City on the Hill

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The 400 people who filled the ballroom of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel last week for the fifth anniversary of the Berggruen Institute included governors and mayors past and present, academics, a gaggle of billionaires, and members of the region’s cultural elite. They had come to hear Nicholas Berggruen, the erstwhile “homeless billionaire” who has now made Los Angeles his base, if not his home, talk about putting down roots.

His eponymous think tank, focused on issues of governance in Europe, Asia and California, has been housed in temporary space in Santa Monica for the last several years, and Berggruen has been making the rounds to let Los Angeles that he’s here to stay.

Having acquired a 450-acre site in the hills west of the 405 near the Getty Center, Berggruen’s plan is to build a “secular modern-day monastery” where ideas of impact can be exchanged and cultivated.

As perhaps befits a man who until recently led a peripatetic life, bouncing from Europe to Asia to the U.S., Berggruen can be a little hard to pin down, on both his business interests (the institute is his primary focus now, “I’ve been going that way for some time”) or exactly why Los Angeles came to be his base.

“I found L.A. to be a place that is essentially open,” he said in a conversation before the anniversary event. “Open to ideas, open to immigrants, creativity, originality, and daring.”

It is, and therein lies the challenge for the man who said last week his foundation had endowed the think tank with $500 million. That openness, that constant state of change and reinvention, may be confused with superficiality, and that confusion has caused many outside the region to decry Los Angeles as an intellectual desert. It’s a tag we could do more to dispel.

And so into the fray comes Berggruen, whose think tank has been billed as a mini-Davos, though in its outlook, geography, and construction it will likely be more akin to the Aspen Institute, which is no less an ideal to aspire to. Meeting the challenge of drawing big names to the conferences and events the institute plans may be the easy part – when a billionaire throws a party, people tend to show up. (In attendance week were Eli Broad, Patrick Soon-Shiong, Lynda and Stewart Resnick, and Tony Pritzker, meaning the host, whose estimated net worth topped $1.5 billion last year, was not the wealthiest person in the room.)

In fact, it may be the more quotidian aspects of Berggruen’s plan that prove the biggest hurdle.

The site he purchased from David Murdock’s Castle & Cooke for a reported $45 million sits amid the chaparral of the Santa Monica Mountains in the city of Los Angeles near Mountaingate, a community where homes run upwards of $3 million. Making way for the ambitious development, which includes a conference center, a residence for the executive director, and bungalows for guests, will undoubtedly involve an extended period of review by official and unofficial stakeholders. In a city where a health care organization in one of the denser neighborhoods can stall a high-rise apartment building and a community group with a vague membership can hold off retail giant Target, Berggruen’s effort to ally himself with civic leaders is wise for both the project’s short- and long-term aspirations.

There will be opposition to the construction, to be sure, but in the end Los Angeles should cheer Berggruen’s decision to plant his flag here.

Though he confesses to not yet be immersed in the governance issues affecting the city, he was not oblivious to them. Transportation, education, housing, and homelessness were the structural matters he said he could see addressing at the local level. From his eventual perch above the 405, he ought to get a bird’s eye view of at least one of those.

If his institute can have an affirmative impact on any of those it will be a welcome addition to L.A.’s civic life.

As a draw to thinkers from around the world who are engaged in trying to untangle some of the most vexing problems around the globe, its mere presence should be a welcome addition to our intellectual life.

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