Over the past several years, the City of Commerce has been pushing forward with plans to raze a strip of industrial buildings between The Citadel shopping center and The Commerce Casino. The city’s goal is to replace these warehouse and manufacturing properties with retail development.
Parties that have been involved or have an interest are the following: Costco Wholesale Inc; Nederlander Organization; Majestic Realty; Commerce Hyundai; J.H. Snyder Company; Golden Boy Productions; and Craig Realty. Costco is currently constructing a new 126.432 square foot retail building on a 12 acre site at 6333 Telgraph Road; the 126,432 square foot store will be a business-to-business prototype, serving the needsof community and business residents. The store will feature business supplies, a food court, and a 4-bay gasoline station. This corner location at Telegraph and Washington is the site of the former Firestone building. Here is a preliminary site plan for the project.
Los Angeles Magazine has written a lengthy article about Baker Commodities, a livestock rendering plant based in the City of Vernon, California, near Downtown Los Angeles. It is the oldest rendering business in L.A. and the largest on the West Coast. In 2008, some 250 U.S. rendering plants like Baker took in 54 billion pounds of killed livestock—blood, bone, guts, legs, hide, muscle, and head, the detritus of slaughter—warmed the raw material in cookers, and squeezed out a clear liquid called tallow.
Baker seizes on fat wherever it can: dairy cows that have died in the heat of the Central Valley, the trimmings left over from the purchase of a Niman Ranch roast at Whole Foods, steaks and chickens whose shelf life at Pavilions has expired. The company retrieves grease from deep fryers at McDonald’s and the drippings of ribs in the Vons hot section. Rendering is the most elemental form of recycling, the regeneration of the dead into soap and scented creams. It has existed for millennia in societies, and its reach in modern America is staggering. We live in a vast cycle of fat reclamation, one that stretches from the killing floors of the Midwest to our medicine cabinets, making a stop along the way at the local Burger King.
Every restaurant and fast-food stand in L.A. has a fat reservoir called a grease trap, usually secreted under the parking lot. A trap may strain as much as 15,000 gallons of liquid fat from a kitchen’s drains, though the speed at which it fills depends on what’s cooking upstairs. A Burger King trap can take three months to fill, while an El Pollo Loco trap might need to be emptied in weeks. There are tens of thousands of grease traps citywide, each a promising revenue source for rendering companies. Baker taps around 8,000 of them.
Biodiesel! About 40 pounds of good ground beef heated to 250 degrees will produce enough tallow to make a gallon of biodiesel. The process is insanely wasteful if cattle are raised for it alone; you’d need to boil an entire cow to fill your Chevy Volt. Yet there’s no shortage of cow remnants in slaughterhouses, and U.S. production of biodiesel from renderers has grown from 78,000 metric tons in 2007 to 400,000 metric tons in 2008.
CDC Small Business Finance announced today that all 504 loans approved after February 16, 2009, will be offered with significantly reduced loan fees. The Stimulus Plan completely eliminated the 0.50% SBA Fee charged on the first trust deed bank loan in a 504 loan structure. The plan also reduced the fees associated with the SBA piece of the structure from 2.15% of the loan amount to just 0.625%.
These changes will result in significant savings for commercial real estate buyers looking to finance purchases with SBA 504 loans. For example, consider a $2,000,000 purchase with just10% down payment in Los Angeles, California. The SBA fees under the old plan would have totaled approximately $5,000 on the bank loan and $17,200 on the SBA loan. With changes announced today, using the same purchase price and down payment, the total SBA fees are reduced to just $5,000 (a savings of $17,200).
The new fee structure is expected to remain inplace through the balance of 2009, but there is no guarantee. With respect to interest raters, the current SBA debenture rate is 5.60%. On the bank side, the 5 and 10-year fixed rates are 6.25% and 6.75%, respectively, resulting in a “blended” SBA 504 rate for owner-users of 5.96%. SBA.
CleanTech Manufacturing Center is a planned development in Downtown Los Angeles. The 19-acre tract on which the green industrial belt would be built was just acquired from the state of California for $14 million. Originally owned by Crown Coach, a builder of school buses, the land was supposed to be a site for a state prison, which was never built because of community protests. Thoroughly cleansed of toxics, it is now ready to receive one or more anchor tenants. The property once laced with toxic contaminants is where city officials hope to build Los Angeles’ future epicenter of clean technology and green jobs.
The Green Building Program was approved by the Los Angeles City Council in 2008.
Requirement
Meet the intent of the US Green Building Council’s (USGBC) Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED®) Certified level. (Formal certification by the USGBC is not required.)
Project team must include a LEED® Accredited Professional (LEED® AP). Information about local consultants can be obtained at: www.usgbc.org.
Both by-right and discretionary projects must receive clearance prior to the issuance of a building permit.
Subject Projects
A new non-residential building or structure of 50,000 gross square feet or more of floor area; or
A new mixed use or residential building of 50,000 gross square feet or more of floor area in excess of six stories; or
The alteration or rehabilitation of 50,000 gross square feet or more of floor area in an existing non-residential building for which construction costs exceed a valuation of 50 percent of the replacement cost of the existing building; or
The alteration of at least 50 dwelling units in an existing mixed-use or residential building seven stories or more, which has at least 50,000 gross square feet of floor area, for which construction costs exceed a valuation of 50 percent of the replacement cost of the existing building.
LEED® is comprised of various Rating Systems designed by the USGBC that establish green development standards. The existing Rating Systems include: New Construction (NC), Existing Buildings (EB), Commercial Interiors (CI), Core and Shell (CS) and Homes (H).
Southern California-based Shangri-La Industries and Thompson National Properties are forming a $100 million fund to make buildings more environmentally friendly and energy efficient – a big chunk of money for the growing green building industry. The companies’ $100 million Green Building Fund will be aimed at “value-add commercial and industrial assets that can be retrofitted, repositioned or redeveloped as energy efficient and environmentally sustainable,” according to the companies’ news release.
CALIFORNIA GREEN INNOVATION INDEX (2009): The Index provides insight on a California culture that includes three decades of ambitious state environmental and energy policies, putting California on a path to energy independence and one of the lowest per capita carbon footprints in the nation, all the while growing one of the most vigorous economies in the world.
