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LA’s downtown visionary is hopeful — just not with these candidates

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For a generation, Nick Patsaouras was widely seen as a visionary, a man who dreamed of an LA whose downtown would emerge as the center of our vast, sprawling region.

The Greek engineer, who emigrated here in 1961, exercised great influence with mayors like Tom Bradley, Richard Riordan and Antonio Villaraigosa, all of whom shared something of this vision. 

Now over lunch at a half-empty Jonathan Club last week, it’s clear Nick’s hopes for downtown are fading away.

“It’s different today, you see it on the streets,” he suggested over, naturally, a Greek salad. “City Hall was buzzing. It was hard to get a lunch reservation. Now it’s no problem.”

The decline of downtown comes despite years of hype from places like the New York Times, which in 2019 compared downtown’s growth to the awakening of “a sleeping giant.” Since then, the core has devolved instead into a dystopia of half-vacant buildings, including luxury high-rises; trash-filled, crime-ridden streets filled with ragged people; and criminal gangs who even strip the copper from street lights. 

So much for the relentless densification beloved by architectural “visionaries,” local planners, construction unions and well-connected developers. These boosters foresaw a city center to rival Manhattan, and instead created one that looks remarkably like Mumbai on a bad day.

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