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THE URBAN MAN FOR KCRW, NOV. 13, 2006

Flipping Real Estate on First Street

By Marc Porter Zasada

BACK IN MARCH OF 2000, when the Chandler family announced that it had sold the Los Angeles Times to some guys in Chicago—thus ending 120 years of local control—the Urban Man understood.

I mean, everyone I know flips real estate here. Every day I see those full page ads for seminars on the subject, and these ads are not sentimental about family tradition. They don’t have headlines like, “Come learn how to create a longterm dynasty in the Southland.”

No, they say, “Take a bit of nothing, build it into something, and then flip it.”

Okay, I knew that in many ways, the Times, along with founders Harrison Gray Otis and Harry Chandler, created L.A. from nothing—starting right there at that building on First Street. And I knew that later, various Chandlers took our local paper and turned it into an international voice.

But that’s just history, and out here in the desert, nobody much cares about history. History evaporates like early-morning fog. It vaporizes in a hot easterly breeze. And if we’ve learned one thing in this town, it’s “never look back.”

Besides, the Urban Man is a globalized kind of guy. I know that media ownership has become a far off and volatile thing. I’m accustomed to my newspapers and radio stations being bought and sold as often as sports franchises. What does it matter who owns the local team as long as the players keep wearing those local colors? These days, it’s the fans who need to show loyalty—not, for heaven’s sake, the owners.

Still, I admit that despite many sound arguments not to care, I felt a certain nostalgic loss when the Times got sold off. And I have to confess that last week, when local entrepreneurs Eli Broad and Ron Burkle announced an effort to buy out those guys in Chicago and bring the paper back home, I did notice my heart leap, just a little.

I mean it’s such a delightfully old-fashioned notion, this idea of bringing the local paper home—almost as if L.A. were an actual city, almost as if L.A. were a real place with a unique identity and a special international viewpoint. Almost if we were not just one more location shoot or one more node on the information superhighway. Almost as if we were not just a well-situated campground for money, conveniently located between the mountains and the sea.

Of course, I know better than to get too excited about the possibility that our L.A. entrepreneurs will prevail. No one knows if the Chicago guys will actually sell, just as no one knows what the longterm intentions of any of the players may be. In Sunday’s opinion section, when the current Harry Chandler wrote to lament the inconstancy of his own wealthy family, he alluded suspiciously to the egos of entrepreneurs. But as Chandler should know better than anyone, entrepreneurs do sometimes build cities.

I don’t know Eli Broad or Ron Burkle personally. But I do find it sort of comforting to see the Broad name on more and more weighty museums and hefty new wings of large structures around L.A. I take heart that these buildings do seem to sit heavily in our shifting desert soil. They look tough to evaporate, even during a long hot summer. And who knows, maybe they’ll prove difficult to flip, even the next time a strong Santa Ana comes whipping across the basin and down along First Street.