Oceanwide Plaza luxury development, a 30-story complex that has remained vacant and half-finished since 2019, has sparked debates in Los Angeles.
In a daring stunt, three taggers broke into the highest of Oceanwide’s three towers and spray-painted their names across its floor-to-ceiling windows. The graffiti in the towers quickly proliferated across social media, creating a sense of excitement within Los Angeles’ graffiti community.
However, the question now is what will become of the towers. Should they be demolished? Should the city seize them, complete them, and turn them into public housing? Or will they stand for decades as “ghost towers,” the kinds that loom over economically ravaged cities as a constant reminder of what could have been?
On Feb. 9, the L.A. City Council voted through a measure to have the buildings cleaned and secured and serve Oceanwide with the bill — which could be as high as $4 million. However, Oceanwide is now bankrupt, part of a massive real estate market crash in China valued in the hundreds of billions of U.S. dollars that also took down Evergrande, the country’s largest real estate developer.
Billionaire developer Rick Caruso, a former L.A. mayoral candidate, criticized the city’s approach to handling the graffiti. He expressed that the city’s dependency on money from China has led to the situation and blamed it on several bad policies that have been ongoing for years.
Mayor of Los Angeles Karen Bass did not respond to the requests for a comment during the writing of the story, but a Bass aide provided a statement regarding the dangerous stunts and risks that have been observed at the towers. This situation continues to create discussions on the future of Oceanwide Plaza and the implications of its current state on the city of Los Angeles.
