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Adaptive Reuse
Mercantile ArcadeBuilding, Hollywood Broadway Department Store, theEastern Columbia Building, Roosevelt Building and 1010 Wilshire.
By Keeley Webster
California Real Estate Journal
Posted 8/2006
The Challenges
Even with the sped-up entitlements making adaptive reuse easier, these projects come with their own set of challenges.
Forest City has taken over three projects that other developers ended up selling out of rather than finishing.
Mercury, formerly owned by Upside Investments, was one of these. Others included 1100 Wilshire and its Metro 417 project.
With plans to build apartments, Upside had framed several floors of the building before market conditions stopped the progress.
"The market changed," Simril said of Upside's decision to sell. "Construction costs were going up, so it had to be condominiums."
Forest City purchased Upside's construction materials as part of the transaction but wasn't able to use them or finish the previous owner's design.
"It's like taking someone's essay when it's halfway written," Simril said. "The prose may be different."
For example, Upside had purchased armoires for the units, but Forest City decided that the units would be more functional with closets and that they would provide more storage space for the buyers.
"We had to do a lot of tweaking and didn't end up keeping as much as we thought," Simril said. "ForestCity has a deliberate style. They needed to be higher-end units as condominiums. It made more sense from a financial standpoint to start from scratch."
The larger challenge than that of taking over a project that had begun construction was in converting office space to residential.
The floor plates in an office building are much larger than that of a residential building. This created an issue in terms of how to subdivide the space while providing enough natural light for residents.
In the corner units, this wasn't much of a problem, but for the middle units it was a challenge.
"If the windows are along the front, how do you get light into the back of the units?" Simril said.
The solution: Create units with a narrow and long living room and a kitchen on a platform. The kitchen would borrow light from the living room. And the platform creates a sense of space.
A large part of adaptive reuse has to do with being adaptable. And the city of Los Angeles is making that easier, Simril said.
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