You can read the WSJ article here. Excerpt below.

Some say a $15 minimum wage, slated by 2020, will drive them out.

LOS ANGELES—Its numbers have slipped from earlier highs, but Los Angeles still boasts more jobs making jeans, jackets and other apparel than any other pocket of the country.

Manufacturers and designers now fear “Made in L.A.” is under threat from a new law set to boost the city’s minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2020.

The city’s wage law, which will raise the base pay by 50% over five years, serves as a test for urban minimum wages. Advocates say it will provide much needed help for working families but manufacturers warn it will undercut their competitiveness and drive them out of town.

Contract apparel manufacturer 5 Thread Factory, whose garments include shirts for men and women, mountain-bike gear and other products, has outgrown its two floors of space in a gritty downtown neighborhood just three years after it opened. But with wages rising, CEO Brian Zuckerman said he won’t sign another lease in the city.

“The simple answer to this whole conversation is we’re moving out of the city of L.A.,” he said.

Although many artists have flocked to industrial areas of Los Angeles for decades, there has been a rapid increase in this movement over the past 5 years. Especially in the Downtown Arts District and the NorthEast L.A. neighborhoods of Silverlake, Glassell Park, Mt. Washington, Frogtown, and Atwater.

The below is excerpted from a WSJ Magazine feature article on Michael Kelley in 2013.

At a time when rising-star artists earned their stripes in New York, Kelley also stood apart for championing Los Angeles, a once-sleepy art scene that now simmers with younger talents like painter Mark Grotjahn and sculptor Sterling Ruby—both in their early-to-mid forties—who say they moved there in part to study with Kelley or work nearby. In fact, his thrift-store aesthetic has arguably influenced the way younger artists everywhere think about making art. “Mike brought the lowest, base forms of pop culture into the arts,” says Ruby. “That’s big with my generation, but he was the pioneer.”

It just so happens that we were involved in  real estate transactions with each of these artists (Kelley, Ruby and Grotjahn).  The neighborhoods were, Glassell Park, Frogtown, and Vernon, respectively.

Currently we have a 9,000 square foot brick building with fenced yard available for lease along the L.A. River bordering Glassell Park and Frogtown.

The USDA plans to close 259 of their US offices, facilities and labs.  The Los Angeles County office will be closed and re-opened inside one of my client’s food processing facility, which is a poultry slaughterhouse.