A decade ago, the stretch of downtown L.A.'s Main Street between 4th and 6th streets was a desolate collection of empty buildings and homeless encampments, an area where drug dealing was conducted in the open, and the only longtime residents lived in residential hotels. These days, that stretch resembles a bustling small-town main street.
There's the neighborhood bookstore, where an attentive shopkeeper knows her customers by name. A DVD store that stocks the kind of films that appeal to the hip residents who live in the building upstairs. And shop owners and customers who live side by side above the stores.
While much of downtown is struggling to attract the kind of ground-floor retail that many urbanists say is essential to turning a cluster of residential units into something more like a neighborhood, downtown's historic core has been seeing a surge forward lately.
Some downtown boosters who track such developments say that the vast majority of retail space along Main Street, from 4th to 7th Street, is now leased -- an accomplishment that they are touting as a sign of the neighborhood's successful reinvention.
The changes along Main Street -- and in downtown's historic core in general -- were launched 10 years ago this month, when a new city ordinance went into effect that made it easier to convert former bank, office and industrial buildings into residential and small retail spaces.
The ordinance was little noticed at the time. But the adaptive reuse ordinance, as it is known, has profoundly changed the way the city thinks about its long-neglected urban center. It streamlined the city's permitting process for those seeking to re-purpose the old buildings and allowed for flexibility in the city's zoning and code requirements.
"After decades of beating a dead horse, they realized that commercial was not going to come back to this neighborhood the way it was," said Bert Green, owner of an art gallery at 5th and Main. "It made sense to change the use of the buildings."
In 1999, downtown Los Angeles was an area very much in transition. The Staples Center had just opened. Walt Disney Concert Hall, L.A. Live and other downtown attractions were still years away from opening. Only 18,000 people lived in the city center.
"We had offices, we had some cultural attractions," said Carol Schatz, president and chief executive of the Central City Assn., a business advocacy group that pushed for the change. "But the one thing that we knew we needed to make downtown survive and thrive was residents."
