Reclaiming the Center:
A Regenerative Vision for Hawthorne, California
My first job was at a bookstore inside a mall that has been dead longer than it was open. I worked at the B. Dalton Bookseller in the Hawthorne Plaza, Hawthorne, California. My family moved to Hawthorne in 1987, and the Plaza was the center of downtown then — 130 stores, a regional anchor, the place you went before there was anywhere else to go. It closed in 1999, undone by the same forces that would eventually hollow out malls across the country: the departure of anchor tenants, the rise of bigger regional centers, expiration of tax breaks and in Hawthorne's case, the specific damage of the 1992 uprising and the aerospace industry collapse that took tens of thousands of well-paying jobs out of the South Bay in the years before. The current owner, The Charles Company of West Hollywood, acquired the property in 2001 and has done nothing with it since. This past September, after years of code enforcement actions and legal proceedings, the City of Hawthorne obtained a court injunction requiring the company to demolish or redevelop the site by August 31, 2026, or face a court-appointed receiver. That deadline is what has brought this proposal into focus.
The Urban Ecology Conservatory is advocating for the adaptive reuse of Hawthorne Plaza as an eco-regenerative community neighborhood — a formal way of saying that we want to turn a derelict million-square-foot structure into something the 88,000 people who live in Hawthorne can actually use. The full proposal, which we have already presented to Mayor Alex Vargas and the City Manager, describes a layered civic campus: affordable housing at 30 to 80 percent of Area Median Income, deed-restricted in perpetuity; a rooftop greenhouse, green roof, and stormwater capture infrastructure that would intercept 6.5 million gallons of annual rainfall in a neighborhood that currently has almost no tree canopy and ranks in the 89th percentile of California's pollution burden index; a public library, fabrication and maker spaces, a performing arts venue, co-working space available at subsidized rates, farm-to-table restaurants, a recording studio, childcare, elder care, a natural swimming pool, and a cooling center. The ecological and the civic are designed together rather than as separate programs, because Hawthorne's environmental conditions — aviation pollution, extreme heat, near-total impervious surface coverage — are themselves a community health issue, and any honest response to a 26-year vacancy at the center of a low-income city has to address both at once.
The proposal sits in direct contrast to The Charles Company's 2017 plan, called Magnitude LAX, which called for demolishing the existing structure and building roughly one million square feet of new luxury mixed-use development at an estimated cost of $500 million — in 2017 dollars. That figure was always a rendering-brochure number rather than a construction estimate, and it has not aged well: commercial construction costs in Los Angeles have increased by an estimated 40 to 50 percent since 2017, putting the real current cost of Magnitude LAX somewhere between $750 million and over $1 billion. More fundamentally, a luxury development in a city where 73 percent of residents are renters and 41 percent of households earn less than $50,000 a year would not serve the people who have been living with this vacancy. The research on gentrification and displacement in Los Angeles County is consistent on this point: when higher-income development arrives in low-income renter-majority neighborhoods, lower-income households leave, and they tend to move to neighborhoods with worse schools and higher crime rates. That outcome is not inevitable if development is structured differently, which is what the adaptive reuse framework attempts to do.
The economic case for the approach we are proposing draws on precedents closer in scale and context than the High Line. In 2010, the City of Lancaster, California — a desert city in the northern reaches of Los Angeles County, historically auto-dependent, with a significant working-class population — invested $11.5 million to convert nine blocks of a five-lane arterial road into a pedestrian-centered, tree-lined public boulevard designed by Pasadena-based Moule & Polyzoides. Within four years, the project had attracted $130 million in private investment, generated $273 million in total economic output as estimated by the California Redevelopment Association, contributed to a near-doubling of downtown tax revenues, and added 48 businesses and 802 permanent jobs to a struggling commercial corridor. The Hawthorne Plaza project is considerably more complex and more expensive, but the underlying relationship between public investment in civic space and subsequent private investment is the same: when a city makes a legible commitment to a place, capital tends to follow, and the returns compound over time in ways that are difficult to model in advance but well-documented in retrospect.
We have met with Mayor Vargas. The proposal is on the table, the deadline is real, and we are building the public case for a different outcome than demolition or luxury redevelopment. If the question of what happens to dead malls — and there are hundreds of them, in cities across the country that are having versions of the same argument Hawthorne is having right now — seems like something worth following, we would be glad to have you with us.
Our proposal is available to review here: From Dead Mall to Living Neighborhood
