How did the looming new Lowe's Home Improvement Center complex in Mid-City turn into the Lowe's Home Wrecking Center — and is the new building at MidTown Crossing legal?
Mid-City residents in front of the gray backside of the new Lowe's, which now blocks their view of the Hollywood Hills.
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Six weeks ago, CIM Group erected a massive Lowe's complex on Venice Boulevard at Pico Boulevard that drastically changed the aesthetics and livability of the community. Despite legal protections against environmentally damaging development, nobody at Los Angeles City Hall can explain why no Environmental Impact Report was created or whether a binding Planning Commission vote to protect the neighborhood was thrown out — or perhaps accidentally ignored.
Using a tilt-up construction method, CIM Group in a matter of hours on June 2 erected the 68-foot-tall Lowe's, building it so close to Venice Boulevard that the ridge-top homes across the street lost their historic views of the Hollywood Hills and the Hollywood Sign.
Instead, the neighborhood now looks upon the concrete backside of the Lowe's development dubbed MidTown Crossing. Homes in the ethnically mixed, working-class neighborhood plummeted in value overnight, and the residents are seeking a lawyer.
Former City Councilman Nate Holden oversaw lengthy negotiations that resulted in a 2001 Planning Commission vote to protect the neighborhood's livability — and, particularly, to protect its expansive views.
Contacted this week by L.A. Weekly, Holden reacted to the controversy by denying that the neighbors once had terrific views over the roof of the previous building on the site, the 60-year-old Sears Building.
"I can't believe you can't see around it!" Holden said of the towering new MidTown Crossing complex. "The homeowners must not have been there when the Sears Building was there — they would remember they couldn't see over that, either."
But that's not true. The city's own documents confirm what numerous furious residents say: The ridge-top neighborhood on 16th Place for 60 years looked easily over the top of the Sears Building.
In its 2001 Determination of the City Planning Commission, when the project was still proposed as a Costco/Home Depot and not a Lowe's, the city agreed to protect the 16th Place community from adverse environmental changes.
The document assured that "the roof of the proposed Costco/Home Depot building would be at approximately the same elevation as the [land] of the residential lots to the south" on 16th Place.
Further, the Planning Commission promised that the "68-foot height of the project will not result in any new impacts on the residents of these buildings. Specifically the ... building will simply replace the over-60-year-old Sears Building." The new building would "not cast shadows on or adversely affect the privacy, views or aesthetics of any residential property," the city agreed.
The city broke that promise. The CIM Group moved its new Lowe's complex south, about 200 feet closer to the 16th Place community than Sears had been, wiping out the line of sight that gave the ridge-top street its views of the distant Hollywood Hills.
Holden slammed the neighborhood for forcing the Planning Department to agree to numerous conditions for the development back in 2001, saying, "By the time I was finished accommodating them, the builder took a walk!"
He says he's so flabbergasted by complaints that the Lowe's at MidTown Crossing has fundamentally harmed and altered the Mid-City neighborhood that, although he lives in the Marina, "I'm going to go see it!"
Confusion reigns not just among former elected officials closely tied to the project, such as Holden, but inside Los Angeles City Hall.
Three boxes of records given to the Weekly by the City Planning Department — described by Claudia Rodriguez, neighborhood liaison for City Planner Michael LoGrande, as the key documents in the case — provide no clues about who allowed the new Lowe's to be built so close to the homes. Residents cannot see over the new building's top, even from their second-story windows.
Nor has the city been able to produce, despite numerous requests from the neighbors and the Weekly, any evidence of a legal notification to residents that the formal protections they were promised 10 years ago were in danger of being thrown out.
There was no warning that the project would result in the worst-case scenario they had fought hard to avoid.
Peter Porte, one of several residents trying to get a coherent answer from City Planner LoGrande or their current city councilman, Herb Wesson, says, "I wouldn't be surprised if there was a cover-up, since there's no documentation of how this was allowed. But maybe it was just a terrible, terrible mistake" in which somebody dropped the ball.
Ironically, the Lowe's complex is an "anti-blight" project of the Community Redevelopment Agency. That huge agency, which spends millions of taxpayer dollars a year subsidizing developers in an effort to improve downtrodden areas, has passed the buck since the controversy erupted.
David Bloom, public affairs consultant for CRA chief Christine Essel, says, "If Planning and Zoning laid out a bunch of rules and chose not to give all the [rules] to Building and Safety," that is not the fault of the CRA.
Rather than get to the bottom of the weeks-long controversy over its project in working-class Mid-City, the CRA's official position continues to be that it has no idea what is going on.
