The Wall Street Journal-20080123-Plots - Ploys
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Plots & Ploys
[What's Brewing in the Real Estate Market]
Disappointed Developers
Warehouses in downtown Los Angeles are here to stay.
City planners have put the kibosh on large-scale conversions of industrial land for residential projects. The decision follows a two- year study of land-use policy, which had raised expectations of big zoning changes in a resurgent area of Los Angeles. The decision to maintain the status quo keeps some 2,000 acres off-limits to housing developers.
The municipal planning department justified its decision by saying that the city's "policy is to retain industrial land for job-producing uses." The downtown industrial zones support about 40,000 jobs, and residential projects are deemed inappropriate on about 80% of the industrial land.
By endorsing an existing policy, city planners avoided public consultations and a vote by the six-member city-planning council. And some dismayed developers are skeptical of the city's idea to revisit the industrial-land issue as part of a broader new community plan, fearing it will only postpone the debate indefinitely.
"This issue has been debated for the last seven years," says Yuval Bar-Zemer, whose company has converted two factories into lofts. "And the end result is to wait another five years."
Down and Out in Aspen
City officials in Aspen, Colo., are considering a new tack for dealing with a glut of luxury stores downtown: Requiring that new commercial building projects set aside a percentage of space at affordable leasing rates.
Such a program would mirror a long-held practice by Aspen and other U.S. cities to require developers of residential projects to designate a number of their units as "affordable," or priced at a preset percentage of market rates, to house low-income workers. Aspen's council last week instructed the town's planning personnel to study options for such a program for commercial space.
Amphibian Alarm
While the mortgage market has hit home prices everywhere, real- estate prices on Hawaii's Big Island are facing a more unusual menace: noisy frogs.
The coqui frog, a small, shrieking species native to Puerto Rico, has overrun the island in the past decade, bringing a chorus of high pitched ko-KEE, ko-KEE chirps that reach 70 to 100 decibels, a noise level akin to having a lawnmower buzz by an open window.
University of Hawaii economists estimate that the coqui frog has damaged home prices by $22.5 million on the Big Island.
While the frogs aren't well-established on other islands, officials fear that could change, when the new interisland Superferry begins service between Honolulu and Hilo, on the Big Island, next year. The frogs stash as stowaways on cars, and biologists worry the ferry has insufficient frog safeguards. Real-estate damages could reach $158 million if the frogs spread to Oahu, Hawaii's most populous island, university researchers say.
