The cranes were still up when I first started exploring Downtown Los Angeles in 2022, physical vestiges of the wave of construction that ended abruptly with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. These ghosts of a more optimistic time gazed down at me as I walked unknowingly through the emptied streets below.
I remember passing by Oceanwide Plaza — the infamous, unfinished skyscraper development across the street from the Crypto.com Arena — expectantly admiring the orderly rows of clean glass windows ascending into the cloudy sky. Materials and vehicles were posed around the site as if workers had left for the day just hours before: Surely, these three enormous towers forming the tallest residential development in Los Angeles history would soon provide sorely needed housing for thousands of people. However, in November 2022, after sitting untouched for over three years, the cranes were taken away. Then came the graffiti.
Oceanwide Plaza’s transformation into the world-famous “graffiti towers” wasn’t gradual; it happened almost overnight. The huge, highly visible construction site was in legal limbo; the insolvent Chinese developer that owned it could not afford to secure the site. Within days of the first street artists noticing this opportunity, three 40-story towers’ worth of windows were entirely covered in boxy drawings and enormous, dully-colored block letters. The city discovered it could not afford to remove the vandalism; the equipment that scaffold workers left hanging off the building came to represent municipal acceptance of Downtown’s decay.
Oceanwide Plaza needs to be completed. Yet when the development finally found a buyer in February, I was surprised by my mixed feelings. Removing the graffiti and finishing Oceanwide Plaza will turn a concrete husk into necessary housing. But even so, I worry that completing Oceanwide Plaza will destroy as much public space as it creates. What is now an infamous monument to Los Angeles’s street culture and the broken dreams of its downtown will become identical to the other glass skyscrapers around it: The elephant in the room, once insisting on being recognized, will blend into the skyline’s squeaky-clean, mirrored wall.
Oceanwide Plaza became a cultural phenomenon because it lent symbolic space to the people who have been squeezed out of cities — not just by their high rents but also by their inhumanity. To address the issues it represents and fight for housing and economic development in Los Angeles, we must push for serious changes to the city’s culture and policies in order to make public space a real priority.
Like urban America overall, Downtown LA has few public parks and few benches. Its wide roads are full of cars, its desolate sidewalks scatter those who might wish to linger. Its streets were once lined with small buildings of varying uses and styles. Now, too many streets are split between surface parking lots and planned developments spanning full city blocks.
But just as we must complete Oceanwide Plaza, we must also reject this false choice between infrastructural progress and humanity in our cities. These two things can coexist; the only way to build livable cities is to build enough to afford all of us a slice. If we fail to do so, the lack of housing will cause rising rents, and we will destroy what makes our cities unique, displacing millions of lower-income residents in the process. We mustn’t continue over-planning and over-optimizing our cities. Graffiti towers should not be the only places we can identify with in our downtowns.
It seems no coincidence that the period of greatest economic inequality in American history has translated into bland, lifeless development in our cities. Many of Los Angeles’s most trendy and desirable ‘urban’ neighborhoods replicate or are built upon the very urban spontaneity which they too often destroy, such as the various “Arts Districts” which occupy formerly industrial areas with chain art galleries and bars, standardizing what was supposed to fuel a serendipitous formation of creativity and connection in urban areas nationwide.
Many neighborhoods where this cycle has been repeated are those that have priced out and pushed away established lower-income communities so that the results of decades of economic segregation and underinvestment can become glorified cityscapes with a “gritty” and “authentic” feel for the young and affluent to colonize. Anyone who has been to Highland Park, Silver Lake or Echo Park has seen this phenomenon firsthand. While it has much to do with the ongoing displacement of many LA renters and small businesses by high rents, it also reflects an unmet need for true urban public space.
Today, most of LA’s commercial districts feel like the floundering shopping malls they once competed with. This is a consequence of hostile infrastructure and policies meant to keep homeless people from living in cities by erasing places for them to stay, and the city surrendering to risk-averse property managers who repaint once-colorful apartment buildings in “fashionable” shades of gray. When parks have been replaced by “private public spaces,” and the only places left to hang out after dark are chain restaurants’ outdoor seating. This conformity, born of a desire for efficiency and profit, comes to bind all of us. We are left to cry for help in our own ways, be it through vandalism or the donning of peculiar hats in the name of making space for ourselves.
We see these same problems closer to home as well. I may be biased by living off-campus, but it seems like at my own school, Claremont McKenna College, as well as at the other Claremont Colleges in various ways, we have lost some of the community that our campuses once cultivated due to facilities becoming more upscale.
Looking at old photos, I can’t help but notice how many quaint lawns were replaced by concrete as CMC renovated its landscaping, and how many ugly courtyards were replaced by the grand approach to the Kravis Center when it replaced CMC’s smaller and confusingly named Pitzer Hall in 2011. These initiatives were an opening up of space, but resulted in a collapsing of it at the same time. I still sometimes hear old-timers’ laments about how many more people would hang out in the fountain outside the Hub before it was renovated several years ago, even though the current design was purposely designed by architects to be easy to navigate on foot. Where have we gone wrong?
People love neighborhoods with inconveniences and eyesores because, as more inefficient spaces, they are actually more livable and more relatable. These neighborhoods don’t get built anymore; they only appear when our social fabric breaks down in accidental masterpieces like the graffiti towers. But it’s not because we don’t know how to build them — if we reform our byzantine municipal regulations to make it cost-effective for more people to build more varied buildings again, and if we move past our misguided aspiration to create “efficient” urban areas, we can once again build the progress we need in our cities without closing them off to humanity. It will just take some imagination and some optimism, which American cities have sorely lacked in the lean, zero-sum days since the pandemic.
In any case, it seems I lamented the consequences of this particular mistake too soon. While I was working on this article, the City of Los Angeles moved to delay approval of the sale of Oceanwide Plaza, citing continued uncertainty about the ability of the new developers to repay debts and fulfill the original project’s contractual obligations. Rumor has it that another potential buyer has come out of the woodwork to contest the deal. Either way, it seems that Los Angeles won’t be too perfect any time soon.
Nicholas Steinman CM ’28 wears fedoras as a metaphor for the decline of America’s ability to dream of great cities for everyone. Those intrigued by this should contact nsteinman28@cmc.edu to learn more about Claremont Students for Abundance.