Trojan spearheads redevelopment: USC real estate chief Gerald Trimble is key to a giant commercial project.

Trojan spearheads redevelopment

USC real estate chief Gerald Trimble is key to a giant commercial project

The eventual success or failure of the Community Redevelopment Agency's plan to revive 736 acres of blighted Central Los Angeles may rest with Gerald Trimble more than with any other individual.

At 5 feet 7 inches and 135 pounds, Trimble hardly strikes an imposing figure. But Trimble, as president of USC Real Estate Development Corp., is fast becoming a major force on the local real estate scene, as he leads his alma mater into the highstakes world of commercial development.

At the heart of Trimble's agenda is USC Plaza, a $100 million office-hotel-retail project, which the CRA considers the linchpin of its 736-acre Hoover Redevelopment Project Area.

Trimble has secured all needed city approvals for his mega-project, which is targeted for a 4.6-acre site directly across Figueroa Street from the USC campus.

The 56-year-old Whittier native is now negotiating with hotel developers/operators about possible partnership arrangements, and brainstorming with real estate mogul John Cushman about how to market USC Plaza to prospective tenants.

When asked if developing risky commercial projects is an appropriate endeavor for institutions of higher learning, Trimble bristles a bit and then downplays USC's direct participation.

"USC is not really in commercial development," he asserts. "We intend to do it (commercial development) in joint venture; we don't want to be on the line from a risk standpoint."

Whether or not Trimble finds a partner willing to take on that risk, the fact remains that USC, through Trimble, is becoming increasingly involved in efforts to revitalize the blighted neighborhoods surrounding USC's main campus.

"USC has been here for 110 years and plans to be here for another 110 years," Trimble says from his second-floor office in a beautifully restored Victorian mansion four blocks from campus. "So it's important to the image of the institution and to those going to school here for the neighborhood to be improved."

Trimble is no newcomer to urban renewal; he's been hip-deep in it ever since beginning his real estate career in the early 1960s.

At that time, the Community Redevelopment Agency was busy relocating some 8,000 residents and 500 businesses from Bunker Hill in downtown Los Angeles, which was being razed to make way for commercial highrises.

Young Trimble, still working on his real estate certificate at UCLA, joined the CRA as a part-time business relocation worker.

That part-time job blossomed into an eight-year stint at the CRA, during which Trimble served as project manager of the Beacon Street Redevelopment Project Area, then project manager of the Bunker Hill Redevelopment Project Area and, finally, deputy administrator in charge of managing all CRA project areas.

But Trimble says his high-level post required just too much paper pushing.

"I've always enjoyed negotiating transactions, not being an administrator," he explains. "My job with L.A. (CRA) had gotten so big it just became a bureaucratic post."

So when Pasadena officials asked Trimble to head its fledgling redevelopment agency in 1977, Trimble grabbed for it.

"We only had 25 or 30 people in Pasadena, so I got hands-on involvement in every transaction," he remembers.

Trimble now has an even smaller staff -- just six full-time employees. The bulk of USC Real Estate Development's work is performed by outside consultants, which range from architects to brokers, engineers to lawyers.

Trimble oversees and coordinates the whole shebang, and that keeps him at work 10 to 12 hours each day.

Growing up as an only son, Trimble learned the meaning of hard work at a very early age.

His father built a 30-store chain of dry cleaning establishments from scratch, stretching throughout East Los Angeles. While growing up in Whittier, Trimble ran many of those stores for his father and drove truckloads of laundry around town.

"I had the work ethic driven home very hard, very young," he says matter-of-factly, without a trace of bitterness. "It helped me to become familiar with the barrios of East L.A. and to decide I didn't want any more of this small service-business stuff. Small service businesses are very tough, and (profit) margins are very thin."

Although Trimble did not follow in his father's small-business footsteps, he admits, "the apple did not fall far from the tree."

"I've ended up doing a lot of things just like my father," he concedes, "working the same kind of hours with the same kind of intensity."

Trimble initially studied educational psychology at USC and contemplated a career in academia. But his entrepreneurial roots soon led him back to the world of business. He finally settled on real estate or, more specifically, urban renewal.

Now Trimble can be found at 5 a.m. most weekdays jogging through the Bunker Hill Towers condominium complex in downtown L.A., where he and his wife live during the week.

On weekends, after a short train ride to his permanent home in La Jolla, Trimble can often be found swimming in his lap pool or surfing the nearby breakers, much as he did as a boy. He and his wife and two sons are also avid snow skiers and go on about four ski vacations each year.

"Jerry is still doing the same things he was doing at 20 or 25 (years of age)," confirms Norman Tucker, a vice president at Prudential Securities in Century City and Trimble's close friend since the two met in the U.S. Army National Guard in 1958.

But Trimble exerts most of his energy as president of USC Real Estate Development Corp.

He was initially hired by USC in 1985, to serve as a part-time outside consultant. At that time, Trimble was heading the City of San Diego's non-profit redevelopment corporation, where he successfully completed what he considers his crowning achievement to date, the Horton Plaza redevelopment project in downtown San Diego.

"That development agreement took us 10 years to negotiate," he says. "The administration of (then-San Diego Mayor) Pete Wilson was very conservative. It (the development agreement) had to be amended five times; we had lawsuits against the EIR (environmental impact report). When it was finally signed, that was a highlight."

Trimble has always done some private consulting work on the side. And it was in that capacity that he first worked for USC in 1985.

"The university was very interested in building faculty housing, I was asked to do brainstorming, and one thing led to another," remembers Trimble, his starched white shirt as immaculate as everything else in his office.

In fact, if the neighborhoods surrounding USC were but a fraction as neat as Trimble's office and his personal attire, he would most likely be out of a job.

Every one of his reddish-brown hairs is neatly in place, as are the grayish ones at his temples.

"Jerry has always been very meticulous at keeping his clothes and all his materials in perfect order," Tucker chuckles. "He was always very obedient and did his job well at Fort Ord. I never saw him get in any trouble."

So what did Trimble do while on leave, as his Army buddies raised hell? "He found a wonderful bookstore in Monterey and spent much of his time there, browsing and reading," Tucker reveals. "Jerry's very well-read."

Revitalizing the neighborhood for profit

USC Real Estate Development Corp. was formed in October 1987 to help revitalize the blighted neighborhoods surrounding USC's 157-acre main campus and its 30-acre Health Sciences campus in East Los Angeles.

That revitalization is to be carried out through the development of student and faculty housing, as well as mixed-use commercial development and research facilities.

Gerald Trimble, an outside consultant and head of San Diego's redevelopment corporation, was hired to head USC's new for-profit real estate subsidiary.

Trimble's first major decision was to purchase the Embassy Hotel in downtown Los Angeles for $12 million. That complex, located at the corner of Ninth Street and Grand Avenue, now provides USC students with 252 units of housing and a 1,600-seat theater.

Trimble has also purchased and renovated another 50 units of student housing closer to USC's main campus, many of which are in beautifully restored Victorian mansions. Probably the most striking of those is the Forthmann House, built more than 100 years ago with the fortune made from the Forthmann's Los Angeles Soap Co. That mansion, purportedly the sixth-oldest house in Los Angeles, now serves as headquarters for USC Real Estate Development Corp.

Since joining USC, Trimble has also purchased three apartment buildings with a total of 80 units, and has renovated one of those buildings.

Trimble's first new development project for USC is McCulloch Townhomes, a $6 million for-sale residential complex dedicated to housing USC faculty and staff. That project, two blocks from the main campus, was completed last November and all of its 27 townhomes have been sold, Trimble reports.

Early next year, Trimble plans to break ground on USC's second new project, a $26 million for-sale faculty housing complex directly across 30th Street from McCulloch Townhomes.

Trimble reveals that project's $17.7 million construction contract will be put out to bid before the end of this month.

All 126 units of that project, called The Courtyard, will be reserved for purchase by faculty and staff of USC and Hebrew Union College, a small rabbinical college abutting the project site.

In May of last year, Trimble took a giant step toward solving the university's worsening parking problem by purchasing three nearby warehouses, containing 1.3 million square feet of space, from May Department Stores Co. for $15.5 million.

One of those warehouses was declared seismically unsafe and knocked down. But the other two have been converted, at an additional cost of $7 million, into a 1,850-car parking structure, which is scheduled to open Oct. 1.

That structure, south of Jefferson Boulevard between Grand Avenue and Hope Street, will enable USC to capture a much larger portion of off-campus parking revenues, which currently go into the pockets of independent operators in the area.

The new off-campus structure will also enable USC to charge a higher premium for its on-campus parking spaces, Trimble explains.

Further, USC can also develop another new 2,000-car parking structure on the vacant land where the demolished warehouse once stood.

USC, in fact, has acquired the entire city block on which its off-campus parking structure sits. That block -- bounded by Exposition and Jefferson boulevards, Grand Avenue and Hope Street -- contains the former U.S. National Guard Armory building and the former California Department of Motor Vehicles building.

Trimble says he plans to convert both those buildings into vehicle repair-and-storage facilities.

"We'll be moving all the repair shops and utility stuff over there from the main campus so we can free up some green space," Trimble reveals.

USC's growing number of projects, while impressive, pale in comparison to USC Plaza, the $100 million office-hotel-retail project the university plans to develop directly across Figueroa Street from its main campus.

That mega-project, which USC is developing in partnership with Jones Commercial Development Ltd., calls for three office towers containing a total of 730,000 square feet of space, a 250-room hotel with state-of-the-art conference facilities, 30,000 square feet of retail space and more than 2,000 parking spaces.

The first phase of USC Plaza will most likely be the hotel, from which USC stands to profit handsomely. "USC has a lot of visitors, which it now sends over to the University Hilton or to downtown hotels," Trimble says. "We would be much better off capturing that market and putting them right here (at USC Plaza)."

USC also hopes to snag its fair share of convention-goers who attend functions at the newly expanded Los Angeles Convention Center nearby.

Does USC fear that its incursion into the surrounding area might spark widespread opposition from low-income residents in the neighborhood? After all, the CRA recently had its redevelopment plan for Watts explode in its face when residents revolted. And Walt Disney Co. has suffered untold misery from backlash over its territorial expansion in Anaheim and Orlando, Fla.

"There have been some complaints of USC maybe being insensitive," concedes Trimble. "It will never be perfect. We are doing everything we can and have not had to cause displacement (of existing residents or businesses) yet. I think we are being very sensitive."

PHOTO : 1. Northerly property, McCulloch Townhomes; southerly property, future site of The Courtyards 2. Severance Street Apartments 3. Jewel Manor Apartments 4. Cockins House Bed & Breakfast 5. Forthmann House 6. USC Parking Center 7. Westerly property, Regal Trojan Apartments; easterly property, Fairmont Apartments 8. Future site of USC Plaza Note: Map does not identify university-owned housing in the main campus area; its 30-acre medical campus in East L.A.; its 252-unit Embassy Hotel in dowtown L.A.; or its two historic landmark houses, the Freeman House in Hollywood and the Gamble House in Pasadena