First in a series
[img]2014|right|Steve Rose||no_popup[/img]CEO of the Culver City Chamber of Commerce for the past 28 years, Steve Rose was in the audience for yesterday afternoon’s sold-out Future of Culver City panel discussion for one central reason.
“I am hoping to learn what the commercial real estate market thinks about our city and the development we have been doing for the last 15 years,” he said.
Over the pre-meeting din in the open-ceiling Hayden Tract headquarters of hosting PMI Properties, Mr. Rose, like most guests, was beaming with optimism.
At the event sponsored by the website bisnow.com, he was asked what signals he had been detecting, the face of the Chamber was on his game. “Signals are a warning,” Mr. Rose said. “Instead, what I have been getting are flashing neon lights that the commercial real estate market is ablaze.”
What triggered it?
“A combination of far-sighted property owners who have invested in this town, the city, which has allowed the old warehouse space of the Hayden Tract to turn into creative office space. This attitude is just going to spread throughout our city and bring in a workforce of people who will be amazing.”
Sudden? Hardly
Tracing the trajectory of the cloudburst of commercial success, Mr. Rose said that when visitors and residents alike today look at blossoming Downtown and say “Wow, I say to them: Yeah, it has been an overnight success that took 10 years. Like a movie star who explodes after being a journeyman for many years.”
The Chamber leader explained how the Hayden Tract and surrounding neighborhoods began prospering “the last 10 or 12 years” after a number of slow motion seasons.
“Creative developers have come in, realizing what the future of the employment market is. They have taken old warehouse and manufacturing buildings and turned them into imaginative office work spaces ideal for the 21st century workforce.”
The momentum of development was so strong that it handily withstood the mid-first decade recession, Mr. Rose said. Returning to what now seems to some like prehistoric times, he said that “Like Culver City, it started to prosper in the recession of the early ‘90s because of (the arrival of) Sony Studios.
“Look at all of the industrial outposts south of LAX when the defense industry went down. Sony came here in 1991 – great timing – and with entertainment and computerization, and it just began booming.”
(To be continued)
