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Google and Apple Are Opening New Offices In West LA
Amrita Khalid
Amrita Khalid is a tech journalist based in Los Angeles, and has written for Quartz, The Daily Dot, Engadget, Inc. Magazine and number of other publications. She got her start in Washington, D.C., covering Congress for CQ-Roll Call. You can send tips or pitches to amrita@dot.la or reach out to her on Twitter at @askhalid.
Even though Los Angeles’ office market faces an uncertain future due to the slowing economy, signs seem to suggest that West L.A. could weather the storm.
For starters, Apple and Google still plan to open new offices in the area — even as much of Big Tech is scaling back their physical footprints nationwide. Earlier this month, Apple's plans to build 536,000 square feet of office space and production space went before the Culver City Planning Commission. The Culver Crossings campus is expected to break ground in early 2023, with an anticipated move-in date of 2026.
“The West L.A. office market is very different from the rest of the county in that it has an abundance of very cool, architecturally distinct real estate that is very attractive to the creatives”,” wrote CBRE’s Vice Chairman Jeffrey Pion in an email. “While many of the tech companies are downsizing in other parts of the country, we are not yet certain how much of that anticipated downsizing will occur in this market but believe the long term outlook for West Los Angeles is very good.”
In addition, a Google spokesperson confirmed to dot.LA that Google has leased the former Westside Pavilion shopping complex in West L.A. and plans to move in sometime in 2023. The company has yet to decide which job functions or divisions will be located in the new West L.A. campus. And Amazon signed a deal to rent a 200,000-square-foot space at the Water Garden this summer as part of a greater Southern California expansion, even as it halted plans to build other offices nationwide.
Nonetheless, the state of L.A.’s office space market remains uncertain as companies also scramble to cut costs due to the slowing economy. J.P. Morgan Asset Management this week put up its 1.4 million square foot Santa Monica office campus for sale — which includes tenants like Amazon and Sony Inc., reported the Commercial Observer.
Still, according to a third-quarter report from CBRE, West L.A.’s office vacancy rate is at 14.5% — roughly four points lower than the average in Greater Los Angeles. “[...] Several tech, media, and entertainment companies leased space this quarter, emphasizing the prevalence of entertainment and technology in Los Angeles and West L.A.,” wrote the authors of the report.
This is all to say that after two years of remote work and hybrid offices, 2022 could be ushering in a vibe shift as more companies reverted to traditional in-office work environments. Nearly 50% of company leaders said they were planning to require workers to return to the office full-time in the next year, according to a Microsoft survey from March. While a sluggish economy has forced some companies to make cuts to their workforce and close offices — many also appear to be staying put or even expanding their corporate real estate portfolios.
The potential shift to in-office work could be further bolstered by the current economic downturn, according to Matthew E. Kahn, Provost Professor of Economics at USC. In an email to dot.LA, Kahn wrote, “During a tech recession, management has the upper-hand in determining the real pay of workers and ordering workers to work on-site — 5 days a week — is a type of pay cut.”
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Amrita Khalid
Amrita Khalid is a tech journalist based in Los Angeles, and has written for Quartz, The Daily Dot, Engadget, Inc. Magazine and number of other publications. She got her start in Washington, D.C., covering Congress for CQ-Roll Call. You can send tips or pitches to amrita@dot.la or reach out to her on Twitter at @askhalid.
https://twitter.com/askhalid
QR Codes Will Be LA Schools' First Line of COVID Defense When Students Return Monday
09:00 AM | August 14, 2021
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
When students at the nation's second largest school district return to school Monday, they will be carrying not only a backpack, but a QR code that is supposed to be the first line of defense against spreading COVID-19.
The QR code is like a pass school officials scan to make sure teachers and students' health screenings, COVID test results and vaccination records are aligned with safety rules. The district called the technology, created in partnership with Microsoft at no cost to the district, "groundbreaking" and the first of its kind in the nation, but glitches have already emerged.
Some parents are preparing for potential "lines around the block" on Monday as children are screened.
The application is effectively a massive living database that will track the more than half a million students and about 75,000 employees that will have to undergo weekly COVID testing.
To keep children safe, district officials plan on administering and processing 100,000 COVID tests each day.
The Daily Pass was first used in the spring when 1 in 4 students attended in-person classes. Starting Monday, the district will be faced with vastly increasing the scale of its use.
Some parents who sent their children to school in the spring are raising concerns. Several said the website crashed some mornings and that test results didn't load within the expected 24 to 36 hour timeframe necessary.
Still the Los Angeles Unified School District boasts that it has the "strongest safety standards in the country," and a spokesperson said the Daily Pass is part of its "robust" mitigation measures.
On Monday, the website will again be put to the test.
Gov. Gavin Newsom this week ordered that all teachers and staff must either be vaccinated or submit to a weekly test that shows they are not infected with COVID-19, a protocol backed by the nation's largest teachers union and Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and President Joe Biden's chief advisor on COVID-19. LAUSD Interim Superintendent Megan Reilly said Friday LAUSD employees must be vaccinated by Oct. 15.
And the district is going even further than the state's mandate, requiring weekly testing for students and staff regardless of their vaccination status. Masks will also be required indoors and outdoors while on school campuses. The L.A. County Department of Public Health guidelines only require masks be worn indoors, but school districts can enforce more stringent protocols.
LAUSD's Daily Pass app
Problems With the App
In the spring, if a negative COVID test result was not loaded into the app, students couldn't return to campus on the first day of school.
Leo Jungeun Oh said her daughter missed three weeks because her results didn't appear in the app even after taking three tests at a district vaccination site.
She said her 9-year-old stood outside the gate in tears while she spoke to the principal. In the car, her daughter's sadness turned into anger as she couldn't understand why she was excluded from school, while her older sister wasn't.
Oh enrolled both children in the Santa Clarita Unified School District where they don't require weekly testing.
"Why do I have to get victimized, and my children, it's just too much for us; I'm done with this," she said.
Parents are responsible for getting their child a "baseline" COVID test before Monday and the district has established several testing sites throughout the sprawling district. Test results are added to a child's Daily Pass profile. Parents can call a hotline at 213-443-1300 if test results are not appearing on the app. Once it does load, parents recommend taking a screen shot of the QR code or printing it out.
At the testing sites, some parents have reported waiting two to three hours in line, errors in the system with spelling of names and birthdates, and challenges for new student enrollees in getting an ID number to go into the system, Jenny Hontz, spokesperson for the parent advocacy organization Speak Up, said.
Not everyone has had such bad experiences. Others said there was a quick turnaround with results and the testing sites were very convenient.
If a student hasn't been tested by the first day of school, rapid antigen tests may be available so children will not be turned away.
"However this is not guaranteed and parents are encouraged to schedule the baseline test for their child as soon as possible," a district spokesperson said. No appointments are necessary.
Easing Anxiety
LAUSD officials said at Tuesday's school board meeting that the enhanced safety measures should ease parents' worries about sending their unvaccinated children to school, the vast majority for the first time since March 2020.
"We learned so much from the spring and we are in fact looking joyfully to back to school 2021," the district's chief of schools, David Baca, said.
To take on the massive undertaking, 900 healthcare professionals will administer COVID tests at about 1,000 campuses across the county.
The district is sharing the data collected through the Daily Pass with Stanford University, UCLA, The Johns Hopkins University, Anthem Blue Cross, Healthnet and Cedars Sinai to "to provide insights for strategies" for creating a safe environment. While the data is anonymized, some parents and advocates have privacy concerns.
And there are worries about the district's ability to just carry out the feat.
"There are some questions about the capacity for LAUSD to get every student tested weekly with the number of students expected to return to campus in the fall," Hontz said.
In the spring, the weekly COVID testing requirement was extended to every 14 days after the district failed to keep up with demand. The district said students will be able to answer screening questions verbally when they arrive if they don't have the QR code.
Negeen Ben-Cohen, a parent of three LAUSD students, is part of California Students United, a group of parents that filed a lawsuit opposing the district's weekly testing protocols. She is hoping the website can handle the influx of parents that will be logging on Monday.
"There were a couple days (in the spring) that I had to struggle, standing at the gate trying to get QR codes to load so that my kids could get in," she said.
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Sarah Favot
Favot is an award-winning journalist and adjunct instructor at USC's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. She previously was an investigative and data reporter at national education news site The 74 and local news site LA School Report. She's also worked at the Los Angeles Daily News. She was a Livingston Award finalist in 2011 and holds a Master's degree in journalism from Boston University and BA from the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada.
Using Backyards as Showrooms, Online Furniture Retailer Outer Raises $4.3 Million
03:43 PM | June 16, 2020
Outer, the direct-to-consumer outdoor furniture brand that uses backyards as showrooms, raised $4.3 million in a seed round led by Mucker Capital. The two-year-old Santa Monica based company has seen business boom during the pandemic as retail stores shut down and online orders surged. Suburbanites looking for a stay-cation plucked up their eco-friendly sectionals as consumers spent more time at home.
"We went from tens of thousands of dollars in monthly revenue to millions of dollars in monthly revenue," said co-founder Jiake Liu. "In April we hit profitability."
The closure of retail has given the company an opening and the rise of Airbnb has made consumers more comfortable going into strangers' homes.
Outer has tapped into the shared economy with a network of 120 showrooms in customers' backyards. The company pays its partners $50 a visit and says it has a waiting list of 6,000 applicants.
"We are catering to this new consumer who is so used to online shopping, but that doesn't take away the fact that people still need to touch see and feel a lot of products and specifically around furniture," he said. "People just want to sit in a sofa before investing $1,000."
The pandemic has brought in new opportunities.
Outer's low-slung sectionals range from $2,000 to $8,000, and are supposed to appeal to Restoration Hardware and Pottery Barn shoppers. Liu and co-founder Terry Lin, a former designer at Pottery Barn describe the design as timeless.
The products are manufactured in Liu's family-owned factory outside of Shanghai. The family, which has built furniture for retailers for years, shifted their production to source recycled materials. The new round of funding will help Outer develop better products and build a line of rugs, tables and other outdoor products. Liu also said he's focused on expanding content around outdoor living.
If working remotely catches on permanently, he said, it could help his business as people seek to work outside of urban cores to roomier homes with wider outdoor spaces.
The funding round pulled in some big names in Los Angeles consumer tech, including Honey co-founder George Ruan, GOAT co-founder Eddy Lu and Thrive Market co-founder Nick Green.
"It's truly an L.A. story and I am really glad about that," Liu said.
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Rachel Uranga
Rachel Uranga is dot.LA's Managing Editor, News. She is a former Mexico-based market correspondent at Reuters and has worked for several Southern California news outlets, including the Los Angeles Business Journal and the Los Angeles Daily News. She has covered everything from IPOs to immigration. Uranga is a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism and California State University Northridge. A Los Angeles native, she lives with her husband, son and their felines.
https://twitter.com/racheluranga
rachel@dot.la
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