Baldwin Hills, CA

Rumors have been circulating, but it's now official: Costco is coming to Baldwin Village.

Developer Thrive Living has announced plans to redevelop a five-acre property at 5035 W. Coliseum Street, formerly home to View Park Community Hospital, with a mixed-use apartment complex featuring a Costco on the ground floor. Located just east of La Brea Avenue, the proposed project would include 800 apartments in a new building composed of prefabricated modular units.

“Mayor Bass has declared a housing emergency in Los Angeles, and we’re answering the call,” said Jordan Brill of Thrive Living in a news release. “Our company is focused on addressing the severe housing affordability crisis in Los Angeles, while also attracting retailers willing to make long-term commitments and deliver community-serving products and services that enrich the living experience for our residents and neighbors.”

Although the project has yet to be filed with the Planning Department, a project description indicates that plans rely onto allow greater density and floor area than zoning rules would otherwise permit. Thrive Intends to set aside 184 of the new apartments as low-income affordable housing, making the project eligible for Transit Oriented Communities incentives that permit greater density and floor area than otherwise allowed by zoning rules. The remaining market-rate units are described as non-subsidized affordable and workforce housing, which will be made available to renters with Section 8 vouchers, including families and seniors in the surrounding community.

The ground-floor Costco is set to include produce, optical services, a pharmacy, and delivery services for nearby businesses. The new store is expected to create up to 400 jobs.

"This is truly a game changer for us and a huge investment in the community," said Brenda Ashby of the Crenshaw Manor Community Association." We are excited to have quality groceries close to home, in addition to all the other services Costco provides."

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AO is designing proposed six-story building, which would sit atop a multi-level basement parking garage, is also slated to include indoor and outdoor amenity spaces, which are intended to cater to the surrounding community. Plans call for five courtyards, a landscaped walking path, a rooftop pool, basketcall courts, play structures, and a fitness area. Likewise, the property is expected to incorporate outdoor spaces for movie nights, community gardens, and room for classes.

Thrive Living is an affiliate of Magnum Real Estate Group, a New York-based firm which recently acquired the neighboring Baldwin Hills Shopping Center to the north at 5060 Obama Boulevard. The nearly 104,000-square-foot property is anchored by a Ralphs grocery store.

The project sits less than a half-mile south of Metro's Expo/La Brea Station, which is served by the E Line. Properties surrounding stops on the E Line have proven attractive to developers in the past decade, with large mixed-use projects starting to sprout near stops at Bundy Drive, Sepulveda Boulevard, La Cienega Boulevard, and Crenshaw Boulevard, as well as in Culver City.

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A Costco store could make its way to the Baldwin Village neighborhood and add 800 apartment units and about 400 jobs to the South Los Angeles community, according to renderings released this week.

The apartment units would sit above the warehouse store at Coliseum Street and La Brea Avenue, real estate developer Thrive Living announced in a press release.

Artist renderings for the proposed mixed-use project show the familiar Costco Wholesale logo crowned with an apartment complex. The project would sit on a vacant 5-acre lot that was previously home to View Park Community Hospital in Baldwin Village. It would be the first Costco in South L.A.

There have been no applications filed with the city of Los Angeles for the project, but it was announced earlier this year and renderings for the development were released Tuesday. A spokesperson for Costco could not be immediately reached for comment.

The site would feature a “state-of-the-art store, featuring fresh produce [and] healthy food options for residents,” according to the developer. The store would also include an optical service counter for eyeglasses, a pharmacy and a delivery service. There’s no word if the site would feature the traditional Costco food court.

The project would include 800 apartments, with 184 units meant for low-income tenants, equaling 23% of the total units, the developers said. The mixed-use project would be 25% retail and 75% housing. That would make the project eligible for incentives through the city’s Transit Oriented Communities program, which allows greater density and floor area than is normally allowed under current zoning rules, according to the Los Angeles Planning Department’s guidelines.

The project is meant to support families, seniors and other residents from the community, according to Thrive Living, a privately owned national real estate firm. Apartments would be marketed for affordable housing for seniors and low-income households, the developer said.

Jordan Brill, a representative for Thrive Living, said the project helps address the state of emergency on homelessness declared by Mayor Karen Bass on her first day in office.

“Our company is focused on addressing the severe housing affordability crisis in Los Angeles, while also attracting retailers willing to make long-term commitments and deliver community-serving products and services that enrich the living experience for our residents and neighbors,” Brill said in a written statement.

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The developer said it would partner with Costco to hire and train local residents for an estimated 400 jobs that would be created at the store.

Thrive Living is owned by New York-based real estate firm Magnum Real Estate Group. The firm purchased the adjacent Baldwin Hills Shopping Center last year for $37.3 million, as reported by the real estate website the Registry. That location includes a Ralphs supermarket on Obama Boulevard, right around the corner from the proposed Costco.

The area is a food desert, according to Joe Rouzan, president of the Vermont Slauson Economic Development Corp.

“The lack of quality groceries at prices that are affordable is something that needs to be addressed,” Rouzan said in an email.

He thinks a Costco would offer residents more options and would be a job generator. He’s also confident the developer’s vision has already signaled something that other big-box stores have not emphasized in the past — adding affordable housing.

John Cleveland, chef and co-owner at Post & Beam at the nearby Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza, describes the neighborhood as tight-knit, but one that has been changing over the last several years.

“I think for the most part, there are a little bit of nerves around all these changes that everybody knows are in the works,” Cleveland said.

As a business owner, he said he knows that he benefits from more traffic coming into the neighborhood, but he also understands that some South L.A. residents could be displaced as rents increase and more high-end developments are built.

“It can be real easy for a Costco to come in and really change the whole neighborhood,” Cleveland said.

VIDEO | 04:59

LA Times Today: Costco wants to build a different kind of store in South L.A. — with bulk housing

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Watch L.A. Times Today at 7 p.m. on Spectrum News 1 on Channel 1 or live stream on the Spectrum News App. Palos Verdes Peninsula and Orange County viewers can watch on Cox Systems on channel 99.

Photos by Jason Lewis

Lifestyle

Afro City Marketplace and My BBB have created a home for several Black merchants.

By Megan Reed

The retail market is tough for small-business owners. It’s difficult to get their products into the major retail stores, and leasing space in shopping malls is very expensive, leading many local Black merchants to reply on pop-up shop events.

Two stores at the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza are giving local Black merchants an opportunity to sell their products on a daily basis in a shopping mall. Afro City Marketplace and My BBB are using a co-op business model, where merchants can have a section in the retail store.

“Afro City is a collective of Black-owned businesses,” said Afro City Marketplace creator Rwanda Ray. “We’re all under one roof for economic development and to recycle Black dollars.”

“We’re providing a platform for Black-owned brands who normally do popups,” said Mercedes Jenkins-Carter, owner of My BBB. “We’re giving them a home and an anchor.”

These stores feature clothing, accessories, health products, candles, jewelry, trinkets, and many other products that have Afrocentric themes.

Partnering with several Black merchants allows these businesses to increase their revenue while keeping their overhead low. It also gives the merchants a clearer path to sell their goods in a shopping mall.

“We’re working together with common goals, and without the big overhead,” Jenkins-Carter said. “There are a lot of barriers of entry. There’s insurance, contractors, painters, and there’s inventory. So there’s quite a few barriers to entry. When they come here, they’ll learn all of the tools. So when they’re ready to take that plunge, they will be equipped to make it to the next level.”

These co-ops have less red tape than the major retail stores because the local merchants can work directly with the manager of the co-op.

“We provide affordable retail space for small Black-owned business,” Ray said. It’s very affordable, especially after COVID. If they can’t afford a full space, then we’ll try to make a smaller section that can work with their business until they scale to a bigger space.”

Both Afro City Marketplace and My BBB are located on the first level of the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza. For more information visit www.afrocitymarketplace.com and www.myblackbeautybox.org, and follow them on social media.

California, the seventh-biggest U.S. crude oil producer, has put a near halt on issuing permits for new drilling this year, according to state data.

The state's Geologic Energy Management Division, known as CalGEM, has approved seven new active well permits in 2023. That compares with the more than 200 it had issued by this time last year.

The stalled approvals represent the latest tension between California's bold environmental ambitions and its role as a major oil and gas producer and consumer.

New drilling permits have steadily declined since Gavin Newsom became governor in 2019, but the current rate of approval represents a sudden and dramatic drop.

"It's just fallen off the cliff," Rock Zierman, chief executive of the California Independent Petroleum Association (CIPA), said in an interview. The industry has more than 1,400 permit applications for new wells awaiting CalGEM approval, half of which are more than a year old, he said.

In an email, CalGEM attributed the smaller number of approvals to both the broader decline in California oil production and litigation that has paused permitting by Kern County, the center of the state's oil industry.

CalGEM is processing far more approvals to permanently close wells than for any other activity, the agency said.

"We expect this permitting trend to continue as California transitions away from fossil fuels," CalGEM said.

The approved new wells include one for Sentinel Peak Resources in San Luis Obispo County and five for E&B Natural Resources Management in Kern County.

In an apparent concession to the oil and gas industry, approvals to improve or repair established wells are up nearly 50% to 1,650 in the first half of this year, according to an analysis of the CalGEM data by environmental group FracTracker Alliance that was provided to Reuters by the consumer advocacy non-profit Consumer Watchdog.

Reworking existing wells to boost their production cannot replace volumes from new wells that are needed to meet California's energy needs, CIPA's Zierman said.

The governor wants to phase out oil drilling in the state by 2045.

California also passed a law last year banning oil and gas drilling within 3,200 feet of structures including homes, schools and hospitals. But CIPA has blocked implementation of that law by qualifying a referendum to overturn it for the November 2024 ballot.

Nearly half of the wells with rework permits approved this year are within the contested buffer zone.

Consumer Watchdog criticized those approvals as a threat to public health because they extend the lives of low- and non-producing wells, which the group argues would likely have been plugged had the setback law not been paused.

“The state is simply helping the oil industry cut costs by issuing permits to tinker with unproductive wells rather than making them plug and remediate those wells that endanger the public and environment by emitting toxic compounds," said Liza Tucker, a consumer advocate for Consumer Watchdog.

CalGEM said it is required to evaluate permits so long as the law is barred from being implemented.