2024 Construction Facility Of The Year: Extra Space, Los Angeles, CA

Posted by Jerry LaMartina on Jan 17, 2025 8:06:13 AM

Take a challenging self-storage construction site with little footprint to spare in densely developed and populated downtown Los Angeles, add typically extensive jurisdictional permitting requirements, pandemic-induced supply chain and other delays, and two of the wettest consecutive winters in Southern California’s history, and what do you get? In this case, you get an award. MSM named the Extra Space Storage facility at 2515 S. Broadway in downtown Los Angeles as its 2024 Facility of the Year winner in the construction category.

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Challenges Abound

All construction projects pose problems to be solved. This project’s designer and construction contractor both see it as an unusually challenging one.

This Extra Space Storage facility ironically allowed for nearly no extra space for staging construction. The three-story building with a basement occupies almost all the land it was built on, which is less than three-fourths of an acre. It fronts two streets and has immediately neighboring buildings.

In its written submission for consideration of the award, the project’s architectural firm describes the facility’s location on the corner of LA’s South Broadway and West 25th Street and near the 110 and 10 freeways as “easily accessed by commuters and locals alike.”

Ryan Jordan, executive vice president of the project’s construction contractor, Monarch Construction Management Inc. of Newport Beach, Calif., says the project was made challenging first because it’s in densely developed downtown Los Angeles. Along with very little space to stage construction, “not one square foot of extra site to lay anything down,” the project required vertical shored walls on all four property lines for the basement.

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“When confronted with a small site, the immediate reaction is to go vertical from a design perspective,” according to the award-consideration written submission. “The subject site was no different in this regard. Adding to the complexity of limited site area were the height limitations (due to proximity of residential) and the parking requirements that further challenged the design team to think outside the box ... or in this case, under the box.”

Jordan says Monarch Construction “knew what we were getting into” with the project. “We build multistory projects, self-storage with covered basements in urban infill development sites quite often,” he says. “This is a typical challenge for us but nonetheless a challenge.”

And that thing everybody talks about but nobody can do anything about also made the project much more challenging than usual: two consecutive winters of nearly record wet weather.

“Us California guys don’t act like we’re prepared for weather,” Jordan says, “especially when you dig a basement project. ... When you’re effectively digging a hole, you’re not rerouting much around it. You’re going to have to fight your way through it because it’s all sitting on top of you.”

The project’s owner and design team chose to include a basement to increase space for rentable square footage because of the site’s tight footprint and the city’s parking requirements. These included standard, accessible, and compact parking spaces and electric vehicle charging spaces.

Monarch Construction President Tom Stocksdale says the city required a basement-level rock pocket drainage and pump system for the project “very late in the game.” It was designed to control anticipated groundwater problems. Monarch had to design the system as quickly as it could. The team “dug in their heels and got the job done.”

But Stocksdale says the toughest problem they faced was that the city delayed the start of excavation and shoring because of permitting issues. And the rain started and continued for months.

“So, you’ve got a building that’s wide open, and you’re trying to finish it, but you don’t have a completed roof on it yet,” he says. “We tried to keep everything as dry as possible ... and make sure it drained properly.”

Another challenge was that the COVID-19 pandemic caused the City of Los Angeles, along with so many other jurisdictions and companies, to function while short staffed, he says.

Concrete also became harder to get. Monarch had to schedule big pours a week to two weeks ahead of time and give the supplier exact dates for it to arrive. If Monarch was unable to make the pour on the specified date, they would have to face another delay.

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Architectural Design

When approaching the corner of South Broadway and West 25th Street, the facility presents “a bank of glass giving way to faux doors at the second and third floors,” the entry information states. “The facility’s design incorporates a blend of modern and traditional elements, with brick facades and architectural details that pay homage to the nearby University of Southern California campus. With limited available height to work with, the design team was still able to vertically articulate the structure in order to break up the façade. The building also contains in and out movement along the street frontages. Though the project was essentially developed property line to property line, the project team did leave room for some bougainvillea plantings to ascent ornate metal trellises that are planted within the voids created by the façade movement. Further highlighting and complementing these features are decorative lighting fixtures selected by the internationally recognized firm of LDA.”

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Parking dominates the facility’s ground floor, but it also has some drive-up storage units, which are in high demand in that market area. The facility’s first floor is 15 feet high to allow for vehicle clearance. This height enabled the inclusion of lockers above the standard units, “a cost-effective solution for the local student population.” Music and Wi-Fi are available throughout the site.

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Developers must conform to jurisdictional permitting and code requirements where they build. This facility’s project manager, Marcelo Quiroga with San Clemente, Calif.-based Jordan Architects Inc., says he and his team had to supply written project plans to 15 different city departments. The city required venting of methane on the project, for example, as it does with most projects. Despite these requirements, the facility was able to quickly generate revenue when completed.

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The design was constrained on floor-to-floor height, Quiroga says. The city allowed him to exceed the height limit for elevators and stairway enclosures. He, too, has worked on similarly challenging projects, including one in San Diego that required methane venting and was close to a freeway, which complicated the retaining walls’ design and construction.

The city’s environmental “green” code requires the facility to include indoor bicycle parking spaces for employees and tenants, Quiroga says. The design called for a first-level, 10-by-30 enclosed and locked unit with parking racks for 10 short-term and 11 long-term parking spaces. Two showers were also required.

The facility includes solar panels that help supply power to run it. But another complication was that the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power would not inspect the solar system until the main electric meter was put in place, he says. As of October, there was an ongoing delay in getting the solar system operational.

All the facility’s lights are motion activated with timers than turn them off during inactive periods to save energy. The climate-controlled facility keeps the temperature typically between 55 and 80 degrees, intended to maintain comfortable temperatures while saving energy.

The client was concerned about the risk of the building getting tagged with graffiti, which is a common problem in that part of Los Angeles, so the building was designed with a brick veneer to blend in with the nearby University of Southern California’s brick buildings.

Graffiti “brings a nightmare for us,” says Quiorga. They applied a coating to protect the veneer. It makes cleaning off graffiti easier because the paint can’t attach to the surface as well. But pressure washing the surface might make it necessary to reapply the protective coating.

Quiroga is thinking of a way to eliminate the defacing of property with graffiti on a future project. His idea is to create a space on a project’s grounds where graffiti artists could practice their art without breaking the law, with the client’s approval, and maybe even hold a graffiti contest.

“Anything you do in LA is challenging,” says David Meinecke, vice president of Jordan Architects, a full-service design firm that focuses on retail, hospitality, custom residential, and self-storage projects. It was founded in 1981 and has designed self-storage facilities, hotels, retail centers, and resorts throughout the United States.

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Management And More

Michael Sparnicht, regional manager of third-party management for Salt Lake City-based Extra Space Storage Inc., works closely with the Los Angeles facility’s operations team. He calls the facility “an unbridled success.”

“It’s really a marvelous property,” Sparnicht says. “I’m not surprised that it’s getting recognized. It’s a beautiful site and a terrific market that’s dense and growing.”

Given the facility’s dense urban location, it has state-of-the-art security. “It’s the partners’ decision as they’re building the site,” Sparnicht says. “Our job as the operator is to provide guidance and feedback. The site is very secure. ... You drive into the site (from West 25th Street) and there’s a parking lot for customers to park and access the office. There’s a high-speed door into the facility grounds. It’s becoming common practice.”

The facility has a coded-entry gate that requires each tenant to enter a personal code. It also has individual door alarms and multiple surveillance cameras with display monitors in the management office.

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Its office has a modern design with two service podiums and abundant natural lighting from exterior windows. It also has a “small retail center, complete with packing supplies, as well as a coffee bar and refrigerator,” which “further exemplify the welcoming atmosphere,” per the entry information.

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The facility’s brick exterior, designed to mirror the “architecturally beautify” USC campus, helps set the facility apart from its competition.

“That whole corridor in south Los Angeles is in transition,” Sparnicht says. “West from the site, there’s a lot of vertical housing and apartments and a lot of student housing going in. There’s an expectation that storage has a design element. Cities do want these structures to blend in and add architectural interest in the area.”

He says the site “has really exceeded expectations.”

The facility’s quick lease-up, achieving 86 percent occupancy within five months from opening, “is a testament to the facility’s superior design, security, and convenience,” the submission document states, “making it a valuable asset for the surrounding community. Ultimately, this is a timeless facility that will address the needs of residents and businesses alike for years to come.”

“We’re proud to have it on our platform,” Sparnicht says.

Extra Space Storage is the largest operator of self-storage facilities and the largest third-party self-storage management company in the United States, according to its website. The company was founded in 1977. It has more than 3,500 properties as owner, operator, or both in 43 states and Washington, D.C. Its facilities comprise about 2.5 million storage units and more than 280 million square feet of rentable space.

Ownership

Los Angeles-based Staley Point Capital owns the facility. Staley Point’s owner, Kevin Staley, says the company had previously developed and bought seven other facilities under the brand name Magellan Storage, which he started in the 1990s in Southern California. Staley sold those facilities mainly to Uncle Bob Storage, based in Buffalo, N.Y., which later sold them to Life Storage Inc. It in turn sold them to Extra Space Storage.

Blending the Los Angeles Extra Space facility’s design into its immediate surroundings exemplifies Staley Point’s approach.

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“We like to develop projects that can be placed in the proper context of the surroundings,” Staley says. “We found considerable use of brick on the USC campus. We knew we’d have a lot of students. We wanted it comfortable and familiar.”

The edges of the facility’s grounds have landscape features that are 10 feet to 15 feet tall. Staley calls them “green screens.” They are about 12 feet by 15 feet and sit at intervals along the façade along two streets. They are intended to “humanize” the facility.

The normal process of getting the city’s approval for the project was delayed by the pandemic because city employees were working remotely.

“It prolonged the approval process, to be sure,” Staley says.

He encountered no opposition to the project from its neighbors or anyone else.

“We communicated with our immediate neighbors to let them know what was unfolding,” he says. “We took the good-neighbor approach.”