Who owns the Fairmont Century Plaza now?

The Reuben brothers — David and Simon Reuben, through their vehicle Motcomb Estates — after a $1 billion credit bid at their own foreclosure auction on 6 April 2023, at which no other bidder appeared. That bid took the 400-room hotel, the retail and a first tranche of condominiums for roughly 40 per cent of the $2.5 billion the project cost to build. Michael Rosenfeld, the developer, initially retained 197 tower condos under a forbearance agreement; by October 2025 all residences were being marketed by Sotheby’s with no mention of him, and no publication records how his residual stake resolved.

Did the preservationists cost the developer his project?

No — the opposite reading fits the record better. The preservation compromise of February 2010 got Rosenfeld a unanimous 14-0 council approval in January 2013 for a 1.5-million-square-foot project, on a site where the demolition plan had produced a National Trust endangered listing and a hostile councilmember. His own joint-statement sentence names the trade: “Preservation of the hotel could only be achieved if sufficient additional development was permitted on the site.” What took the project was the financing: a 2021 default on almost $1.8 billion, and a lender that had climbed the capital stack until foreclosure made it the owner.

Is the Century Plaza Hotel a designated landmark?

Yes. It became a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument in December 2013 — on an application filed that June by the owner itself, Next Century Associates, jointly with the LA Conservancy, the National Trust and Councilmember Koretz. Koretz had originally moved to nominate it in July 2009, in his first week in office, against the owner’s demolition plan; four years later the same owner filed the landmark papers voluntarily, as part of the preservation compromise.

What did Michael Rosenfeld lose at Century Plaza?

No total has ever been published. What the record shows: he bought the hotel for $366.5 million in 2008, spent about $2.5 billion building the redevelopment, defaulted on almost $1.8 billion in July 2021, and lost the hotel, retail and part of the condo inventory to a $1 billion credit bid in April 2023. He kept 197 condos under a 12-month forbearance whose eventual fate the record does not state, and he never filed for bankruptcy — which also means no court ever forced a full accounting of his loss.

Is the new Metro station under the Century Plaza?

No. The Century City station’s box runs under Constellation Boulevard with its entrance at the north corner of Constellation and Avenue of the Stars — across the street from the hotel, not beneath it. The reel’s claim that Rosenfeld “locked in the easement back in 2013” is not supported by the record: the project’s own development agreement contains no reference to Metro, an easement, or a station connection. The station, part of the D Line extension’s second section, was about 83 per cent complete in late 2025 and is projected to open in the second quarter of 2027.

Case study Nº 21

The demolition plan and the landmark application came from the same developer

In December 2008 Michael Rosenfeld announced he would raze the Century Plaza Hotel; in June 2013 his own company filed the papers that made it a landmark — because, in his words, preservation could only be achieved if sufficient additional development was permitted. The entitlement held for three ownerships. The $2.5 billion capital stack under it did not: he defaulted on $1.8 billion in 2021, and in April 2023 his lender bought the project with a $1 billion credit bid nobody else came to contest.

Ben Fan, with Darryl WengApril 21, 202616 min readWatch the reel

Photo: Alexis Doine, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

What it cost to build, 2016–2021

$2.5B

The only bid at the auction, Apr 2023

$1B

The reel this brief grew from tells the first half of the story: a developer announced the demolition of a Los Angeles landmark, and fourteen months later stood beside the preservationists announcing its rescue — with two towers’ worth of new entitlement attached.¹⁰ The record tells the second half. The project cost about $2.5 billion to build, its developer defaulted on $1.8 billion of it, and in April 2023 his lender bought the whole thing at its own foreclosure auction for a $1 billion credit bid that nobody came to contest.^21,25,26 Jump to the money ↓

The Century Plaza deal is usually told as a preservation story with a happy ending: the developer who wanted to tear the hotel down turned the preservationists into partners, got a bigger project approved than the one he started with, and proved that saving a building can pay. Every part of that is true, and the file that proves it also keeps going — past the ribbon-cutting, into a default, three lawsuits between the lenders themselves, and an auction with one bidder.

What survived all of it is the thing the fight was about. The hotel stands, landmarked on an application its would-be demolisher filed himself. The towers the preservation deal priced stand behind it. The entitlement of 2013 turned out to be the most durable structure anyone built at 2025 Avenue of the Stars — more durable than the capital stack, and more durable than the developer’s ownership of any of it.

The Century Plaza deal, at a glance
The deal at a glance	Number
The hotel, opened 1966	726 rooms, nineteen storeys, by Minoru Yamasaki^2,4
Bought from Sunstone, closed 30 May 2008	$366.5 million — $505,000 a room, in about 90 days, off-market^1,2,3
Demolition announced	December 2008 — a $2 billion, two-tower replacement^4,6
The revised plan, announced 11 Feb 2010	Hotel preserved; two towers added around it¹⁰
Entitlement approved	15 January 2013, by a 14-0 council vote¹²
Landmark application, 28 Jun 2013	Filed by the owner itself¹⁴
Construction financing, 2016	$446M J.P. Morgan + $120M Colony + $450M EB-5¹⁵
Cost to build	About $2.5 billion²⁶
The default	July 2021 — almost $1.8 billion^21,26
The Fairmont Century Plaza reopens	27 September 2021¹⁹
The foreclosure, 6 Apr 2023	A $1 billion credit bid; no other bidder^25,26
What the developer kept	197 condos under forbearance; by late 2025 the marketing names him nowhere^26,32
What Rosenfeld lost in all	Never published
The subway across the street	Century City station, about 83% complete, projected Q2 2027³³

A crescent on a backlot

Century City exists because a film went over budget. Cleopatra’s costs pushed 20th Century Fox to sell about 180 acres of its backlot in 1961, and the centrepiece of the district that rose there was a nineteen-storey crescent of a hotel by Minoru Yamasaki, opened in 1966, five years before his World Trade Center.^4,36 It became the room where official Los Angeles happened. In August 1969 Nixon flew the Apollo 11 astronauts here for the “Dinner of the Century” — the only presidential state dinner ever held outside the White House — and every president from Johnson on stayed here, Reagan so often that the press called it the Western White House.¹⁹

Buzz Aldrin, Michael Collins, President Nixon, Neil Armstrong and Vice President Agnew in black tie in the Century Plaza Hotel ballroom on 13 August 1969. — Buzz Aldrin, Michael Collins, President Nixon, Neil Armstrong and Vice President Agnew in the Century Plaza ballroom, 13 August 1969 — three weeks after the Moon landing, at the only presidential state dinner ever held outside the White House. Photo: Oliver Atkins, White House Photo Office, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Ronald and Nancy Reagan seated on a floral couch in a Century Plaza Hotel suite, watching election returns on the night of 6 November 1984. — Ronald and Nancy Reagan watching the returns in a Century Plaza suite on election night, 6 November 1984. The hotel's Western White House years are most of the reason a 1966 convention hotel could summon a preservation campaign four decades later. Photo: White House Photographic Office, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Architect Minoru Yamasaki in 1959, seated at a table in a suit and glasses, photographed in Seattle. — Minoru Yamasaki in 1959, seven years before the Century Plaza opened. The preservation case rested on the building being a major work of the architect of the World Trade Center — an argument that carried differently after 2001. Photo: Seattle Municipal Archives, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Ninety days to buy it, six months to condemn it

Michael Rosenfeld’s Next Century Associates — his Woodridge Capital, with the D.E. Shaw group as equity partner — bought the hotel from Sunstone Hotel Investors for $366.5 million, closing on 30 May 2008, a deal negotiated off-market in about ninety days with no brokers.^1,2,3 Sunstone, a public REIT, had paid $293 million three years earlier and told its shareholders the sale booked a $42.1 million gain.^1,2 “This is a rare opportunity to buy a jewel in my hometown,” Rosenfeld told the Los Angeles Times.²

Six months later, in December 2008, he announced a $2 billion plan to raze the jewel and put two towers on the site.^4,5,6 How tall depends on which document you read — the preservationists’ own 2009 op-ed says 49 storeys and 570 feet, the National Trust’s listing says 600 feet, the Times’ retellings say 50 — and the divergence never resolved, because the towers were never drawn in public detail.^5,7,9 The reaction resolved much faster. The National Trust put the hotel on its 11 Most Endangered list in April 2009; the LA Conservancy collected 1,300 pledges and made the hotel an issue in that year’s Fifth District council race; and Diane Keaton, a Conservancy board member, put the case in one line: “Find a vacant lot instead of tearing down this mass of steel and concrete.”^4,5,6,7

The politics arrived in July. Paul Koretz won the council seat, and in his first week — 7 July 2009, council file 09-1676 — moved to nominate the hotel as a Historic-Cultural Monument, saying later that demolition “would happen over my dead body and even then I hoped my heirs would fight it.”^8,11 A developer with an unentitled site, a listed cause célèbre and a hostile councilmember was going to spend years in hearings and win nothing. Most developers fight anyway. Rosenfeld did the more unusual thing: he changed sides.

The Century Plaza Hotel in June 2008 — the nineteen-storey crescent in evening light, with the MGM tower behind it.

February 2010: the trade, in the parties’ own words

On 11 February 2010 — fourteen months after the demolition announcement — Next Century, the Conservancy and the National Trust issued a joint statement announcing a revised plan that kept the hotel and built around it.¹⁰ Every principal got a line, and the lines are worth reading closely, because a deal is rarely stated this plainly. Linda Dishman thanked Koretz “for his leadership in bringing us all to the table.” Richard Moe of the National Trust said the parties had shown development could be re-envisioned “to save our country’s one-of-a-kind places.” And Rosenfeld, in the sentence that is this study’s spine: “Preservation of the hotel could only be achieved if sufficient additional development was permitted on the site.”¹⁰

Read that sentence as a term sheet, because it is one. The preservationists were not granted a stay of execution; they were paid in density. The revised project unveiled that August was a $1.5 billion proposal with two 46-storey residential towers by Henry N. Cobb of Pei Cobb Freed — convex forms designed against the hotel’s concave one — with the hotel cut from 726 rooms to 394 and its top floors converted to 63 condominiums.¹¹ Keaton’s verdict on the compromise: “You see? It can be done. Development and preservation are not mutually exclusive.”⁹

The entitlement took three more years of environmental review and closed emphatically: on 15 January 2013 the City Council approved the full 1.5-million-square-foot project fourteen votes to none, under a fifteen-year development agreement whose ordinance took effect that March.^12,13 Five months later came the gesture that makes this deal a genuine one-off: Next Century itself filed the Historic-Cultural Monument application for the building it had announced it would demolish, jointly with the Conservancy, the Trust and Koretz, and the designation followed in December.^4,14 “The hotel’s designation will forever affirm the collaborative efforts of the city, the developer, and the preservation community,” Rosenfeld said.¹⁴ The man who had filed the wrecking plan filed the landmark papers, and both filings were the same strategy: the demolition plan bought the negotiation, and the landmark bought the entitlement.

The two Park Elm towers at Century Plaza in August 2024 — rounded triangular glass high-rises beside the older Constellation Place tower, seen from Westfield Century City. — The two towers the preservation deal priced — approved at 46 storeys in 2013, described as 44 in every account since 2019, a change no source explains — photographed in August 2024 beside the older Constellation Place. They were later branded Park Elm. Photo: Alexis Doine, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

The stack under the deal

The money that performed the entitlement arrived in July 2016: a $446 million senior construction loan from J.P. Morgan, $120 million of mezzanine debt from Tom Barrack’s Colony Capital, and $450 million of EB-5 money — 900 foreign investors at $500,000 each, raised through the CMB regional center — plus a preferred-equity piece whose size and holder the public record never states.^15,17 D.E. Shaw was long gone by then; Oaktree Capital had replaced it as equity partner in 2011.¹⁷ Construction began that year with completion estimated for 2018.¹⁵

It opened in 2021. The project’s own cost consultant later wrote that its independent estimate came in above the contractor’s initial guaranteed maximum price, forcing a “budget realignment” — the polite name for the overruns that pushed the total toward $2.5 billion.²⁰ In March 2020 the pandemic arrived mid-pour, and Next Century went back to its lenders to restructure; in September 2020 the Reuben brothers — David and Simon, the London-based billionaires — agreed to a senior mezzanine loan of up to $275 million that vaulted their vehicle over Colony in the stack and made it administrative agent of what was by then an $821 million mezzanine loan.²¹ In July 2021 Rosenfeld defaulted on almost $1.8 billion.^21,26 Two months later the Fairmont Century Plaza opened anyway — 400 rooms where 726 had been, with the towers’ 268 condominiums and the hotel’s 63 selling above it — and Rosenfeld gave the Wall Street Journal the quote of the whole file: “My wings are getting tired from flapping so long.”^16,17,19,21

The lender’s position, re-marked

Most foreclosures are an event. This one was an ascent: a lender that kept buying deeper into the capital stack until, at the top of it, the debt stopped being debt and became the property.

What the Reuben brothers held

$1 billion

6 Apr 2023 · Credit bid at their own foreclosure auction^25,26

3.6× Up to $275M

Not a price in the ordinary sense: the brothers bid debt they were already owed, and no other party attended. It bought the hotel, the retail and the first tranche of condos at about 40 per cent of the build cost — plus roughly $55 million of transfer tax for closing five days after Measure ULA took effect.

Sep 2020Up to $275M
By Sep 2021≈$1.16 billion
2022More than $1.2 billion
6 Apr 2023$1 billion
against$2.5B

What Century Plaza cost to build — the line the position climbed toward, and the credit bid then bought at 40 per cent of.

Four marks of one lender's exposure, from a mid-pandemic mezzanine commitment to ownership of the property. Two draw hatched: the 2021 figure is our sum of two amounts the record states separately, and a credit bid is not a valuation — it is debt converted at an auction nobody else attended. What the position has ultimately cost or returned the Reuben brothers has never been published.

What the Reuben brothers held
When	Mark	Value
Sep 2020	Senior mezzanine loan, agreed mid-pandemic	Up to $275M
By Sep 2021	Senior and mezzanine debt, after buying out J.P. Morgan — Two months after the default began, the Reubens were the sole senior lender. The record states the position in parts — an $890 million senior loan and $271 million of mezzanine — and this bar is our sum of the two.	≈$1.16 billion
2022	The position as the lenders’ own suits described it	More than $1.2 billion
6 Apr 2023	Credit bid at their own foreclosure auction — Not a price in the ordinary sense: the brothers bid debt they were already owed, and no other party attended. It bought the hotel, the retail and the first tranche of condos at about 40 per cent of the build cost — plus roughly $55 million of transfer tax for closing five days after Measure ULA took effect.	$1 billion
—	What Century Plaza cost to build — the line the position climbed toward, and the credit bid then bought at 40 per cent of.	$2.5B

The lender’s position, re-marked

The Reubens did not arrive as buyers. They arrived in 2020 as rescuers of a project the pandemic had caught mid-construction, and the rescue was structured the way sophisticated rescues are: senior to the mezzanine lender already there, with control of the loan’s administration.²¹ DigitalBridge — Colony’s successor — would later sue over what that seniority was used for, and settle.^21,24

A lender who keeps buying deeper into a troubled capital stack is not averaging into a loan. They are accumulating a position in the property, one layer of seniority at a time.

The default came in July 2021, and the response tells you what the position had become: within two months the Reubens had bought out J.P. Morgan entirely, making themselves the sole senior lender with about $1.16 billion across two layers.^21,25 A bank that wants repayment sells a defaulted loan. A lender that buys more of one wants the collateral.

Then the stack went to war with itself. DigitalBridge sued in March 2022; the 900 EB-5 lenders sued in October, calling the restructuring “a wrongful and tortious campaign to destroy [their] undisputed property interest”;²² the auction slipped from December to February, and a New York injunction held it until the appellate division struck the injunction down on the morning of 6 April 2023 — hours before the gavel.^23,24,25 The judge in the parallel California case had already told the EB-5 side what the file showed: “You were told that that was the plan… It undercuts the very heart of the argument you were making to me.”²⁴

The auction lasted as long as one bid takes. The Reubens converted $1 billion of the debt they held into the hotel, the retail and the first tranche of condos — about 40 per cent of what the project had cost to build — and paid roughly $55 million in transfer taxes for closing five days after Los Angeles’s Measure ULA took effect.^25,26 Rosenfeld kept 197 tower condos under a twelve-month forbearance, marketing them for a time alongside the Reubens’ own brokers; an appellate court closed the last claims against the Reubens in 2024; and by October 2025 Sotheby’s was marketing every residence at the property with no mention of the man who built it.^{26,27,28,29,32} How his residual stake resolved — a second foreclosure, a buyout, a quiet surrender — appears in no publication. The record simply stops naming him.

Sep 2020Up to $275M
By Sep 2021≈$1.16 billion
2022More than $1.2 billion
6 Apr 2023$1 billion
against$2.5B

What Century Plaza cost to build — the line the position climbed toward, and the credit bid then bought at 40 per cent of.

What the record refuses to close

Three numbers this story turns on were never published. Nobody has printed what Michael Rosenfeld personally lost — only its shape: his equity partners’ stakes were reported facing wipeout in the foreclosure, and there was no bankruptcy filing to force an accounting.³⁷ Nobody has printed how his 197 retained condos left his hands; the last dated report says their fate “remains unclear,” and the next simply markets them under someone else’s name.^29,32 And nobody has printed what the Reubens’ position has returned: the towers were 32 per cent sold as of December 2024, which is a sales pace, not a verdict.³¹

The stains in the file mostly do not belong to the preservation deal. Glorya Kaufman — the philanthropist widow of KB Home’s co-founder — sued Rosenfeld and his accountant in 2020 alleging she was misled into “very risky” investments including more than $24 million of Century Plaza condominium, claims Woodridge denied and countersued over; the public record does not carry a resolution.¹⁷ And the EB-5 machinery that supplied $450 million produced its own litigation trail: a 2018 investor suit over the visa backlog, and in March 2024 a racketeering complaint by 185 investors with $92.5 million in the project — against CMB and its law firm, not against Rosenfeld or the Reubens.^17,30 Nine hundred families bought green-card eligibility attached to this building; the building got built; what they got is still in court.

The subway that is not under the hotel

The Century City/Constellation station construction site in September 2024 — a crane above construction hoarding on Constellation Boulevard reading “Next stop: Century City/Constellation.” — The Century City/Constellation station excavation in September 2024, one block of Constellation Boulevard become a pit. The station entrance rises at the corner across from the hotel — near it, and not beneath it. Photo: Alexis Doine, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

The reel ends on a flourish: a Metro station opening in spring 2027 directly underneath the property, on an easement Rosenfeld locked in back in 2013. The station is real and the date currently holds — the D Line’s Century City stop was about 83 per cent complete in late 2025 and is projected to open in the second quarter of 2027.³³ The geography is not: the station box runs under Constellation Boulevard, with its entrance at the north corner of Constellation and Avenue of the Stars — across from the hotel, not beneath it.³⁴ And the easement is nowhere. The project’s own development agreement — the governing document of everything Rosenfeld was entitled to build — makes no mention of Metro, an easement, or a station connection anywhere in its text.³⁵ What 2013 actually gave him was the entitlement itself.¹² That was the prize, and it did not need embellishing: the towers stand across the street from a subway their approval predates¹⁸ — which is either foresight or luck, and the record does not say which.

The sequence

1966
The Century Plaza Hotel opens on the old 20th Century Fox backlot — a nineteen-storey crescent by Minoru Yamasaki, who would later design the World Trade Center. The land became Century City because the studio needed cash after Cleopatra.^4,36
13 Aug 1969
President Nixon hosts the Apollo 11 astronauts at the “Dinner of the Century” in the hotel’s ballroom — the only presidential state dinner ever held outside the White House. Every president from Johnson onward stays here; under Reagan the press calls it the Western White House.¹⁹
30 May 2008
Michael Rosenfeld’s Next Century Associates, in partnership with the D.E. Shaw group, buys the 726-room hotel from Sunstone Hotel Investors for $366.5 million — $505,000 a room, negotiated off-market in about ninety days. Sunstone, which paid $293 million in 2005, books a $42.1 million gain. “This is a rare opportunity to buy a jewel in my hometown,” Rosenfeld says.^1,2,3
$366.5M
Dec 2008
Six months after calling it a jewel, Rosenfeld announces a $2 billion plan to raze the hotel and replace it with two towers — described contemporaneously as 49 storeys and 570 feet, elsewhere as 50 storeys and 600 feet.^5,6,7,9
$2B plan
Apr 2009
The National Trust for Historic Preservation puts the Century Plaza on its 11 Most Endangered Historic Places list. The LA Conservancy campaign collects 1,300 pledges and makes the hotel an issue in the Fifth District council race.^4,5,6
7 Jul 2009
Paul Koretz, sworn in that month, introduces the motion to nominate the hotel as a Historic-Cultural Monument — council file 09-1676. He later says demolition “would happen over my dead body and even then I hoped my heirs would fight it.”^8,11
11 Feb 2010
Fourteen months after the demolition announcement, a joint statement from Next Century, the Conservancy and the National Trust announces a revised plan that preserves the hotel. Rosenfeld’s own words carry the deal: “Preservation of the hotel could only be achieved if sufficient additional development was permitted on the site.”^9,10
Aug 2010
The revised project is unveiled: a $1.5 billion proposal with two 46-storey towers by Henry N. Cobb of Pei Cobb Freed, their convex forms answering the hotel’s concave one; the hotel cut from 726 rooms to 394 plus 63 condominiums.¹¹
$1.5B proposal
15 Jan 2013
The City Council approves the project 14-0 — a $2 billion, 1.5-million-square-foot scheme under a 15-year development agreement, council file 12-1580, ordinance effective 9 March 2013.^12,13
$2B approved
28 Jun 2013
Next Century itself files the Historic-Cultural Monument application for the hotel it once planned to demolish, jointly with the Conservancy, the National Trust and Koretz. Designation follows in December 2013.^4,14
Jul 2016
The construction financing closes: a $446 million senior loan from J.P. Morgan, $120 million of mezzanine debt from Colony Capital, and $450 million of EB-5 money raised from 900 foreign investors at $500,000 each through CMB. Construction begins; the project is estimated at completion in 2018.^15,17
$1.016B debt
Sep 2020
Mid-pandemic, with costs over the contractor’s original guaranteed maximum price, the Reuben brothers agree to a senior mezzanine loan of up to $275 million — climbing over Colony in the stack and taking over as the $821 million mezzanine loan’s administrative agent.^20,21
$275M
Jul 2021
Rosenfeld defaults on almost $1.8 billion of project loans. Construction continues; the Fairmont Century Plaza opens on 27 September. “My wings are getting tired from flapping so long,” he tells the Wall Street Journal.^19,21,26
$1.8B default
Sep 2021
The Reubens buy out J.P. Morgan and become the sole senior lender — $890 million of senior debt on top of $271 million of mezzanine. The climb from rescue lender to owner-in-waiting is complete.^21,25
$1.16B held
2022–2023
The lending group turns on itself: DigitalBridge sues the Reubens’ vehicle in March 2022, the 900 EB-5 lenders sue in October, and the foreclosure auction is postponed from December to February. A New York injunction blocks the sale until the appellate division strikes it down on the morning of 6 April 2023.^{21,22,23,24,25}
6 Apr 2023
The auction is held that same morning. The Reuben brothers credit-bid $1 billion — about 40 per cent of what the project cost to build — and nobody else shows up. Closing five days after Measure ULA took effect costs them roughly $55 million in transfer taxes. Rosenfeld keeps 197 condos under a 12-month forbearance.^25,26
$1B credit bid
Jan–Jun 2024
A New York appellate court dismisses every EB-5 claim — the Reubens’ conduct “was contractually authorized upon an Event of Default, which undisputedly occurred” — and a further appeal fails in June. Separately, 185 EB-5 investors file a racketeering suit against CMB and its law firm; neither Rosenfeld nor the Reubens are defendants.^28,29,30
2025–2026
David Reuben Jr. runs the project and lives in one of its towers; the condos are 32 per cent sold as of December 2024, and by October 2025 Sotheby’s markets all 268 tower units and the Fairmont Residences with no mention of Rosenfeld. Across the street, the Century City station is 83 per cent complete and projected to open in the second quarter of 2027.^31,32,33
32% sold

What transfers

The first lesson is the reel’s, and it survives everything the record adds: the preservation pivot was brilliant dealmaking. Rosenfeld faced years of hearings against a listed cause with a hostile councilmember, and instead converted his opposition into co-signers — fourteen months from wrecking notice to joint statement, a unanimous council vote, and a landmark application he filed himself. The mechanism deserves its plain name, which he supplied: preservation was priced, and the price was density. Nothing about that is cynical. It is what a working preservation economy looks like — the alternative on this site was a decade of litigation about a parking lot.

The second lesson is the one the reel stops before. An entitlement and a capital stack are different assets with different survivorship, and at Century Plaza every paper Rosenfeld signed with the city outlived every paper he signed with a lender. The 2013 development agreement performed exactly as written for three successive ownerships; the 2016 financing was restructured within four years and consumed its sponsor within seven. When a deal is retold as developer-versus-community, it is worth checking who actually took the developer’s project. Here the community signed a joint statement, and the lender signed a credit bid.

The third is about reading a rescue. From September 2020 the Reubens did everything a supportive lender does — new money in a crisis, extensions, protective advances — and every step also happened to deepen a position that ended in ownership at 40 cents on the build-cost dollar. The courts found all of it contractual, and that is precisely the point: the loan-to-own path runs entirely through documents the borrower already signed. The Macklowe study one shelf over ends the same way for the same reason. A sponsor’s best protection is not a lender’s goodwill; it is not needing the fourth restructuring.

And the last is about retellings, including ours. The reel was posted in April 2026 — three years after the auction — and ends in 2013, with the developer holding a fully entitled site and a subway coming. Nothing in it is invented; the ending is simply left off, and an easement is added that the governing documents do not contain. The Century Plaza is a preservation triumph, and the man who made the deal lost the building to the people who financed it. Both of those are the story. A telling that keeps only one is not wrong. It is half.

Common questions

Who owns the Fairmont Century Plaza now?: The Reuben brothers — David and Simon Reuben, through their vehicle Motcomb Estates — after a $1 billion credit bid at their own foreclosure auction on 6 April 2023, at which no other bidder appeared. That bid took the 400-room hotel, the retail and a first tranche of condominiums for roughly 40 per cent of the $2.5 billion the project cost to build. Michael Rosenfeld, the developer, initially retained 197 tower condos under a forbearance agreement; by October 2025 all residences were being marketed by Sotheby’s with no mention of him, and no publication records how his residual stake resolved.
Did the preservationists cost the developer his project?: No — the opposite reading fits the record better. The preservation compromise of February 2010 got Rosenfeld a unanimous 14-0 council approval in January 2013 for a 1.5-million-square-foot project, on a site where the demolition plan had produced a National Trust endangered listing and a hostile councilmember. His own joint-statement sentence names the trade: “Preservation of the hotel could only be achieved if sufficient additional development was permitted on the site.” What took the project was the financing: a 2021 default on almost $1.8 billion, and a lender that had climbed the capital stack until foreclosure made it the owner.
Is the Century Plaza Hotel a designated landmark?: Yes. It became a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument in December 2013 — on an application filed that June by the owner itself, Next Century Associates, jointly with the LA Conservancy, the National Trust and Councilmember Koretz. Koretz had originally moved to nominate it in July 2009, in his first week in office, against the owner’s demolition plan; four years later the same owner filed the landmark papers voluntarily, as part of the preservation compromise.
What did Michael Rosenfeld lose at Century Plaza?: No total has ever been published. What the record shows: he bought the hotel for $366.5 million in 2008, spent about $2.5 billion building the redevelopment, defaulted on almost $1.8 billion in July 2021, and lost the hotel, retail and part of the condo inventory to a $1 billion credit bid in April 2023. He kept 197 condos under a 12-month forbearance whose eventual fate the record does not state, and he never filed for bankruptcy — which also means no court ever forced a full accounting of his loss.
Is the new Metro station under the Century Plaza?: No. The Century City station’s box runs under Constellation Boulevard with its entrance at the north corner of Constellation and Avenue of the Stars — across the street from the hotel, not beneath it. The reel’s claim that Rosenfeld “locked in the easement back in 2013” is not supported by the record: the project’s own development agreement contains no reference to Metro, an easement, or a station connection. The station, part of the D Line extension’s second section, was about 83 per cent complete in late 2025 and is projected to open in the second quarter of 2027.

Sources

Sunstone Hotel Investors (SEC exhibit, Q2 2008 earnings release) — The sale of the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza on May 30, 2008 for gross proceeds of $366.5 million and a net gain of $42.1 million (2008-08-05)
Los Angeles Times (Roger Vincent) — Century Plaza Hotel sold — the 726-room hotel at $505,000 a room, Next Century Associates with the D.E. Shaw group, and “a rare opportunity to buy a jewel in my hometown” (2008-06-03)
Forbes (Peter Slatin) — The deal done off-market in about 90 days, without brokers, from REIT Sunstone (2008-06-05)
Los Angeles Conservancy — Century Plaza Hotel — the Conservancy’s own history: the December 2008 demolition announcement, the campaign, the February 2010 revised plan, the January 2013 approval, and Historic-Cultural Monument designation in December 2013 (undated)
National Trust for Historic Preservation (archived listing) — 11 Most Endangered Historic Places: Century Plaza Hotel, listed 2009 — “less than six months later, announced plans to raze the building and replace it with two 600-foot towers” (2009)
Associated Press (via NBC News) — The endangered-places listing announced, and the December 2008 $2 billion two-skyscraper plan (2009-04-29)
The Planning Report (Diane Keaton and Linda Dishman) — Op-ed against demolition — the proposal described as two 49-story, 570-foot towers, and “find a vacant lot instead” (2009-08-20)
Los Angeles City Clerk (Council File 09-1676) — 2025 Avenue of the Stars / Century Plaza Hotel / Historic-Cultural Monument — Councilmember Koretz’s nominating motion, introduced 7 July 2009 (2009-07-07)
Los Angeles Times (Martha Groves), via the Internet Archive — The February 2010 agreement — the original plan to raze the hotel for two 50-story high-rises, the revised plan’s 400 rooms and 45 condominiums, and Diane Keaton: “You see? It can be done.” (2010-02-11)
Next Century Associates, Los Angeles Conservancy and National Trust (joint statement) — Century Plaza owners and preservation groups announce revised development plan that preserves hotel — including Rosenfeld: “Preservation of the hotel could only be achieved if sufficient additional development was permitted on the site” (2010-02-11)
Los Angeles Times (Roger Vincent and Martha Groves) — The revised $1.5-billion proposal — two 46-story towers by Henry N. Cobb, rooms cut from 726 to 394, 63 condominiums in the hotel, and Koretz: demolition “would happen over my dead body” (2010-08-11)
Los Angeles City Clerk (Council File 12-1580) — 2025 Avenue of the Stars / Next Century Associates / Development Agreement — adopted 15 January 2013 on a 14-0 vote, final ordinance 182381 effective 9 March 2013 (2013-01-15)
The Architect’s Newspaper (Sam Lubell) — Developer gone good? Century Plaza towers get approval — the $2 billion, 1.5-million-square-foot scheme, Marmol Radziner on the hotel, Pei Cobb Freed towers, and the 15-year development agreement (2013-01-17)
Los Angeles Business Journal — Hyatt Regency Century Plaza to seek historical status — the owner’s own Historic-Cultural Monument filing of June 28, 2013, made with the Conservancy, the National Trust and Councilman Koretz (2013-06-27)
Century City-Westwood News — Project receives hefty construction financing — the $446 million J.P. Morgan senior loan, $120 million from Colony Capital, and $450 million of EB-5 financing via CMB (2016-07-13)
Los Angeles Times (Jack Flemming) — Century City’s revamped Century Plaza moves ahead — two 44-story towers, 268 homes, and 63 hotel residences (2019-10-25)
The Real Deal (Trevor Bach) — Inside Michael Rosenfeld’s $1.8B odyssey at Century Plaza — the 900 EB-5 investors, Oaktree replacing D.E. Shaw in 2011, the preferred-equity guaranties, the Kaufman lawsuit, and $300 million of pre-sales (2020-07-02)
Urbanize LA — Two-tower Century Plaza development reaches its peak — the towers topped out, and both developments flanking a new station on Metro’s Purple Line extension (2020-09-30)
Forbes (Michael Goldstein) — Fairmont Century Plaza ready for its close-up — reopened September 27, 2021; the “Dinner of the Century” for Apollo 11, the only presidential state dinner held outside the White House; Reagan’s “Western White House” (2021-10-20)
MGAC (project cost consultant) — Behind the build: Century Plaza — an independent cost estimate above the contractor’s initial guaranteed maximum price, and the budget realignment that followed (2022-12-29)
The Real Deal (Isabella Farr) — Fight or flight: inside the billion-dollar battle at Rosenfeld’s Century Plaza — the March 2020 restructuring, the Reubens’ $275 million senior mezzanine loan, the $821 million mezzanine stack, the JPMorgan buyout, and “my wings are getting tired from flapping so long” (2022-10-06)
The Real Deal (Isabella Farr) — Double whammy: Reuben brothers hit with second Century Plaza suit — the 900 EB-5 lenders’ claims of a reshuffled debt stack and 20 per cent protective advances (2022-10-20)
The Real Deal (Isabella Farr) — Reuben brothers delay foreclosure on Century Plaza — the auction pushed to February 23 by agreement with DigitalBridge and the EB-5 lenders (2022-12-06)
The Real Deal (Isabella Farr) — Reuben bros get court go-ahead to foreclose — Judge Epstein on the evidence the EB-5 side withheld, the $100 million bond, and the Measure ULA clock (2023-03-31)
The Real Deal (Isabella Farr) — Reuben brothers finally foreclose on Century Plaza — the injunction struck down that morning, the credit bid, and no other bidder at the auction (2023-04-06)
The Real Deal (Isabella Farr) — Century Plaza’s price tag: $1 billion — 40 per cent of the development cost, the $55 million of post-ULA transfer taxes, Rosenfeld’s 197 retained condos and the 12-month forbearance (2023-04-18)
The Real Deal (Isabella Farr) — Brokers at The Agency tapped to sell Century Plaza condos — Park Elm at 115 Park Circle and 211 Elm Court, and the Reubens “fulfilling Michael Rosenfeld’s vision” (2023-08-11)
The Real Deal (Isabella Farr) — Reuben brothers win court case over Century Plaza debt — all EB-5 claims dismissed; the conduct “contractually authorized upon an Event of Default, which undisputedly occurred” (2024-01-19)
The Real Deal — Appeals court rules in Reuben brothers’ favor — the dismissal upheld, and what happens to the nearly 200 condos still owned by Rosenfeld “remains unclear” (2024-06-28)
Bisnow (Los Angeles) — 185 EB-5 investors file a racketeering complaint against CMB and Lewis Brisbois over $92.5 million placed into the Century Plaza project (2024-03-15)
The Real Deal (magazine) — The Reuben brothers’ self-described black sheep steps up — David Reuben Jr. running Century Plaza, and the towers only 32 per cent sold (2025-01-02)
The Real Deal — Sotheby’s Neyshia Go lands the Park Elm and Fairmont Residences sales contract — 268 units, priced roughly $2.5 million to above $20 million, with no mention of the original developer (2025-10-08)
Los Angeles Business Journal (Howard Fine) — The D Line extension — Section 2 about 83 per cent complete and projected to open in the second quarter of 2027 (2025-11-10)
Streetsblog LA (Joe Linton) — Eyes on the street: the Century City station under construction at the north corner of Constellation Boulevard and Avenue of the Stars (2026-03-11)
Los Angeles Department of City Planning (CPC-2008-4953) — Amendment to the Century Plaza Development Project Development Agreement — the governing agreement’s amendment record, which contains no reference to Metro, an easement, or a station connection anywhere in its text (2020-01-23)
National Trust for Historic Preservation, Preservation magazine (archived) — Extended stay: Century Plaza Hotel — Cleopatra’s budget, the 180-acre Fox backlot sale, and the district that rose on it (2013-12-19)
The Real Deal (Isabella Farr) — These savvy investors are set to lose big in the Century Plaza foreclosure — the minority stakes facing wipeout, and Next Century having filed no bankruptcy (2023-01-13)