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, Public Library, 5-Acre 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 Its civic facilities were outdated and deteriorating rapidly. And there was no public funding available to replace any of it. No bond issue, no tax measure, no voter approval on the horizon.

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 city was already spending $12.8 million a year to maintain the buildings it needed to replace. We believed that same annual 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 ($12.8M/yr) was the puzzle we had to solve.

That required finding sources of value that others had missed.

We identified three:

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 another $8 million in 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 Public Library to replace a facility that had long outgrown its usefulness, a new Port Administration Building that brought the Port of Long Beach's headquarters downtown for the first time, and a reimagined five-acre 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 civic center project was completed, the surrounding neighborhood has experienced a wave of new housing, restaurants, business activity, and nightlife that has transformed downtown Long Beach. A part of the city that had been stagnant for years is now one of its most vibrant.

What makes this outcome even more remarkable is how close it came to never happening at all. What changed was not the city's budget but the approach. By structuring a solution that worked within the city's existing means, we were able to deliver far more than new buildings and spaces. And with 40 years of guaranteed maintenance built into the agreement, the city can be confident that what was delivered today will still be performing decades from now. The result gave Long Beach and the surrounding community a renewed sense of confidence in what was possible, and the market responded.

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 quickly became the anchor that unlocked everything that came after it.

For any municipality facing a similar set of constraints, aging facilities, limited funding, and a community that deserves better, 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 have never delivered exactly what a client has asked for. We always find a way to deliver something better. 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.