Big Trouble In Little Tokyo

[Charles]

Parking is becoming more scarce to be sure but that certainly hasn't stopped any of the recent development in the area...almost every new residential or mixed use development that has gone up in the area was built on what used to be a parking lot. The gentrification of downtown and the immediate surrounding area is still in full swing it seems.

Ah, I see what's happening now. I looked at the pic you posted, with the markings of the development site. The stupid monument is up in the left corner, half cut off. I remember this location well. This used to be an old printing plant, the building was abandoned for many years. Then they finally flattened it in preparation for construction. When the building plan was revealed, the LA Board of Supervisors had a shit fit. The plan was to build a large multistory luxury condominium retirement home for expat nihonjin. At that time, it was cheaper to set up the medically supported residences for your old folks in LA than in Japan. The Supervisors insisted that the housing conform to all LA laws, including set-asides for low income housing for local residents. The owners refused to comply, it would be impossible to sell retirement condos to nihonjin with those icky low-income gaijin living next door. So the land remains a parking lot unto this day.
Anyway, Little Tokyo wanted to move eastward into the Loft District and tear it all down for reconstruction, but the locals banded together and got city grants to gentrify the area, preventing the expansion in their direction (if you want to see a heavily stylized version of this story, watch the movie Robocop 3). So now they're moving northward. But there is an absolute limit, they'll never get north of Temple, as that's the edge of the City Plaza.

[2triky]

Little Tokyo looks to get back its vibes with new development
Friday, Oct. 10, 2008

By JACOB ADELMAN
The Associated Press

LOS ANGELES (AP) The last time Little Tokyo tried getting back to its Japanese roots, it was in the early 1980s with the Japanese Village Plaza, a warren of sweets shops, tea stands and trinket stores under sloping glazed-tile roofs.

Now, on the eve of the area's most ambitious development project in decades, the historically Japanese enclave in Los Angeles has something different in mind: trendy boutiques and stylish apartments enclosed in sleek mid-rise towers.

As Little Tokyo's ethnic vibes change with newcomers filling new housing, neighborhood leaders are making a bid to lure hip young Japanese-Americans back to the neighborhood with the $300 million Nikkei Center, a sprawling complex of apartments, shops and public gardens being built on the area's last major undeveloped parcel.

Coming after the sale of the Japanese Village Plaza and a string of other iconic Little Tokyo properties to buyers from outside the community, neighborhood leaders who want the community to maintain a strong Japanese character say the Nikkei Center represents a last hope.

"It's our attempt to determine the community's destiny, which up until now has been determined by well-meaning developers from outside the community," said Jonathan Kaji, whose firm Kaji & Associates is codeveloping the property.

The City Council voted to sell the 1.8-hectare parcel of city-owned land to developers for $44 million in mid-August. Jerde Partnership, which designed parts of Tokyo's chic Roppongi Hills high rise, as well the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas, has been tapped as the project's architect.

Planners say groundbreaking is at least a year and a half away, so details on the complex's design that will include a mix of apartments, offices and shops are still sketchy. But they say it will avoid the samurai-movie-set hyperbole of past development projects.

"We would like it to have a Japanese touch or flavor, but not this pagoda sort of thing: this sort of ostentatious caricature of Japanese culture," said Bill Watanabe, president of the Little Tokyo Services Center, a social services agency and nonprofit developer teaming up with Kaji on the project.

The team plans to attract tenants by advertising the development in Japan, as well as in Japanese-language media in the U.S. and Latin America with large ethnic Japanese populations, like Peru and Brazil.

Planners hope the Nikkei Center's shopping, dining and night life offerings — which emulate those of Japan's big Tokyo — will encourage Japanese-Americans who feel a connection with modern Japan to take up residence in the complex's apartments.

Businesspeople from Japan and overseas Japanese communities who need a part-time home in L.A. are also being targeted as possible tenants.

It's all an attempt to arrest a process that many ethnic communities across the United States have undergone, as assimilated generations leave dense ethnic enclaves for mainstream neighborhoods.

New York's Little Italy, once a sprawling Italian district, is now little more than a block-long strip of pasta restaurants; Los Angeles' Historic Filipinotown district is now primarily Hispanic.

California's other major Japanese enclaves — the Japantowns of San Francisco and San Jose — have also lost much of their Japanese populations.

Covering 15 square blocks, Los Angeles' Little Tokyo remains the nation's largest ethnic Japanese district.

Its first Japanese inhabitants settled here around 100 years ago, when neighborhood covenants and other opposition kept them from living in more established areas. At the time, the gritty neighborhood on the fringe of downtown was full of rooming houses.

By the start of World War II, Little Tokyo had 8,000 residents of Japanese decent. The sprawling enclave of Buddhist temples, Japanese-led churches and markets selling tofu, miso paste and other traditional foods also drew customers from the region's other, smaller Japanese neighborhoods.

But after the war, many former Little Tokyo residents did not return to the neighborhood from the internment camps where they were held, moving instead to newly built suburbs that had no history of excluding nonwhite residents.

Its area also shrank as the city's police headquarters and other civic buildings were constructed within its borders.

Still, its temples, Japanese churches and ethnic grocery stores kept it at the heart of the region's Japanese-American society until the 1980s, when newly assimilated generations found less use for what it had to offer.

The neighborhood was also hurt by the early 1990s collapse of the Japanese economy, when investors demolished structures to make way for new buildings that were planned but never built.

In 2005, about two-thirds of the neighborhood's 875 households — most of them elderly residents in senior housing developments — were of Japanese descent, according to the Little Tokyo Services Center.

By June 2008, the number of homes in the area had grown to 1,449, but the portion of Japanese occupants had declined to just over half.

Some fear the newly diverse mix of residents could spell the end of the neighborhood's Japanese cultural character, as retailers focus on a more mainstream clientele.