What once was considered an area west of La Cienaga Boulevard or the San Diego (405) Freeway is migrating east to La Brea and even Western Avenue – at least in the minds of marketers, homeowners and real estate agents wanting to capitalize on the perceived affluence of a Westside address.

“If you can be associated with the Westside, it’s highly desirable. There’s a definite cachet,” said Scott Chalmers, first vice president, western region, for Arden Realty Inc., which is marketing its commercial buildings in the Miracle Mile area as Westside properties.

“When I have a client who wants to be near the talent agents in Beverly Hills, they’ll get sticker shock when they look in Beverly Hills or Century City,” he said. “But when I take them to look at nearby Miracle Mile, they say, ‘I can afford this and still be close to the Westside.’”

The recently formed Westside Economic Collaborative – whose membership covers the cities of Beverly Hills, Culver City, Los Angeles, Malibu and Santa Monica – has come up with the name “Greater Westside” to describe an area stretching from Malibu all the way east to Hoover Street in the Westlake district and Hyperion Avenue in Los Feliz.

“When you take all of Los Angeles County, it’s not unreasonable to think of anything west of downtown as the Westside,” said Tom McCollough, chief operating officer for Century City-based First Regional Bancorp and incoming chairman of the collaborative.

But even McCollough is uncomfortable with the parameters. “When I think of Koreatown, I would agree it’s not part of what most people consider the Westside,” he said. “But it’s not Eastside either. There’s no regional economic development entity that includes this area, so that’s why we have included this in our definition of the greater Westside.”

The “greater Westside” definition is so expansive that the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp. has divided the area into “West Westside” and “East Westside,” with the eastern part including Hollywood and mid-Wilshire.

Each of these two sides has distinct economic characteristics. The part west of La Brea is dominated by business and professional services, with nearly 84,000 lawyers, business consultants and other professionals, according to an LAEDC study. About 60,000 workers cater to the tourist trade, including hotel workers and tour companies. Other sectors include government, education, retail, media and entertainment, and finance.

East of La Brea, the largest sector is education and health care, with 48,000 working at universities and hospitals dotting the area. Professional and business services and media and entertainment are the two other major pillars.

Moving westward
Ironically, the eastern boundary of the “greater Westside” is close to the original boundary defining the western part of Los Angeles 100 years ago. That’s when planners drew up Western Avenue, a straight line demarking the western edge of the young city.

Beyond Western Avenue were miles of open space, dotted with pockets of development, such as Windsor Square, Beverly Hills and Santa Monica, the oldest of all the major communities now comprising the Westside.

For the next 40 years, the spaces between these pockets filled up – first in a burst of development in the 1920s and then in the post-World War II housing and building boom. As that boom accelerated, wealthy and mostly white residents fled the central city for the newer suburbs, finding the proximity to the ocean attractive.