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Los Angeles Times

Downtown L.A. has battled COVID, homelessness and protests. Why its residential popularity is surging

Like many downtown Los Angeles residents, Ricardo Sebastián doesn't own a car and prefers it that way. 'I do not want the responsibility of owning a vehicle. That's not for me,' said Sebastián, who grew up in Chicago relying on public transit. The 38-year-old consultant travels around L.A. by train and bus, but finds most of what they need close to home in the South Park district near Arena, including leisurely strolls. 'I enjoy going for long walks from one end of downtown to the other,' Sebastián said in Muffin Can Stop Us, a casual coffee bar and restaurant at the base of a high-rise apartment complex on Hope Street. 'I love living downtown.' Sebastián is hardly alone in that sentiment. In addition to being a commercial center with office skyscrapers, trendy hotels and cultural venues, downtown L.A. remains a vibrant and growing residential neighborhood with a population of 90,000 — about the size of Santa Monica. Despite myriad challenges — including a sprawling homeless population and its reputation as a sometimes dodgy place to live and work — downtown L.A. is staging a comeback by attracting a steady stream of new residents. Occupancy in downtown apartments has remained about 90% for more than a year, recent surveys by a downtown business support group show. That is slightly higher than the level before the pandemic, when offices hummed with 9-to-5ers. In fact, the downtown population has more than tripled since 2000, reflecting a dynamic shift in the city center's character toward a 24-hour lifestyle. 'You do not see that kind of change in any other neighborhood in Los Angeles,' downtown activist Cassy Horton said. 'If anything, most neighborhoods are kind of aging and atrophying versus adding people.' The reasons why people choose to live in L.A.'s urban core are varied. Some point to the value of living downtown, where rents for high-end buildings are relatively more affordable than in other parts of the city. A raft of new developments has increased the availability of housing units. And with thousands of houses and apartments lost to wildfires in an already tight housing market, there is now widespread demand for housing that landlords hope to attract downtown. There's also the convenience factor. Many residents say they are drawn to downtown's urban lifestyle with stores, restaurants and cultural attractions like the Broad or Walt Disney Concert Hall within walking distance. And unlike dwellers of most parts of L.A., they want their blocks to get more busy, Horton said. 'We're the only neighborhood where residents actually want more neighbors,' she said. One of the many frustrations over this month's outbreak of violence around federal immigration sweeps was the way social media coverage was 'completely devoid of any reference to the fact that people live here,' Horton said. 'Downtown gets treated in these situations really differently than other residential neighborhoods would be.' The addition of residents has helped offset downtown's other dramatic population shift — the unsettling disappearance of thousands of office workers who did their jobs from home during the pandemic and are unlikely to ever return at pre-COVID 19 levels. Many firms have implemented hybrid schedules that allow employees to work at home certain days of the week. Some other white collar companies have given up on downtown and moved their offices to other urbanized neighborhoods, including Century City and Pasadena, saying that downtown hasn't sufficiently recovered from the pandemic as stores and restaurants remain closed and streets feel less safe than they did in 2019. Nevertheless, 'the downtown community has maintained a sort of passionate commitment to the place, and while there are challenges, they are not dissuaded by them,' said Nick Griffin, executive vice president of the DTLA Alliance. Committed residents say they like downtown's city lifestyle and they want to see it improve as the neighborhood transitions from being primarily office-centric to more residential-oriented. Restaurants and other small businesses are making a comeback after COVID-19 restrictions contributed to widespread closures, Griffin said. 'We've had 140 new restaurants open since the end of the pandemic,' he said. 'That's many, many more than we lost.' Support for the businesses is underpinned by the residential population and growth in visits to downtown by regional residents and tourists, Griffin said. 'Where it was a doom loop in one direction three years ago, downtown is now going back to that virtuous cycle that we were in after the financial crisis' that caused the Great Recession nearly two decades ago. In the years before the pandemic, 'we were just on a roll,' Griffin said. That included a monumental housing construction boom prompted by the fact that developers find it somewhat easier to get big projects approved downtown than elsewhere because city leaders have long identified downtown as a place for dense housing growth. It has ample sites to build on, especially in South Park, and is the nexus for the region's rail, bus and freeway lines. Southern California has a serious housing shortage and 'downtown is one of the few places that has been able to build at any scale over the past 10 years,' Griffin said. In that time, 22% of the new housing in the city was built downtown, he said. The latest major project is a 54-story skyscraper with 685 apartments nearly completed at Hill Street and Olympic Boulevard, a few blocks east of the L.A. Live entertainment complex. The tower, called Olympic + Hill, is being built by Canadian developer Onni Group, which has been one of downtown's most active builders during the housing boom. Other large projects planned downtown include three similar-scaled high-rises near Olympic + Hill by other developers, but they're not under construction and the pipeline is drying up. Housing construction in Los Angeles plunged during the first quarter of 2025, according to a recent report by research firm Hilgard Analytics, a drop-off that could ultimately worsen the city's affordability crisis. The city approved permits for 1,325 new residences during the first three months of 2025, down nearly 57% from the same period a year earlier. 'Supply is going to be falling off a cliff in 2026,' said local developer Jaime Lee, chief executive of Jamison group of companies. Industry observers point to high interest rates and rising costs of material and labor, as well as uncertainty over tariffs and immigration policies that could reduce the construction workforce. Additionally, local developers are wary of Measure ULA, a new Los Angeles tax on large property sales that cuts into potential profits. An urban lifestyle that doesn't rely on driving everywhere helped lure Noemi Tagorda to downtown in 2006. She moved from Cambridge, Mass., after getting a job at USC, where she manages the financial aid office. She and her husband didn't have cars in Massachusetts, 'and I realized I never wanted to drive again,' she said. 'We found a place here in downtown where I could commute to work taking the bus or the train.' They're now a one-car family with three sons, Tagorda said. The boys attend Catholic schools downtown, including Cathedral High School near Dodger Stadium, which her oldest reaches by bus. They're active in a Boy Scout troop that meets at a Buddhist temple in Little Tokyo. 'I think that a lot of the families leave because there is a perception that there are no educational opportunities in downtown,' she said. 'We need everyone to see downtown as a vibrant community with families and all types of people there, and we also need to support the schools that are in our community.' She shops for groceries at downtown's Ralphs and Whole Foods stores, and laments the closure of Macy's department store on 7th Street earlier this year. 'I used to go to Macy's a lot.' Also in walking distance are movie theaters Alamo Drafthouse and Regal LA Live, and an indoor golf simulator the boys enjoy. Tagorda's mother, a migrant from Mexico, lived downtown in an apartment building that was razed to make way for the Los Angeles Convention Center that opened its first phase in 1971. 'There have been families here for a very, very long time,' she said. 'Families do belong downtown.' The population base is also large enough now for downtown to be considered a true residential neighborhood with the same needs as other parts of the city, said Horton, who is a co-founder of the Downtown Los Angeles Residents Assn. Among its devotees are residents who work in government or are architects or urban planners who 'know downtown is a real project,' she said. 'If you don't want something that's kind of cast in amber and already formed, there's a lot of opportunity to kind of help shape the neighborhood.'