A big-city heart beats again

Downtown Los Angeles is undergoing a rejuvenation, and Chinese property developers are playing a major role. [Photo by Lia Zhu/China Daily]

Now there are 5,636 condos, and more than 5,000 are under construction, most of them invested in by Chinese.

Who is buying the condos?

"New residents help drive the downtown renaissance, and we are clear about the demand, which is mixed-use buildings," said Feng.

He also said that more young people, especially the millennium generation, want to live in downtown Los Angeles to avoid commuting and have more time for entertainment and being on the internet.

Residential Tower I of the Metropolis has been 80 percent sold and the price of the condos range from $600,000 to more than $2 million, according to Wu Chao, Los Angeles general manager of Greenland USA.

He expects even higher prices for the other two towers that target a more upscale market.

Los Angeles has been a tight housing market for a long time. Over the last 20-30 years, there hasn't been enough building of housing units to support the growth in population and demand, which is why housing prices increased over the last decade, said Cheung.

The recession in 2008 also played a role. There was a lot of development to the east and north of Los Angeles then, but "a lot of the market crashed" when the recession occurred, said Anderson. "In the last 10 years, it really changed. I think people started coming because of the value they saw created by the recession," he said.

Chinese investors started coming to Los Angeles after the financial crisis, around 2010, said Andrew Pan, senior vice-president and head of Chinese business and strategy at East West Bank.

"When China's real estate market cooled down, major Chinese developers had to find a market to keep their capacities going, and the US developers were still recovering from the crisis," said Pan, who has worked in downtown Los Angeles for more than 10 years and watched the changes.