HCM-178 — designated 1977-08-17
Los Angeles Herald Examiner Building
146 West 11th Street
active mills act contract on a property in a low or low-to-medium barriers equity tier — city is paying, but owner is in a high-resource neighborhood and would likely have maintained the property without the subsidy
Mills Act subsidy is going to a property in a low or low-to-medium barriers tier — the city is paying, but the owner is in a high-resource neighborhood and likely would have maintained the property regardless
street view ↗ satellite ↗ big orange landmarks ↗ (bariscale, 2008) stone · marble + brick (orchestrator-captured imagery is not building-aimed — use these for HITL verification)
Six-axis scores
- A. would-survive 5 probability the structure would survive market forces without HCM designation. low = needs protection.
- B. tourist currency 0 tourist and cultural currency — Wikipedia pageviews, walking-tour inclusion, public visitation evidence.
- C. subsidy efficiency 3 subsidy efficiency — Mills Act and federal HTC value vs preservation outcome. zero means no active subsidy.
- D. externality load 0 externality load — code complaints, CSR cases, 311 encampment/dumping/graffiti, vacancy duration.
- E. neighborhood health 2 neighborhood health — median household income, distress indicators, displacement risk.
- F. alternative-use value 6 alternative-use value — parcel acres, TOC tier, TPA eligibility, zoning capacity for higher use.
overall confidence: unknown
Site
- lat / lon
- 34.03942, -118.25963
- parcel acres
- 0.9633910177135271 (inferred)
- typology
- commercial
- TPA / TOC
- yes — tier 3
- zoning capacity
- —
- nrhp listed
- no
- architect prominence
- —
Condition + subsidy
all "condition" fields below are proxies derived from LADBS permit history, 311 CSR cases, and code complaints. none of these directly measures occupancy. the vacancy line shows the proxy value and the specific rule that produced it; readers should treat "active" as "construction permits filed recently," not "people live or work here."
- vacancy proxy
- active
- vacancy proxy basis
- recent investment over 250k in 60mo
- last permit
- 2023
- permits last 24mo
- 0
- code complaints 24mo
- 0
- CSR open cases
- 0
- Mills Act contract
- yes — see contract details below
- federal HTC
- no
- Wikipedia pageviews 12mo
- —
- walking-tour inclusion
- no
- median hhi (tract)
- —
- assessed value
- —
Contextual signals (GIS)
these are contextual proxies — signals derived from spatial context, not direct measurements of the property. they help infer hidden variables (contamination probability, structural risk) that public open-data does not measure directly. source: cal OEHHA CalEnviroScreen 4.0 (cumulative pollution burden by census tract).
- census tract
- 6037207900
- CalEnviroScreen overall percentile
- 61.5 (decile 7)
- cleanups percentile
- 40.8
- groundwater threats percentile
- 64.2
- hazardous waste percentile
- 94.6
- toxic release percentile
- 81.1
- lead exposure percentile
- 3.3
- EnviroStor cleanup sites nearby
- —
- in CGS liquefaction zone
- no
- type-1 contamination probability (fused)
- 0.82 — high (CalEnviroScreen tract burden + parcel-level EnviroStor proximity both signal contamination context)
- type-2 structural-risk probability
- 0.20 — low
Mills Act contract
data from city of la Mills Act program assessment, appendix a — 2019 list of Mills Act properties (chattel/AECOM, 2022). matched to this HCM by HCM number.
- ma contract number
- C-130094
- ma contract year
- 2017
- property use type
- Industrial
- 2019 owner savings (annual)
- $0
- 2019 la city revenue loss (annual)
- $0
- percentage of savings
- 0.0% (no savings)
- AECOM equity index score
- 6.76
- AECOM equity category
- low to medium barriers
- designation type
- hcm
Narrative
history
the los angeles herald examiner building, located at 1111 s. broadway in the south park district of los angeles, was constructed approximately 1914–1915 and designed by julia morgan, one of the most prominent american architects of the early twentieth century and the first woman licensed to practice architecture in california. morgan designed the building as the headquarters and printing plant for william randolph hearst's los angeles examiner, which later merged with the los angeles herald to form the herald examiner. the structure served as an active newspaper production facility for the better part of the twentieth century, housing editorial, press, and administrative operations. the herald examiner ceased publication in 1989, at which point the building entered a prolonged vacancy that has persisted, with intermittent adaptive-reuse proposals, for over three decades. the building has been owned by the hearst corporation and has been the subject of multiple redevelopment discussions, none of which had produced an occupied end-use as of the most recent available data. a notable industrial labor strike occurred at the facility in 1967, lasting approximately a decade, which affected operations significantly.
architectural significance
the herald examiner building is designed in the mission revival style, a relatively rare application of that idiom to a large industrial-commercial program. morgan drew on spanish colonial and california mission precedents — arched colonnades, a tiled dome, decorative ironwork, and textured stucco massing — and integrated them with the functional demands of a newspaper printing plant, a combination that has no precise equivalent among extant los angeles structures. the building is frequently cited in architectural surveys of julia morgan's california work alongside hearst castle (san simeon) and the asilomar conference grounds in pacific grove, both of which carry stronger federal recognition. within los angeles proper, comparably significant mission revival commercial structures of this scale are scarce; the building is arguably the most architecturally distinguished example of the typology in the city. morgan's prominence as an architect — the first woman to receive the aia gold medal, awarded posthumously in 2014 — materially elevates the building's architectural pedigree, even absent nrhp listing.
neighborhood context
the parcel sits within the south park subdistrict of downtown los angeles, a corridor that has undergone substantial commercial and residential investment since approximately 2010, anchored by the crypto.com arena and proximate hotel and mixed-use development. however, the immediate blocks along s. broadway between roughly olympic and washington retain significant vacancy, surface parking, and underutilized industrial parcels characteristic of a transitional district rather than a stabilized one. tract-level median household income and five-year population change data were unavailable in the fetched dataset, precluding a quantitative characterization of neighborhood health; the e-axis score of 2 assigned by the scoring model likely reflects secondary signals from the broader south park context or defaults, and should be treated with low confidence. transit proximity is meaningful — the building is within approximately 0.5 miles (approximately) of metro a and e line stations at pico and at 7th/metro — but the immediate pedestrian environment along broadway at this location is not high-quality. | metric | value | |---|---| | census tract | — | | median hhi | — | | 5yr δ population | — | | 311 within 500ft (24mo) | 0 | | encampment 311 calls | 0 | | ladbs code complaints (24mo) | — | | last permit year | — |
subsidy and condition
| field | value | |---|---| | mills act | — | | federal htc | — | | vacancy status | — |
classification reasoning
axis a (would_survive_without_protection) is scored 5 at medium confidence, reflecting genuine ambiguity. julia morgan's prominence and the building's architectural singularity provide some market floor — the hearst corporation has not demolished it despite decades of vacancy — but the absence of nrhp listing, no confirmed mills act contract, and a prolonged vacancy record suggest that hcm status may be doing meaningful protective work. a score of 5 is defensible but not high-confidence; the building is neither obviously self-sustaining nor obviously demolition-imminent without protection. axis b (tourist/cultural currency) is scored 0 at unknown confidence because all relevant signals — google reviews, wikipedia pageviews, walking tour inclusion — returned null. the building is architecturally notable enough that some visitor draw is plausible, particularly given julia morgan's national profile, but this cannot be quantified from available data. axis c (subsidy efficiency) is scored 0 at unknown confidence; no mills act contract, federal htc participation, or vacancy-with-subsidy data were retrievable, making it impossible to assess whether public dollars are being consumed without commensurate condition improvement. axis d (externality load) is scored 0 at medium confidence, supported by zero recorded encampment, dumping, and graffiti events within 500 feet over the observation window. this suggests the immediate 311 footprint is not currently problematic, though the building's long vacancy is itself a structural externality that point-in-time 311 data may not capture fully. axes e and f are scored 2 and 0 respectively, both at unknown confidence, due to missing tract-level hhi, parcel acreage, zoning capacity, and toc/tpa designation data. these scores cannot be relied upon for threshold decisions.
sources
- la311: https://data.lacity.org/resource/h65r-yf5i.json?$where=within_circle(location%2c%2034.03942179191574%2c%20-118.2596297049312%2c%20152)%20and%20createddate%20%3e%20'2024-05-10'&$limit=1000 --- _generated by hcm-1200 orchestrator on 2026-05-10t23:20:59.120z._