Development And Redevelopment

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power announced Tuesday that it has shelved plans for a 970-acre solar farm near the Salton Sea, just as members of the City Council signaled that they were unprepared to support the project. The DWP's interim general manager, S. David Freeman, said he was troubled by the costs of the 55-megawatt project, which had been slated to go up on land purchased by the utility in 2006. Freeman made his comments moments after Councilwoman Jan Perry, who heads the council's Energy and the Environment Committee, said she planned to send the solar project back to the DWP for more work.

Half a century ago, Walt Disney leased a horse ranch in Placerita Canyon to shoot episodes of "The Adventures of Spin and Marty" from the classic ABC series "The Mickey Mouse Club. " Disney liked the property so much, with its rich variety of meadows, oak groves and mountains, that his production company began buying up land, eventually accumulating 890 acres. Over the decades, the storied Golden Oak Ranch, located in an unincorporated area of northeast Los Angeles County, has been used as backdrop for countless Disney TV shows and movies, including "Old Yeller" and "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End. " Now Walt Disney Co. is moving closer to transforming part of the historic movie ranch into one of the largest high-tech production developments in Los Angeles in the last decade -- and the public will soon get its first say on the project.

Curtis Forrester moved into a brand-new house in Victorville last week, but there was little time to enjoy the Jacuzzi and designer kitchen. He was there only to see it destroyed. Just a few days after his arrival, the two-story residence and three other luxurious model homes were crushed and hauled off for scrap, the latest fallout from Southern California's real estate crash. The homes were part of a planned 16-unit project in this community 100 miles north of Los Angeles.

Most mornings, when the slanted dawn light hits the nearby Tower Palace luxury high-rises, Cho Su-ja can't help but stare, struck by their grandeur. The 72-year-old grandmother lives in a two-room shack with plastic flooring, sandwiched between other shacks built from planks of wood, corrugated tin, castoff door frames and bamboo screens, like a jumble of shipwrecks. But Cho doesn't envy her wealthy neighbors, not one bit. She's proud to be one of the original inhabitants of Guyrong village, a ramshackle shantytown sprawling alongside the exclusive Gangnam area, the highest-priced real estate in South Korea.

For years a chain-link fence surrounded the contaminated 25-acre lot near the junction of Interstate 5 and California 118 in Pacoima, a daily reminder of the thousands of well-paying manufacturing jobs lost to Mexico in the last decade.

TIME stands still at Oakridge. The stone house on the Northridge hilltop is locked. Through its darkened windows can be glimpsed empty rooms that for nearly a half-century echoed with the laughter of comic actor Jack Oakie and a nonstop flow of Hollywood buddies. Its curving driveway, circling an ancient oak, is cracked. The back lawn, where Oakie and his celebrity friends lazed away summer days by the pool, is overgrown and brown.

The recent craze for converting apartment buildings to condominiums, which is drawing political heat in Los Angeles and elsewhere, may be slowed by market forces before City Hall has a chance to act. One possible indication of a coming slump was the number of people willing to pay $1,800 for investment advice on the topic.

After a decade of failing fortunes, the former Oxnard Factory Outlet has been sold to a Thousand Oaks developer who plans to spend at least $2.5 million refurbishing the mostly vacant shopping venue. Silagi Development and Management Inc.

The city of Ventura is moving forward with a project to build 50 low-rent artists lofts in a reinvigorated downtown, a move officials hope will help establish the seaside community as a regional center of cultural activity. The City Council, acting as the redevelopment agency, voted Monday night to negotiate an agreement to turn over an acre on Thompson Boulevard to a Minneapolis-based nonprofit that creates modestly priced rentals for painters, poets and sculptors across the United States.

The federal government is looking for contractors to build a possible detention center in the Los Angeles area that would hold up to 2,200 illegal immigrants and others suspected of violating immigration laws. Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman Virginia Kice said last week that the agency was "exploring the feasibility of such a project," though she said no definitive decisions had been made.

In another sign that commercial real estate is thawing in choice markets, construction will officially get underway Thursday on a $350-million residential and retail development on Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica. The complex, called the Village at Santa Monica, which mixes luxury condominiums and affordable apartments, has been in the works for more than six years. The project is being built by New York developer Related Cos. on a 3-acre site once owned by think tank Rand Corp. The Village is the first major residential development to be built on Ocean Avenue in two decades and one of only a few condominium complexes under construction in Los Angeles County.

Traffic crawled at an infuriating pace Monday morning on the 10 Freeway. But at a groundbreaking ceremony for the last leg of the Expo light-rail line to Santa Monica, dozens of Southland officials proclaimed a different future. "People get stuck coming into this area in the morning to go to work ... and get stuck going home when they leave," L.A. County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky said at the ceremony in the beach city. The Expo Line is "not going to solve the traffic problems of the Westside, but it's going to give people an alternative to being stuck with the problems on the Westside.

These days, there are plenty of "green" buildings, with solar heating, insulated windows, self-generated electricity. But what would it take to construct an office building at competitive leasing rates that generated its own energy and processed its own waste -- for 250 years? That's what they're trying to find out in Seattle, where groundbreaking began Monday on a six-story building billed as the greenest commercial building on earth. The Bullitt Center -- which eventually will use only its own rainwater, generate its own power and compost its own sewage -- is the first big office building designed to carry its own environmental weight.

After years of grumbling, Nevada has thrown down the gauntlet to its neighbor across the deep blue waters of Lake Tahoe. Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval signed legislation last month that amounts to a political ultimatum to California: Make it easier to approve development in the Tahoe basin or the Silver State will pull out of the compact that has tightly regulated land use around the famous mountain lake for decades. "Every time we'd go before the [compact's governing board], the votes were always there to destroy what Nevada was doing," said the bill's lead sponsor, state Sen. John Lee, a Clark County Democrat who contends California's members are in thrall to environmentalists.

Heading to Griffith Park through an equestrian tunnel under the 134 Freeway, horse riders emerge to an unusual sight: huge yellow earth movers chomping into 15 acres of dirt between the freeway and the park. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power is building underground reservoirs that will hold 110 million gallons of water and help eliminate the city's reliance on open-air reservoirs, including Silver Lake Res- ervoir. When complete, the two side-by-side Headworks reservoirs will be hidden beneath a new open-space recreation area along For- est Lawn Drive near Zoo Drive.

Two U.S. experts have reported that North Korea is engaged in new construction at its main Yongbyon atomic complex, suggesting that the secretive regime is following through on a plan to build a nuclear power reactor, a private American security institute said Saturday. The Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security last week released commercial satellite images taken this month showing construction of a rectangular structure, which it believes is a 25- or 30-megawatt light-water reactor.

The mansionization battle rustling the leaves of North Barrington Avenue is something new even for Brentwood. It's a dispute not over a 12,000-square-foot neo-Tudor monster or a towering modernist cube, but over a backyard treehouse for an 18-month-old girl. This being Brentwood, of course, the edifice at issue is no ordinary treehouse.

Dive into the rooftop pool of the Pegasus Apartments -- 13 stories above downtown Los Angeles -- and the first few strokes you make will seem remarkably familiar. Swoosh. The chlorine stings the eyes. Its smell permeates. Swoosh. But soon you realize there's something different about the pulls you are making here. The squeak of bus brakes is audible as you bob above the water. An air-conditioning unit on a nearby building hums at a near-constant pitch.

In a decision that could boost development of wind power nationwide, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar on Wednesday approved a controversial offshore wind project off Cape Cod — potentially the first coastal installation of its kind in the United States. The decision to grant a federal permit to the Cape Wind project was a victory for green-power advocates over local opponents, most of whom are concerned about impacts on scenery, fishing and — in the case of some Native Americans — intrusion into areas traditionally considered sacred.

For decades, Santa Monica has allowed developers to add floors to their buildings or exceed other zoning restrictions in exchange for providing affordable housing to poor and moderate-income tenants. Such was the case with Dorchester House, a luxury condominium low-rise just blocks from the Pacific Ocean. Almost three decades ago, the city approved a development plan in which 15 first-floor units were earmarked as affordable housing. But as real estate attorney Stanley Epstein learned recently, the city has done little to enforce these agreements.