At a Glance

Sector:  Civic / Municipal

Location:  Long Beach, CA

Delivery:  Public-Private Partnership | Availability Payment

Scale:  22 Acres | 6 City Blocks | City Hall, Port Admin Bldg, Billie Jean King Main Library, 5-Acre Lincoln Park

Certification: LEED Gold

Result: Delivered On-Schedule and On-Budget | P3 Bulletin Best Social Infrastructure Project Finalist (2016)

The Situation

The City of Long Beach was sitting on a problem it couldn't afford to fix and couldn't continue to ignore. Its City Hall was seismically unsafe. Its civic facilities were outdated and deteriorating rapidly.

Edgemoor had a unique vantage point. We were already in Long Beach delivering the Governor George Deukmejian Courthouse for the State of California, and through that project had developed deep relationships with city leadership and a firsthand understanding of the land, the politics, and the opportunity. 

When we took a closer look, we discovered that the commitment could be leveraged into an entirely new civic campus without costing the city a dollar more.

Solving the Puzzle

The financial challenge on this project was unlike anything we had encountered. The city needed a new city hall, a new public library, a new port administration building, and a reimagined five-acre park, all spread across six city blocks. Making all of that work within their fixed annual building operations budget was the puzzle we had to solve.

Working alongside our co-developer, we set out to find sources of value that others had missed.

We identified three funding sources:

1 - The city owned a piece of land a block or two north of the existing City Hall that could be sold. Through a painstaking review of land records, we discovered that a seven-foot diameter storm pipe belonging to Los Angeles County traversed the property without a recorded easement, encumbering roughly half the site. Digging further, we found that the unrecorded easement was attached to a recorded easement on the adjacent property, and that the developer of that adjacent parcel had an existing legal obligation to relocate the pipe. Nobody in the city knew any of this. Negotiating that resolution unlocked the full value of the land and brought $8 million in equity into the project.

2 - The Port of Long Beach, an autonomous revenue-generating entity within the city, needed a new headquarters but couldn't pay the city directly for use of city land due to mandates requiring port revenues to flow back into port operations. We structured a solution where the port made a lump sum payment for the ground, bringing additional equity into the deal. We then financed the entire Port Administration Building during construction, a facility the same size as City Hall.

3 - The third piece involved monetizing the land where the old City Hall sat once operations moved to the new building, creating additional value to close the remaining gap.

Together, these pieces made a $513 million civic campus possible within the city's existing annual budget. No new taxes, bond measures, or voter approvals required.

Building A New Civic Core

Six city blocks were reimagined from the ground up. We moved the pieces around, rethinking how each building, each public space, and each piece of city-owned land related to everything around it. A new City Hall, a new 90,000 square foot Billie Jean King Main Library, a new Port Administration Building that brought the Port of Long Beach's headquarters downtown for the first time, and a reimagined Lincoln Park designed to serve as the civic heart of the entire district.

But delivering new spaces was only part of the commitment. The agreement included 40 years of lifecycle maintenance, meaning these facilities were to be kept in like-new condition for decades to come. In an industry where most developers build to a standard, hand over the keys, and move on, that kind of long-term accountability is extremely rare. For Long Beach, it meant something the city had never had before: the confidence that its most important civic buildings would be taken care of long after the ribbon cutting.

The Impact

Great development doesn't just serve the people it was built for. It has the power to change the trajectory of everything around it, to act as a catalyst for future growth. Since the new Civic Center opened in 2019, downtown Long Beach has experienced a wave of new housing, restaurants, business activity, and civic life. The project is expected to generate more than 1.3 billion dollars in regional economic impact over its lifetime and create roughly 8,000 jobs through its construction and operation. On the site of the former City Hall, a new 580-unit mixed-use development is bringing residents back into the heart of downtown, along with 40,000 square feet of ground-floor retail and restaurant space designed to give the district the kind of daily activity it had been missing.

What makes this outcome remarkable is how close it came to never happening at all. The city's budget did not change, the approach did. By structuring a solution that worked within the city's existing means, the project delivered far more than new buildings. And with 40 years of guaranteed lifecycle maintenance built into the agreement, Long Beach has the rare assurance that its most important civic buildings will be kept in like-new condition for decades, an outcome very few cities ever achieve with their public infrastructure.

New developers looked at what was happening downtown and saw a city that was serious about its future. New investment followed, then new residents, and the Civic Center became the anchor that unlocked much of what has come after it. For any municipality facing a similar set of constraints, Long Beach is proof that the right approach can change the trajectory of a city.

Recognition

The Long Beach Civic Center has received the following awards:

• P3 Bulletin — Best Social Infrastructure Project, Gold (2016). 

• P3 Bulletin — Project Grand Prix (2016). 

• IJGlobal — North American P3 Bond Deal of the Year (2017). 

• American Planning Association LA — Merit in Urban Design (2016). 

• Los Angeles Business Council — Architectural Award, Under Construction category.

• DBIA Western Pacific Region — Project of the Year. 

• ENR — Southern California Project of the Year, Best Project Government/Public Building (2020). 

• ENR — Best of the Best Recognition.

• Structural Engineers Association of Southern California — Excellence in Structural Engineering (2021). 

• LEED BD+C NC (New Construction) — Gold Certification.

• North America's first municipal DBFOM (Design-Build-Finance-Operate-Maintain) project.

The Bigger Picture

We always deliver something better than the client originally asks for. Long Beach may be the clearest example of that philosophy at work. The city came to us needing to replace aging buildings it couldn't afford to replace. What they got was an entirely reimagined downtown and a model that other cities are now looking to as proof of what's possible.

That is what drives our team. The chance to help a community unlock something it didn't know was within reach, and then watch that investment ripple outward in ways that go far beyond the original project. Long Beach is a different city today because of what was built here, and that kind of lasting, meaningful impact on a community is what we are ultimately working toward on every project we take on.