LA Council Member Desires to Convey Bioscience Campus to Baldwin Hills / Crenshaw

On April 8. 2021, LA Daily Newswire reported, A member of the Los Angeles City Council looks at a long empty development site in Baldwin Hills and sees a life sciences campus.

A motion sponsored by Councilor Mark Ridley-Thomas proposes that eight parcels owned by the city and nine parcels owned by the city be purchased from the agency overseeing the remaining properties of the city’s defunct municipal redevelopment agency, to create a public property that could be rented to a private developer for a bioscience hub.

“The Bioscience Campus could help fuel the vitality of LA’s bioscience economy, nurture talent from within its own country and contribute to the long-term economic health of the community and the city as a whole,” said Ridley-Thomas’ proposal.

The view from the Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook.

The lots are on a larger site, Marlton Square, adjacent to Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. The redevelopment plans have stopped and started since at least the 1980s. Kaiser Permanente bought part of the Marlton Square property and built a community-centered medical facility that opened in 2017. However, the plans to convert an approximately 10.5 hectare piece of the site into a shopping center failed and talks with the developer were discontinued in October 2020, according to the application.

“Marlton Square is an area of ​​great interest to the Councilor. It’s been bad and underdeveloped for a while, ”said Karly Katona, chief of staff at Ridley-Thomas, whose central borough spans 10 Freeway and includes Mid-City, Koreatown, Crenshaw and Leimert Park. The location is not far from 61 Bristol, a creative four-building office campus that Pasadena-based life sciences developer Alexandria Real Estate Equities bought in early 2019.

Ridley-Thomas, who served as a supervisor in the Los Angeles District before joining the District 10 Council in December 2020, promoted life sciences as an economic engine and job maker while on the Board of Supervisors.

“Bioscience is a high-growth industrial sector that has put Los Angeles on an upward trend despite economic headwinds,” Ridley-Thomas said in a statement to Bisnow. “Marlton Square, with its central location and proximity to transit, is an ideal location to grow and diversify the life science industry and create high quality, well-paid science jobs.”

The life sciences sector in Los Angeles is growing. A CBRE report released in October 2020 ranked Los Angeles 10th on a list of best life science clusters and said the city has a “relatively low” vacancy rate of 6.2% and inventory of SF8.3 million. The Los Angeles metropolitan area, which includes Anaheim and Long Beach, has a number of characteristics that have so far proven to be critical to the growth of the sector, including having the second highest number of STEM graduates after New York, a previously published JLL report found this month.

Building space for the use of life sciences will be an integral part of any growth in this sector, experts say.

“Los Angeles has a history of brain drain from lack of laboratory space,” said Andrew Riley, CBRE senior vice president. Often times, companies looking to expand want to act quickly and don’t necessarily have time to wait for a space to be expanded or remodeled, Riley said.

“It starts with real estate,” said Stephanie Hsieh, general manager of BioCom LA, the local branch of the state’s trade association for the life science industry, of the growth of the LA sector. Hsieh said she has taken more calls from developers and investors than members of the life science industry since joining BioCom, which she attributes to the resilience of the sector during the coronavirus pandemic. Public-private partnerships like the one planned for this location will be key to supporting the industry’s expansion in Los Angeles, Hsieh said.

The project is still in the early stages. The application allows the city to get the ball rolling if it exercises its option to acquire the land it does not already own from the agency that owns the remaining properties of the municipal redevelopment agency, also known as CRA / LA, monitored. But things are expected to move quickly. Ridley-Thomas staff estimate the negotiations will take approximately 90 days and the call for proposals from developers will be published by the end of the year.