Huge Plans to Reinvent Fashion District With College, Housing

Whoa, the gentrification of the Fashion District is going wholesale: developers are planning a huge 10-acre project that would add tons of hotel, office, and residential space, plus a damn college. The plan spans roughly from San Julian to San Pedro and from Ninth to Twelfth (blocks covered in "faded commercial properties"). Developers tell the LA Times the project, called City Market, could take 20 years to actually complete, but when it's done, they want it to include "a campus for one or more private colleges, 945 units of new housing, 210 hotel rooms and more than 500,000 square feet of creative offices, stores, restaurants and entertainment uses." The project will be designed by Smart Architecture; some buildings on the site will be reused, some will be demolished. And it sounds like the developers want to get the college--"probably ... a private postgraduate institution focused on fashion design"--set up in phase one. They're just starting the city approval process.
· Major mixed-use plan announced for fashion district downtown [LAT]