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February 21, 2008
Little Tokyo Lofts Get Mental, Residents Say No Thanks
Anyone living downtown in an old converted warehouse is familiar with the specific brand of glee the comes with learning that the big empty retail space on the groundfloor of your building or across the street from your front door has finally been filled. In a downtown that is still growing and adding services for the ever-expanding resident population, any new service is met with excitement. As in: Will it be a Trader Joe's?
Imagine, then, the reaction of Little Tokyo Lofts residents when they learned what was going into their ground floor retail space: a mental health service organization. Um, yeah.
As the LA Times reports, residents of the lofts aren't pleased:
"For residents of Little Tokyo Lofts, the retail space in their building had held a particular promise. It represented, just as their own units did, another way that gentrification was taking hold in their corner of the city and that the decades-old concentration of social services in the blocks around their building was coming to an end."We are absolutely aware of the area where we moved into," said resident Jack Harding, who moved to the building from Mount Washington 13 months ago. "But that does not mean that we don't have expectations for its improvement."
It's a tricky situation for all. The lofts border Skid Row. Some downtown residents agree that while there are many social services downtown, there could always be more. Yet other downtown dwellers - and let's face it - homeowners all over Los Angeles, have no desire to get that up close and personal with LA's troubled homeless situation.
There are no easy answers to this growing problem. As the owner of the Little Tokyo Lofts' retail space, Steve Lee, puts it, residents "have chosen a very, very challenging place to live. Hopefully, it will get better before it gets worse."
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The problem is that landlords are trying to get as much money as they can out of the spaces before the neighborhood can support those prices. Thus Downtown is still littered with empty storefronts just waiting for that Starbucks, Pinkberry or Robeks Juice to say YES to their building.
And that building doesn't just border Skid Row -- it's IN Skid Row, no matter how hard the sales team tries to bring Little Tokyo's border south.
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Alossix - I hear you. I'm at that building weekly and while it is "technically" on the "border" of Skid Row, the vibe is definitely skid row central. BUT, while there are several homeless camped out across the street and down the alleys, it is still better than a block or two up in either direction (other than in the direction of Little Tokyo itself, which, let's be honest, the Little Tokyo lofts are not even in Little Tokyo)where there are full-on tent encampments.
I agree with you on the landlord/rent thing as well - it's early days to be expecting that big businesses will take the risk to pay high rents with little foot traffic and few residents. Especially over there, where Little Tokyo Lofts is one of the only residences.