Ana Vasquez has sold vitamins, creams, and household goods from her stand at Alvarado and 6th streets for over a decade. Foot traffic is down more than half. And now a 55-story tower is being planned directly above the Westlake/MacArthur Park Metro station, half a block from where she works every day.
She doesn’t know what to make of it yet.
“What happens to my business will depend on the kinds of businesses that open in the Centro and their prices,” Vasquez told LAIST. “Here, with street vendors, prices are negotiable. The Centro opening could really hurt us, rents might go up, making it even harder for me to eventually have my own brick-and-mortar.”
The project she’s referring to is Centro Westlake, a two-tower mixed-use complex proposed for the air rights above the Westlake/MacArthur Park Metro station. It’s a joint venture between developer Walter J. Company and Los Angeles Metro. City officials moved it forward last month. The taller of the two towers would top out at 55 stories. The second comes in at 39 stories. Together they’d add hundreds of residential units, including income-restricted housing, along with hotel rooms, office space, retail, and medical facilities.
No construction timeline exists yet. Neither the Walter J. Company nor architecture firm Skidmore, Owings and Merrill responded to questions about when work might begin or when tenants could expect to move in.
That silence is its own kind of answer for vendors on Alvarado Street. They’re already dealing with a sharp drop in customers that predates any development talk. Immigration enforcement activity that ramped up last year hit Westlake particularly hard, keeping people off sidewalks that vendors depend on. Less foot traffic means less revenue, and the customers who do show up aren’t always spending freely.
Vasquez is in a difficult position. She’s built something over a decade, and it’s showing real strain. The Centro Westlake project could push commercial rents higher in a neighborhood where many vendors are still trying to scrape together enough capital to move from a street stand to an actual storefront.
Not every vendor on the block sees it that way. Produce vendor Lonidas Pinto isn’t convinced the development is a threat.
“The Centro might compete with us, but I think there will also be more people overall, and they’ll buy more,” Pinto said. “Maybe people will start coming from farther away.”
That’s essentially the case Centro Westlake’s supporters are making: dense transit-oriented development draws in people who don’t currently have reasons to visit Westlake, and the rising tide lifts everyone. It’s a theory Los Angeles Metro has been betting on across multiple station areas, where it’s been pushing development on underused land it already owns. The logic is straightforward. Put housing and retail on top of a rail station, generate lease revenue, and give more people a reason to use the line.
Community input gathered in 2023 shaped some of what’s on the drawing board now. Feedback from a March 2023 advisory group process showed residents wanted safer streets, better public space, and improved access to the station itself. Design revisions that followed addressed pedestrian connections at multiple points, a reworked station plaza with lighting and seating, and active ground-floor uses meant to keep sidewalks occupied.
Whether that satisfies vendors like Vasquez is a different question. The Centro Westlake plans don’t include any specific protections or accommodation for the informal economy that’s been doing business on Alvarado Street long before any developer came calling. That’s not unusual. It’s also not reassuring to someone who’s watched her customer base shrink and is now watching a 55-story tower take shape on paper nearby.
There’s a meaningful gap between what a project promises and what it delivers to people already there. Westlake’s street vendors know that gap well.