Lasry, who is developing a stretch of Los Angeles around Western and Melrose, was asked what it takes to get a crosswalk built there. He went on to explain the terms: the city will approve it, but the developer pays, and with engineering, electrical work and a vault underneath, a signalized crossing runs about a million dollars. Roughly 95% of Los Angeles is zoned residential, which is why he argues an uninteresting main street leaves a neighbourhood with nothing.
And I think that's what's really exciting about what we're doing is we're seeing rents increase where we are because I think we've made a really exciting product by investing in talent. There's a lot of new apartment buildings in LA that I don't think many people go around going, wow, that's such a beautiful, cool new apartment building. I think most people are like, oh, God, not another one of those boring, generic apartment buildings. So I think the commercial real estate industry, now we have to actually make good products if we want to make money.
Okay, so speaking of making good products, I read one of the things you're doing as part of your developing is you're building city infrastructure as well. So installing things like crosswalks. What's the process of creating a crosswalk in LA?
It's like a Kafka novel. It's just hard. And sell us more. Oh, we got a great email. We got approved for a crosswalk on Clinton and Western, and it said it'll be built in a few years or more.
Wait, what's the constraint?
Like, what is the actual
holdup? What's your sense of the holdup?