Office Buildings

"Empty," says Jack Rodman, an expert in distressed real estate, as he points from the window of his 40th-floor office toward a silver-skinned prism rising out of the Beijing skyline. "Beautiful building, but not a single tenant. "Completely empty. "Empty." So goes the refrain as his finger skips from building to building, each flashier than the next, and few of them more than barely occupied.

The slumping market for commercial real estate -- viewed by many as the next big shoe to drop on the economy -- now threatens to drag down regional banks as they struggle to collect on loans made against shopping centers and office buildings. Seriously overdue loans against commercial developments have shot up dramatically in recent months, as delinquencies snowball on construction loans and mortgages for office buildings, malls and apartments. That's bad for giants like Bank of America Corp.

The lousy economy continues to quash the commercial real estate market, driving down rents and pushing out tenants. Nearly a third of office space is flat-out empty in parts of Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties. A fifth of the offices are empty in the once-crowded Burbank Media District.

A year after making one of the largest office leasing deals in more than a decade, Fox Interactive Media is abandoning plans to move into nearly a half-million square feet of office space in Playa Vista. The company is committed to a 12-year, approximately $350-million lease. But now it faces financial difficulties and plans to lay off some of the people who were slated to move into two new office buildings in the splashy development near Marina del Rey.

Beverly Hills has long afforded companies a platinum-plated address with amenities to match -- top-notch restaurants, hotels and boutiques in a walkable environment. The city has attracted such prestigious businesses as MySpace, Live Nation, Platinum Equity and talent agencies William Morris and the Firm. But in recent years Beverly Hills has suffered the loss of three high-profile companies: Creative Artists Agency and ICM, talent agencies that migrated to Century City; and Hilton Hotels Corp.

Los Angeles office landlords will probably be forced to slash rents as much as 30% in the first half of the year as job cuts create more empty space, Grubb & Ellis Co. said Wednesday. Office vacancy rates in Los Angeles County jumped to 12.2% at the end of 2008 from 9.7% a year earlier, the Santa Ana broker said. "Southern California counties got caught in the economic whirlwinds of 2008, and there will be little or no letup in 2009," said Jack Kyser, an economist who worked on the report.

With the possible exception of certain underwater adventures and outer-space stories, pretty much every movie relies on architectural symbolism, finding in the house where the hero lives, the saloon he drinks in or the city streets he caroms through in his getaway car some useful ways to sharpen its thematic message. This year's Oscar nominees for best picture, though, exploit that symbolism to an unusually effective degree.

Forget salaries, expense accounts or keys to the executive washroom. Employee loyalty is won or lost over the cleanliness of the bathrooms and the amount of sticky goo on the carpet. One in three workers surveyed recently said they had accepted a job -- or quit one -- because of the most basic working conditions. The respondents' chief complaints by far: the state of the indoor atmosphere, the gripes being about either hot-as-the-tropics heating or Antarctic air conditioning.

The new headquarters of one of the world's most popular websites is 3,000 square feet of rented space furnished with desks and chairs bought on the cheap from EBay and Craigslist. A sheet of printer paper taped to the door says the office belongs to the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that runs Wikipedia, the online almanac of anything and everything that users want to chronicle, from Thomas Aquinas to Zorba the Greek.

Everyone's an art critic when it comes to a $195,000 mural for the LAPD's new Hollenbeck station. The tile mural was meant to depict a quaint Sunday in Boyle Heights. Many angry residents say it makes their neighborhood out to be a crime-ridden dump filled with fat women, stray dogs, beer-swilling men and illegal street vendors. And don't get them started about the pinata. "There's no American flag.