The Urban Land Institute has just completed a study on ways to compete with Santa Monica and Venice to attract creative office users.

PARKING

CONVERT WAREHOUSES TO CREATIVE SPACE

FIBER OPTICS

For Culver City–work on parking, parking, parking and make it easy for developers to convert the warehouses to creative office (which means helping figuring out the parking).  Culver City has a good inventory of mid century warehouses buildings which developers have converted into amazing creative space.  Samitaur has supplied ground breaking architecture.  That has been one of Culver City’s magnets.

El Segundo Sees Creative Ways to Lure Business

By Jacquelyn RyanMonday, July 30, 2012

Move over, Silicon Beach: El Segundo wants in on the tech boom action.

The Urban Land Institute just completed a study for the city that suggests ways it can develop its own creative office space hub that would compete with Santa Monica and Venice, where Google Inc. occupies more than 100,000 square feet and is looking for more space.

The focus of the plan is the former industrial neighborhood known as Smoky Hollow, bounded by the Chevron oil refinery, Pacific Coast Highway and El Segundo’s downtown corridor.

Urban Land Institute consultants conducted the study to help the city identify amenities and services it needs to provide to attract creative firms and become an incubator area for startups. The study, released last week, found that the neighborhood’s industrial feel, small midcentury buildings and beachside locale will be attractive to such firms. Building prices are also advantageous, coming in at least $325 a square foot cheaper than Santa Monica.

But to be truly competitive, the city needs to increase its fiberoptic connections, add parking and amend its specific plan to encourage adaptive reuse, because creative companies seem to be attracted to a concrete-floor, bare-ceiling aesthetic.

This article below from last year shows Los Angeles as low as number 10 as a hotspot for tech startups.  This contrasts with the dot com boom where Los Angeles was a solid four.  A lot depends on how one slices and dices data.  When you look at Los Angeles Orange County as a region, it ranks number 3 to 5 in venture funding ( depending on the quarter) according to Money Tree Price Waterhouse.  However, the rank falls perciptiously when you look at just  software venture funding as this area is driving the urban tech boom.  A recent article by Richard Florida put Los Angeles.  An article by Richard Florida, published in the Atlantic Cities (June 13, 2013), America’s Leading Metros for Venture Capital, shows the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area as number 5.

Map: The hottest spots in the U.S. for startup tech jobs – GeekWire.

In general, Los Angeles as a whole as well as West LA, are lagging behind other major cities in digital technology growth.  However, one area that is booming here is digital advertising.  This specific market is where Los Angeles, especially the Westside, has a dominant role in the this technology.  A recent LA Times article was published that discussed this phenomenon.  In the article, one of PMI’s tenants, Omelet, in Culver City was featured.  However, in the same building, two other digital advertising firms reside in a three tenant building.  See the Los Angeles Times article below from today.

Digital advertising firms are built for the Internet age – latimes.com.