MAILANDER’S LA-Billionaire developer Rick Caruso now has a column on LinkedIn called "Influencers." He is thinking about what the shopping mall has been and what we know as the shopping mall will be in twenty years. He's giving presentations in Pacific Palisades on what he intends to do to scramble the whole shopping climate there. He's soliciting your input. He's impressing people who impress people--John Kaliski, for instance. He is not only a man on the move, he is a civic force in command of a legion of movers.
"Need kid spaces. 1,000 kids under 5 in PP. Parking is out of control; too many tickets. Consider closing street in evenings only. RC gets it," Kaliski, the former principal architect of LA's CRA when the job title was a meaningful one, tweeted of Caruso's patter on the Palisades.
Meanwhile, the intellectually shriveling office of Mayor Eric Garcetti keeps telling their dwindling Facebook faithful about this tote bag competition the Mayor's office is sponsoring.
The totes, all prospective official bags of Eric Garcetti's official mayor's office, are Garcetti's biggest agenda, at least by his Facebook account. With this plastic bag ban, the city badly needs totes, and someone in the Mayor's office needs to make a big show of the City's need of them.
Earlier in his mayoralty, Garcetti's staff kept posting about handing out teddy bears.
These facts alone should give everyone in Los Angeles pause: we are now living in a city in which a conservative developer, whose name is on the Reagan Library's most sacred donor wall, is intellectually outflanking a purportedly progressive, purportedly well-educated mayor in nearly every way.
Caruso's columns are crisp, his tweets are sharp, his presentations authoritative. The billionaire will sit down for an unguarded hour with the nearly unheard of Palisadian-Post and explain what he's going to do in their baliwick. He lets you know, in a crowd or a newspaper or on the Internet, that LA will be shaped by his ideas.
“My hope is to control the whole street. We have already talked to the other owners,” Caruso revealed of his Palisades project on Swarthmore, where his company Caruso Affiliated owns a tidy 2.77 acres of would-be prime cut real estate.
LA should similarly be the mayor's to shape too. But Eric Garcetti, conversely to Caruso, does not express a firebrand's desire to control any whole street and too bad if you're in the way. Instead, he tiptoes about town--this town, and occasionally the one on the Potomac--like a man looking for approval and little else. He is a lost toy poodle gnawing at teddy bears and tote bags rather than a golden retriever stalking business and poverty and billionaires.
In Washington, Garcetti attracts bailout money, certain to evaporate in out-of-town boondoggles, rather than business money that stays in town; in LA, he is attracting crowds of people who already voted for him and few others. He is convincing almost nobody who didn't vote for him of anything at all.
And this is a city in which nearly 3.8 million of four million people did not vote for Eric Garcetti. He is shoring up a puddle.
But people are voting for Caruso, like him or not. Caruso's LinkedIn column reminds us:
"Today, The Grove has five times the national mall average in sales per square foot. Some 18 million people a year visit The Grove – more than Disneyland and the Great Wall of China. Over 90 percent of visitors make a purchase, and they spend more than double per visit compared to the industry average."
Caruso seriously considered running for Mayor in 2009, and thought again about 2013. Both times, most any media who came in contact with him didn't ask him to so much as beg him to. But he twice refused the kingly crown. Even so, he's behaving not only like a developer, but so much like a Mayor that the media may still have some yearnings for a Caruso candidacy in 2017.
Not everyone wants consumer culture to be the great economic furnace of Los Angeles. But Caruso's retail LA is filling a vacuum left by its knock-kneed, money-awed City government.
There's an embarrassment of riches in this town when it comes to urbanism and architectural potential. But Eric Garcetti thumbed his nose at it on election to the City's top office. There aren't good urbanists in the Mayor's office. He appointed to the Planning Commission a woman who mostly frets not about shopping malls but about street vendors. He thinks he can Empower LA best by filling the Board of Neighborhood Commissioners with little experience in either commercial or residential issues. He has nobody on the DWP Board who intuitively think in terms of design or sustainable architecture.
"Yes, all of these new plans are a real detriment to Pacific Palisades," art and architecture historian Lori Erenberg, who attended Caruso's Palisades presentation, told me after the meeting. "First off, I have lived in the Palisades for 30 years, and a stereotypical generic watered down architectural style and way too large scale will destroy the charm, essence and integrity of this village....[T]his schlock over scale parking lot, apartments and 2 story buildings on Swarthmore and Sunset will smother and overwhelm the light, and space create a shadow over this sunny place. The streets and sidewalks cannot absorb the traffic and population that will inhabit these streets. It will be a disaster and ruin any charm left that Pacific a Palisades has to offer."
That's one informed citizen's opinion. Caruso has yet another for Swarthmore and for the pueblo at large. And the Mayor, so often AWOL on so many development issues, even while quietly greenlighting anything anywhere, is glad-handling old supporters and prepping some good tote bags for tomorrow's shoppers.
(Joseph Mailander is a writer, an LA observer and a contributor to CityWatch. He is also the author of Days Change at Night: LA's Decade of Decline, 2003-2013. Mailander blogs here.)
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 12 Issue 18
Pub: Feb 28, 2014
