested some changes in the design of the lower floors.

Plans for a $220 million, 1,200-room hotel on the same Poydras Street site won Planning Commission approval in 2000, but developer Larry Sisung abandoned the project in early 2001.

Although some other developers and business leaders warned last year that the layoff of most Planning Commission staff members after Katrina was delaying the commission’s review of Trump Tower and other major projects so severely that they might die, Mowe said he and his colleagues never complained about delays at the commission. “We knew they were short-handed,” he said.

Despite sharp increases in construction costs after Katrina, Mowe said, “we are trying to make this a reasonably priced project,” although the $120 million price tag announced in 2005 has more than tripled. He said a $400 million estimate “is in the ballpark.”

“We still feel that for the clientele we’re trying to sell to, it will be very affordable, and certainly affordable compared to other Trump projects” in cities such as Chicago, New York, Las Vegas and Miami, he said. Mowe was not involved in building those towers.

. . . . . . .

Bruce Eggler can be reached at beggler@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3320.

Tina Caputo, Special to The Chronicle

Friday, February 16, 2007

Sixth-generation vintner Jeff Bundschu doesn’t remember a time the town of Sonoma wasn’t a tourist attraction. Raised on his family’s Gundlach Bundschu winery estate in Sonoma, 38-year-old Bundschu has spent his whole life observing an ever-changing stream of visitors to his hometown.

“Early on, Sonoma drew people with its culture and history — its quaint and historic square, Jack London’s home,” Bundschu says. “Foodwise, our two cheesemakers and the French bakery were the extent of the culinary scene. Restaurants were all geared toward locals, and the winery tasting rooms were fringe benefits.”

As the public’s interest shifted toward wine in the ’80s and ’90s, wineries became Sonoma County’s main attraction. But even then, Bundschu says, visitors were content to hop indiscriminately from one tasting room to the next.

A decade later, it’s a different scene. Sonoma County towns like Healdsburg and Sonoma are gradually shifting from down-home to upmarket, and visitors are seeking out increasingly high-end wineries, restaurants and hotels with full-service spas.

But as Sonoma County continues its upscale trajectory, residents and vintners fear it’s in danger of losing its identity. Is Sonoma County, with its rural charm and eccentric personalities, destined to become the new Napa?

Despite criticism about tax breaks and land giveaways, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors and the Los Angeles City Council gave final approvals Tuesday to a sprawling mini-city atop Bunker Hill that will alter L.A.’s skyline and set a course for future development in downtown.

Elected officials and other backers of the Grand Avenue project described the vote as a turning point for Los Angeles, whose civic leaders have tried for decades without success to establish a central cultural hub downtown that would draw people from throughout the region.

The $2.05-billion Grand Avenue project would be the largest single development in downtown history, and would be built almost entirely on public land that would be leased for 99 years to mega-developer the Related Cos. It has few if any equals in the region, in part because of the complexity and scope of the private-public partnership.

The project also has emerged as Los Angeles’ most ambitious effort to create dense, high-rise residential developments next to rail lines, offices, cultural attractions and shopping.

Though some consider the project a model for “smart growth” aimed at encouraging people to walk and use mass transit rather than drive, others see it as a tax giveaway that is not in the interests of local government. Critics complain that Related is essentially getting a double subsidy: The city and county are leasing the developer public land for a profit-making business at the same time that the city is granting breaks on future hotel and parking taxes.

They also question whether the project would be the regional magnet its backers hope.

Both the council and board voted Tuesday, in part to demonstrate their lock-step support for the project. The City Council approved the deal 13 to 0, with Councilman Ed Reyes absent. The supervisors approved the project 4 to 1, with Mike Antonovich voting against it.

By approving the deal, the governmental bodies agreed to transfer the land for the first phase of the project — a county-owned parcel — to the Grand Avenue Authority, a joint city-county agency that will in turn lease it to Related. (Later phases include land owned by the city’s redevelopment agency.)

The votes green-light all three phases of Grand Avenue, which calls for at least five new high-rise buildings and 3.6 million square feet of development.

The first phase would include two translucent glass residential towers to be designed by Frank Gehry, one 49 stories and the other 24.

One tower would include a five-star Mandarin Oriental hotel. Two hundred of the 1,000 housing units included in the first phase would be reserved for low-income residents.

The municipal bodies also approved the development of a 16-acre park between the Music Center and City Hall as part of the project’s first phase — one of the civic benefits that backers said was vital to the project’s success.

The development marks the furthest-reaching effort by local leaders to turn downtown into a 24-hour district on par with areas of New York, Chicago, London and Paris. Downtown has long retained a reputation as a sleepy district that virtually shuts down at sunset, though a recent boom in lofts and other high-end residential development is slowly changing that.

The project will rise in an area that since the early 1960s has been at the center of plans for downtown’s revival. Through the 1950s, Bunker Hill was a funky — even seedy — collection of Victorian apartment buildings and boardinghouses that inspired some Los Angeles writers. The city leveled the neighborhood to make way for an extension of the high-rise district.

Backers believe that Grand Avenue can succeed where other downtown revitalizations have failed. They said that it would rise amid such cultural landmarks as Walt Disney Concert Hall, the other venues of the Music Center and the Museum of Contemporary Art at a time when downtown is suddenly a hot destination for the first time in decades.

But even some supporters said it remained to be seen whether such a massive undertaking could change the way people think about the city center.

“Done right, redevelopment is a tool for good. Done wrong, it’s horrible,” county Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky said. “I really believe, let me tell you, there have been more pairs of eyes looking over this project than any I can ever remember.”

Though the project has attracted mostly praise at recent public meetings, the tax breaks and other public support have their detractors.

“The desire for an iconic skyline, that’s just for aesthetics,” said Antonovich, a longtime opponent of the project. “That should be borne by a developer and not the taxpayers who reside in the entire county.”

Christopher Sutton, an attorney for the Westin Bonaventure Hotel, which has opposed the tax breaks for the Mandarin Oriental, told the City Council and the Board of Supervisors that his client was prepared to take legal action to block the project if necessary. He called the project a “direct threat” to the Bonaventure.

The hotel issued a similar ultimatum when the convention center at L.A. Live, another mega-project being built at the south end of downtown, received a larger tax rebate in 2005. But that project has moved forward and will open its first phase this year.

Related Cos. said the Grand Avenue project was not feasible without the subsidies. The developer has spent months negotiating behind the scenes for the tax breaks, an increasingly common incentive used by cities to attract catalytic projects.

Early estimates put the tax rebates for Grand Avenue at $40 million over 20 years. But a recent report from the city’s legislative analyst estimated that the rebates could cost $66 million. The largest tax break would be in the 14% city hotel tax, a maximum of $60.5 million over 20 years, the report said.

From the beginning, the Grand Avenue project has been marked by a nontraditional public-private marriage. Besides the proposed tax breaks, government agencies are providing the land, investing in street improvements and subsidizing affordable housing in the project.

Related and its fiscal partners, meanwhile, are taking much of the financial risk — particularly tenuous in a downtown real estate market that has shown signs of softening. They also are subject to a number of requirements, including the condition that all construction and permanent jobs in the development meet the city’s “prevailing” or “living” wage requirements.

In addition, the agreement calls for developers to give at least 30% of jobs to workers living within five miles of the site. That clause was criticized by Antonovich, who described the city deal as unfair to workers who live elsewhere in the county.

“It’s Jim Crow of the 21st century,” Antonovich said. “We’re denying them their constitutional rights to work in their own county?”

Despite those criticisms, several civic leaders said it was rare for the city and county to cooperate so fully as they have to move the Grand Avenue project forward.

Councilwoman Jan Perry, who serves on the joint powers authority board, called the level of cooperation unprecedented.

Though the city, county and developer each would bear a portion of the project’s financial risk, each also would profit if the development was a success.

The city and county could reap substantial tax revenue from the project, far more than they receive now from the properties, which are either vacant or parking lots.

Related has written a $50-million check to the civic agencies, which represents the prepaid ground lease on the first phase and a portion of the second phase of the project.

Related has said that construction of the first phase is expected to start in October and be completed in June 2011.

jack.leonard@latimes.com