Back in 2015, developer Sassony Properties “broke ground” on a flashy South LA project set to transform a two derelict blocks in the Vermont Knolls neighborhood into a massive shopping center with nearly 200,000 square feet of retail and entertainment space.
Now, two years later, the LA Weekly has checked in on the project and the prognosis is not good. Aside from the demolition of a former Payless Shoes on the project site, no construction work has been accomplished and city officials aren’t optimistic about the future of the development.
Called the Vermont Entertainment Village, the project is planned for a large parcel of land once occupied by a swap meet burned during the 1992 LA Riots. It was initially expected to be complete by winter of 2016, but quickly fell behind schedule.
Councilmember Marqueece Harris-Dawson tells the Weekly that by summer of 2015, a vacant office building on the project site had become the site of a large and sophisticated homeless encampment—some of the residents had evidently managed to tap into the building’s electrical system.
The building has since been vacated, but litter continues to pile up on the site. An executive with Sassony Properties tells The Weekly that the delays are due to an ongoing legal dispute with the successor agency to the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency, which tried to seize the land through eminent domain before it was dissolved in 2012.
But Aurea Montes-Rodriguez, who serves as the executive vice president of the Community Coalition of South LA, suggests that the development firm, headed by real estate mogul Eli Sasson, was never serious about the project in the first place.
“He’s a land prospector waiting for gentrification to hit this area so that he can make a lot of money,” she tells the Weekly.
According to a website for the project, it’s set to include (if ever built) a seven-story parking structure, banquet hall, grocery store, and central performance plaza, in addition to retail space occupied in aspirational renderings by upscale vendors like Gucci and Chanel.
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