L.A. Approves Hollywood Millennium Project

The Los Angeles city council has approved a plan for a Hollywood skyscraper complex despite warnings that the project site may lie on a major earthquake fault line.

The Hollywood Millennium project – two skyscrapers and more than 1 million square feet of office, hotel and retail space – would be built on several vacant parking lots surrounding the Capitol Records building. The developer is Millennium Partners (New York), which has a number of mixed-use properties in its portfolio, most involving a luxury hotel and shopping. The towers in the Hollywood development would be 39 and 35 stories tall.

According to The Los Angeles Times, Mayor Eric Garcetti, who championed new development in Hollywood for 12 years while on the city council, said he planned to sign the deal. Newly elected councilman Mitch O'Farrell, who replaced Garcetti on the council, called the $664-million project a “game changer” that would create jobs and new tax revenue.

Though much of the opposition has centered on aesthetic and traffic issues, John Parrish, head of the California Geological Survey, sent a letter to council president Herb Wesson claiming the skyscrapers “may fall within an earthquake fault zone.” Parrish said a map drawn by his agency in 2010 showed that the Hollywood fault “goes right through the Millennium site.”

He criticized a seismic report produced by the developer that said extensive testing showed that the building site was safe and did not lie on the fault line. Parrish said the report did not refer to his agency's map and left out other important information.

Millennium co-founder Philip Aarons defended the company's testing. “Actual subsurface physical investigations are far superior to maps based on conjecture in locating faults,” he said.