From downtown’s Concerto to Echo Park’s Durbin to West LA's Exposition there’s a pretty familiar pattern going on: Bank A loans a developer money, Bank A fails, FDIC takes over Bank A, sells Bank A to Bank B, which must then re-assess all the loans held by Bank A. In the meantime, construction stops on all the projects associated with Bank A. The state of these buildings varies, but the Arts District's Barn Lofts at 940 E. 2nd Street is the latest to have to wait on a new lender. Work stopped about two weeks at the building, a former 1909 sugarcane and beet warehouse that's being transformed into a 38-unit condo development.
The project's most recent lender, Pacific National Bank of San Francisco, was taken over by the FDIC and then ultimately sold to US Bank last fall, which is now re-assessing Pacific National Bank's portfolio. According to Mark Borman of development company Borman Group, work should hopefully resume by the end of the first quarter. In April 2007, the developer lost its original loan with Fremont Investment & Loan following parent company's Fremont General Corp. involvement in the subprime mess, according to an older Los Angeles Business Journal article. Meanwhile, Rockefeller Partners Architecture is the architect on the project, one of the more interesting developments--given its size and the building's history--to go up in downtown.
· Barn Lofts Archives [Curbed LA]
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