Barclay Hotel In Los Angeles CA Is Officially Up For Sale

2016 is already proving to be an interesting year for real estate in Los Angeles CA, and it looks like there’s yet another piece of news coming out of the City of Angels. Recently, the city’s longest continuously running hotel was placed on the market. The historic hotel, which opened in 1897, has been a fixture in the city for well over a century. When the Barclay initially opened, it was a high-end hotel that attracted guests from far and wide. These days; however, the hotel is no longer a place of luxury. Instead, it has been converted to a “low income hotel.” However, with the sale, the current owners, who hopes to get around $40 million for the property, believes that the hotel can be transformed into “a boutique hotel.”

Getting the hotel back to its original grandeur certainly won’t be an easy or inexpensive job. If the Barclay is to be revamped, its current residents will have to be moved to another similar housing arrangement, this alone could cost upwards of $2 million dollars.  If the new owner plans to displace the residents, he/she must “replace all SRO units demolished or converted for another use, beyond just relocating tenants; the new affordable units created would have to be rented at 35 percent of the area median income.” Also, since the Barclay is one of the city’s Historic and Cultural Monuments, so the new owners will have to understand the limitations and restrictions that come with renovating a classic piece or architecture. As a result, the hotel’s future remains uncertain at this point. Whether or not it will be remodeled will be up to the new owners, but many believe that Los Angeles CA needs affordable housing more than it needs another high-end hotel. However, it’s hard to believe that someone would purchase the Barclay and choose to leave it in its current state.

image via www.laconservancy.org