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Rams owner Stan Kroenke keeps mum on Warner Center game plan
Billionaire has plans for temporary training facility, but hasn’t spoken of a vision for wider development in the San Fernando Valley.
therealdeal.com
Rams owner Stan Kroenke keeps mum on Warner Center game plan
“I assume he bought all that land not just to sit on it,” says Councilman Bob Blumenfield
JUL 6, 2023, 11:00 AM
By
Trevor Bach
In a year filled with high-profile L.A. real estate deals, Stan Kroenke’s ranked among the biggest.
Last March, the billionaire developer and owner of the NFL’s Los Angeles Rams bought the Promenade, a “zombie mall” in the Warner Center district of Woodland Hills, for $150 million. A couple months later, in June, Kroenke added an adjacent site, the 13-story former Anthem Blue Cross office tower and surrounding block, for $175 million. In December he picked up The Village, a newer outdoor mall in the same area, for $325 million — creating a three-property, $650 million, 96-acre assemblage in a part of the San Fernando Valley that’s long been poised for major redevelopment.
In recent weeks, thanks to a new city planning application for a Rams practice facility at the Anthem site, the first iteration of Kroenke’s plan has been confirmed. But 16 months after The Kroenke Group’s first marquee Warner Center purchase, the billionaire still hasn’t shown his cards on his vision for a development that could end up as a signature new landmark for both Warner Center and the broader San Fernando Valley.
“I assume he bought all that land not just to sit on it,” said L.A. Councilmember Bob Blumenfield, who represents the area and has long championed Warner Center development. “I’m eager to see what he wants to do — I like getting things moving, and I think the investment would be very positive.”
Yet so far Kroenke — a lifelong businessman and longtime sports owner whose low-key personality once earned him the nickname “Silent Stan” — has been characteristically tight-lipped, revealing nothing of his wider plans. His firm The Kroenke Group also has not applied for any new projects and, despite widespread speculation, has not hinted at what’s to come. The firm also did not respond to an inquiry from TRD.
Temporary construction
The recent project application did illuminate Kroenke’s plans for the team, which plays its home games at the new SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, about 30 miles to the southeast of the Warner Center assemblage. The San Fernando Valley location is some 20 miles closer to SoFi than the team’s current practice facility at California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks.
The document was filed by TKG Management, a subsidiary of The Kroenke Group, last month, and calls for two adjacent natural grass practice fields on the parking lot of the former Anthem building. It also outlines plans for a new, roughly 65,000-square-foot training facility near the fields, which would connect to the office building via a series of modular structures, and calls for the demolition of one existing 9,000-square-foot visitor center and one 6,400-square-foot movie theater building that was part of the shuttered Promenade mall.
The team has said the training facility will be temporary, so the team can move in later this year while working on longer term plans. The Rams also intend to move its offices to the former Anthem building from Agoura Hills.
“Our long-term vision is to build a permanent practice facility at the Woodland Hills site that Stan Kroenke purchased over the past year,” a team spokesperson recently told the L.A. Daily News.
The practice facility plans have both political and business support. Last month Blumenfield sent out an enthusiastic letter to constituents that promised to help “ensure their review gets rolling so the Rams can call Warner Center home as soon as possible.” The West Valley Warner Center Chamber of Commerce CEO has said the facility will offer an economic boost and “bring prestige to Warner Center.”
Warner Center, a special district that was created decades ago within the neighborhoods of Woodland Hills and Canoga Park, was originally envisioned as a higher-density “downtown” for the mostly suburban San Fernando Valley. In 2013, Blumenfield helped push through the Warner Center 2035 Plan, which created a development-friendly blueprint, including a streamlined environmental impact report process, for 14 million more square feet of commercial building and 20,000 residential units.
“Projects get approved in Warner Center faster than anywhere else in the city,” Blumenfield said. And because Kroenke’s assemblage is entirely within the district, which has very few development restrictions, the owner could have wide leeway to create a new commercial district, the councilman pointed out. While Kroenke hasn’t spoken about his plans, since he started buying up the parcels analysts have speculated that he intends to build a Rams-centered complex that resembles a smaller version of his Hollywood Park at SoFi, where plans ultimately include a near 300-acre “unparalleled sports and entertainment destination” featuring shops, office space, a hotel, apartments and outdoor space.
Promenade 2035 plan
At Warner Center, the Rams owner could decide to take advantage of entitlements that are already in place. In late 2020, before the French firm Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield ended up selling the Promenade site to Kroenke’s group, the L.A. City Council unanimously approved a plan, called Promenade 2035, to repurpose the derelict mall into a major mixed-use complex with around 1,400 residential units, 280,000 square feet of restaurant and retail space, over 700,000 square feet of office space, two hotels and a 10,000-seat entertainment center.
That project amounted to the largest ever proposed in Warner Center, and generated plenty of excitement and criticism, including from residents who saw a new invigoration for the West Valley and others who worried about traffic congestion and affordability.
Kroenke’s larger development plans, whenever they come to light, are likely to reignite the same emotions.
“We lived through the entitlement process and went through the slings and arrows,” Blumenfield said of the Promenade 2035 plan. “But since Kroenke has been so silent about what they’re going to do, and whether they’re going to [follow the Promenade plans] or do their own thing, it hasn’t become an issue.”
“I’m more just eager to see how this is going to play out,” Blumenfield added. “That Promenade site has been sitting vacant for a very long time.”
