For years, the conversation about downtown Los Angeles has focused on what it has lost: office workers who never really returned after the pandemic, struggling storefronts, vacant buildings and persistent concerns about homelessness and public safety.
This week, the Los Angeles City Council approved one of the biggest proposed developments in downtown in decades, offering supporters a chance to point to something different — a $2 billion investment they say reflects continued confidence in the city’s urban core, even as experts caution that one project alone won’t determine downtown’s future.
The Fourth & Central project would transform nearly eight acres of former Los Angeles Cold Storage Company’s warehouses and parking lots at the crossroads of the Arts District, Little Tokyo and Skid Row into a mixed-use neighborhood.
The project would include more than 1,500 homes, with more than 260 set aside as affordable housing, more than 400,000 square feet of office space, nearly 146,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space and roughly two acres of publicly accessible open space.
After a roughly five-year entitlement process that included environment review, community objections over the project’s scale, alcohol-related uses and potential impacts on neighboring Little Tokyo, and negotiations over community benefits, the City Council voted Tuesday to approve the project, clearing a major hurdle before construction can begin.
For supporters, the approval represents more than another housing development.
“It’s a really exciting project because it illustrates precisely what’s possible in downtown Los Angeles,” said Nella McOsker, president and CEO of the Central City Association, a business advocacy group focused on downtown Los Angeles.
Downtown remains the city’s strongest opportunity to add housing at scale, she said Thursday, and the project helps counter the perception that investors have lost confidence in downtown.
“I think this opportunity sort of reminds us of the fact that downtown is where L.A. can and should grow,” McOsker said.
McOsker pointed to Fourth & Central and the proposed World Trade Center conversion into affordable housing as examples of large residential projects moving forward despite a slower development market, arguing they demonstrate continued investor interest in downtown.
Fourth & Central also comes as other major projects are moving forward in and around downtown, including the Alveare affordable housing development in South Park, which broke ground in late 2025, and The Broad’s expansion ahead of the 2028 Olympics, adding to a pipeline of residential, cultural and mixed-use investment.
The project itself reflects years of planning and revisions. First unveiled in 2021, Fourth & Central was scaled back during the approval process, with its tallest tower reduced from 44 stories to 30. The approved plan includes 10 buildings.
Larry Rauch, president of Los Angeles Cold Storage Company, said the project was envisioned from the outset as a long-term investment intended to serve future generations of Angelenos.
“LA Cold Storage has operated at this Downtown site for over 130 years, and it is my hope that this project will serve the Los Angeles community over the next 130 years,” Rauch said in an emailed statement provided to SCNG Thursday.
Rauch said the company remains “bullish on the future of DTLA,” citing planned investments such as the Convention Center expansion, transportation improvements and what he described as the need for a strong downtown.
The project team also negotiated an agreement outlining community benefits with Little Tokyo and Skid Row community leaders. It includes additional affordable housing, public hearings and a community advisory group for future alcohol permits, space for nonprofits and neighborhood organizations, local hiring commitments and a neighborhood investment fund.
Those negotiations were about more than the project design. They also reshaped the relationship between the development and its neighboring communities.
“Growth is inevitable, but how we grow matters,” said Kristin Fukushima, executive director of the Little Tokyo Community Council, in an emailed statement Thursday.
She said years of community advocacy helped ensure the project better supports Little Tokyo and Skid Row while preserving the historic neighborhood’s cultural identity, demonstrating that large development projects can be improved when nearby communities have a meaningful voice in the planning process.
Councilmember Ysabel Jurado, whose office helped broker the deal, described downtown as being “at an inflection point” in an emailed statement Thursday, saying the project demonstrates that housing production and community priorities do not have to be at odds.
She said revitalization should not be measured by a single development, but by whether new investment strengthens the neighborhoods that have long called downtown home.
“Fourth & Central reflects that approach,” she said. “It is an investment in Downtown’s future, but it is also a statement that Downtown’s future has to include the communities that built it.”
Urban planning professor Michael Manville of the University of California, Los Angeles, said Thursday that Fourth & Central is significant largely because it will bring a substantial amount of housing to a transit-rich part of downtown where demand for homes remains strong.
But, he said, the City Council’s vote is not, by itself, the most meaningful signal about downtown’s future.
Instead, Manville said, the more significant fact is that the developer, lenders and investors remain willing to move forward with a project of this scale despite continued uncertainty in commercial real estate.
“The fact that it’s moving forward is probably reassuring to people who are concerned about the future of downtown,” he said. “If you had gotten a press release saying that the investors had all pulled out, that would be a bad sign for downtown. The fact that they’re still full steam ahead…that’s a good sign.”
Still, he cautioned against treating Fourth & Central as a bellwether for downtown as a whole.
The project sits near the Arts District, which Manville said has evolved differently from downtown’s traditional office core around Bunker Hill and the Financial District, where hybrid work has left many office buildings with elevated vacancies.
“I do think when people talk about fears about the futures of downtown, they’re talking more about traditional central business districts,” he said, referring to areas that historically depended on large numbers of white-collar commuters.
The broader challenge facing downtown Los Angeles, and many American downtowns, remains what becomes of office space if hybrid work continues, he said.
The uneven nature of downtown’s recovery is also reflected in projects such as the long-stalled Oceanwide Plaza development, which remains tied up in bankruptcy proceedings years after construction halted in 2019.
One response, Manville said, is adding more residents.
“One way to address that problem, of course, is to just turn the downtown much more into a place where people live,” Manville said.
Projects like Fourth & Central, located near transit and designed around housing, can help downtown evolve into more of a residential neighborhood, even if they do not resolve broader economic and social challenges overnight.
McOsker agreed that downtown’s recovery remains unfinished. She said public safety, homelessness and the return of government office workers remain critical to restoring the daily activity that supports restaurants, retailers and other small businesses.
But she said Fourth & Central challenges the narrative that investors have given up on downtown.
“Anyone who’s saying people don’t want to invest in downtown anymore – not true,” she said. “Look what we got.”