Robert StGenis Voice empowered

Downtown Los Angeles is a "district" which is rather small, only encompassing shy of 6 square miles of the 503 square mile city boundaries. Basically, a little more than 1%. When I first moved to Los Angeles in the late 90s I would joke with visitors that the skyscrapers in Downtown were there as a stage set really so that you could have an easily identifiable location shot. Unless you needed city hall, had to go to court or went to see the opera (and some theatre), there was little other reason to go there unless your job was there. You might have well packed your own lunch or nosh as restaurants were hard to come by as well. Then, as LA moved into the 21st Century and the city adapted some new laws to allow repurposing of abandoned buildings that had been sitting for decades, things began to change.  The 2000 Census found that 27,849 people lived in Downtown. City estimates that the population grew to about 35,000 in 2008. Census data moved that number to over 40,000 by 201...