Room to Grow

The sale of a former defense industry plant in Van Nuys and its proposed transformation into a light industry and high-tech manufacturing campus is welcome news for the San Fernando Valley economy. It’s also an example of the kind of effort and teamwork needed to identify and make the best use of the Valley’s scarce remaining land parcels.

In a deal shepherded by Mayor Richard Riordan’s business team, Trammell Crow Co. purchased the former Marquardt Co. site and plans to spend $20 million redeveloping it. Potential tenants range from a biotech firm to a clothing manufacturer, an ideal use for a site in the shadow--and the noise footprint--of Van Nuys Airport.

The mayor had designated the site as part of his Genesis L.A. plan, a program to find new uses for a dozen large industrial properties scattered throughout the city.

Luring manufacturing jobs is itself a coup in post-Proposition 13 California. Tempted by sales tax revenues, cities often tend to push for retail development. Not that retail is bad; it too provides jobs as well as a place for residents to buy goods. But manufacturing generally provides better-paying jobs more likely to support a household. Such jobs are not only needed in Van Nuys but have a multiplier effect on the rest of the Valley: Better-paid employees spend more, so the city still gets its sales tax revenues.

The project is important for other reasons. At a conference last month sponsored by the Economic Alliance of the San Fernando Valley, businesses that were surveyed listed room to expand as one of their greatest needs.

And businesses aren’t the only ones. Construction of new Valley fire and police stations has been stalled due to the city’s difficulty finding sites. And everyone knows about the Los Angeles Unified School District’s problems finding large enough parcels to build desperately needed new schools. Room to grow is at a premium in the built-out Valley.

It’s not at a premium in places like the Tejon Ranch Co. in northern Los Angeles County. What Tejon Ranch has that the Valley doesn’t is land--lots of land.

On the same day The Times carried the story about the Marquardt site sale, Valley@Work columnist Karen Robinson-Jacobs wrote about the proposed development of a master-planned community of homes and businesses on what is now farmland at the junction of the Golden State Freeway and California 138.

Such development underscores that the Valley is no longer a typical bedroom-community suburb but a kind of middle ground between downtown Los Angeles and the newer, outer suburbs like Santa Clarita and, eventually, Tejon Ranch.

Joel Kotkin of the Pepperdine Institute of Public Policy told Robinson-Jacobs that the Valley could either benefit from its central location between downtown and the northern reaches of the county--or be passed over as its residents give up on traffic, schools, housing prices and lack of land for expansion and put down stakes elsewhere.

Thanks to the mayor’s Genesis L.A. program, the addition of 1,200 manufacturing jobs in Van Nuys puts down stakes here.

Now imagine devoting that kind of attention and teamwork on other vacant and underused lots throughout the Valley.

City officials could join forces with the Economic Alliance, which applies a welcome regional view to solving problems, and such Valley institutions as Cal State Northridge to identify and map available land, then get the word out to the development community, the school district and other groups looking to expand that there is, indeed, room left for stakeholders.