The Culver Steps cost nearly $150 million to build — and it is asking about $150 million

The Culver Steps is the block everyone points at when they want to argue that public space pays. Four storeys of offices and shops on 1.16 acres of downtown Culver City, wrapped around a grand outdoor staircase, built where a public parking lot used to be, and leased end to end — Amazon upstairs, Erewhon and Sephora and Salt & Straw below.^6,17 It is a genuinely good building, and the leasing worked.

The money is a quieter story. The project cost nearly $150 million to build.¹⁸ In August 2024 its own lender’s appraiser valued it at $130 million.²⁰ In April 2026, fully leased, with an Amazon lease running to 2031, it went on the market at a rumoured $150 million.²³ Seven years of perfect occupancy in one of Los Angeles’ strongest submarkets produced an asking price roughly equal to the build cost.

And the plaza that the story hangs on was not a developer’s act of restraint. The stair and the elevated plaza were in the drawings Culver City’s own council chose in December 2011, five years before Hackman Capital Partners bought into the deal at all.^1,5 What follows is the record, in order, with the unflattering parts left in.

The city had been trying to build this for twenty-five years

Start with who owned the dirt, because that is the part the retelling skips.

Parcel B was a public lot at 9300 Culver Boulevard, sitting between Trader Joe’s, the Culver Studios mansion and the Culver Hotel — the middle of downtown, unbuilt. On 5 December 2011 Culver City’s council, sitting also as its redevelopment agency board, voted unanimously to pick one of four submitted proposals: the Combined Properties and Hudson Pacific team, with a design by the Culver City architect Steven Ehrlich. Councilmember Meghan Sahli-Wells, writing at the time, relayed former mayor Gary Silbiger’s count that this was at least the third attempt to develop the plot in twenty-five years.¹

The winning scheme is the building that exists. A grand staircase modelled on the Spanish Steps and the High Line, rising to an elevated plaza, with the massing pushed to the dull Washington Boulevard side so the view from the plaza points at the mansion and the hotel.¹ Every element the reel credits to a later owner’s vision was in that December 2011 drawing set.

Then California dissolved its redevelopment agencies and the deal fell into a hole. By February 2013 the city and its successor agency’s oversight board had both approved the disposition and development agreement, and both were waiting on the state Department of Finance to let the transaction proceed under the Redevelopment Dissolution Act.² The Center for Land Use Interpretation, which had staged an art installation on the vacant lot in 2013, described the result plainly: the agency that owned real estate in downtowns like this one was gone, and what it left behind was a legal ownership mess that held the site empty for years.⁴

The unwinding shows up in a city manager’s bulletin. On 21 April and 8 May 2014 the successor agency and its oversight board approved transferring Parcel B, 9300 Culver Boulevard, to the developer under the disposition agreement and the state-mandated long range property management plan — the same session that moved five downtown parking structures from the agency to the city.³ What the public got paid for the land is not in any source reachable here. The 2011 staff report had promised an economic report detailing the purchase price and a noticed public hearing before any sale.¹ The number itself never surfaced in the reporting that followed, and its absence is part of the story rather than a gap to paper over.

Hackman bought a finished idea

Michael Hackman’s firm did not conceive this project. It bought one that was already drawn, approved and stuck.

On 6 December 2016 Hackman Capital Partners acquired, through an affiliate, the rights to purchase and develop the 1.16-acre site, stepping into the role of Hudson Pacific and Combined Properties, who sold the development rights. The price was not disclosed.^5,6 Hackman said at the time that the opportunity arose from discussions with the developers and the city about joint points of entry and exit for this site and Culver Studios, the fourteen-acre lot an affiliate had bought in 2014 — and that the project would be built around the city’s Town Plaza, a paved and landscaped gathering spot already there.⁶ That is the company’s own account of its own motive, and it is more candid than the version that survives online: the draw was adjacency, not a vision of the parking lot.

Construction began on 8 November 2017 on an eighteen-month schedule. The programme announced that day was roughly 40,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space, 75,000 square feet of creative office, and a 35,000-square-foot public plaza; the mayor of the day called it the crowning achievement of the downtown.^7,8 Two subterranean levels would hold about 230 cars.⁶

Those square footages are worth watching, because they drift. The city’s project page still says 115,000 square feet total and 75,000 of office, and the architects’ own record still says 115,000 too.^9,10 Hackman’s 2016 announcement said 116,000 rentable, with 70,000 of office and 46,000 of retail.⁶ By the 2023 leasing announcement the block was 120,000 square feet with 80,000 of office and 42,000 of retail.¹⁷ The 2024 loan documents described 121,000 square feet; the 2026 sale offering says about 122,000.^20,23 Nobody is lying. Rentable area is a measured quantity that gets re-measured, and a case study that quotes one figure as though it were the figure is hiding an ordinary fact about real estate.

Where the tenant came from

The leasing did not follow the construction. It preceded it, and it came from next door.

The Culver Studios mansion, photographed in November 2007. This is the fourteen-acre lot a Hackman affiliate bought in 2014 and Amazon took on a fifteen-year lease in 2018, across the street from the Culver Steps — which no photograph in this study shows, because no free-licensed one exists.Photo: Termer, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The tenant arrived a year before the building

The leasing did not follow the construction. It preceded it, and it came from next door.

In the autumn of 2017 Amazon took the entire 280,000-square-foot Culver Studios campus that Hackman had owned since 2014.¹² In March 2018 — with the Culver Steps a hole in the ground and a year from delivery — Amazon Studios leased the whole office component, then measured at 75,000 square feet, for Amazon Studios, IMDb, Amazon Video and its worldwide advertising arm.^11,12,15 Jeffrey Pion of CBRE represented the landlord; Kennedy Wilson had the retail.¹¹ Hackman called Amazon a world-respected, award-winning content producer, and later, in an interview, his “dream tenant” — which is what a landlord says when it has just removed all of its leasing risk in one signature.^12,14

The following month Amazon cut the ribbon on a fifteen-year lease of the Culver Studios lot, and by the New York Times’ account of that deal the two buildings together gave the company about 355,000 square feet of Culver City office space.¹³ Hackman had won it with a promise to spend $600 million on seven new buildings and other upgrades in three years.¹³ The expansion that followed added 413,000 square feet and two parking structures for 1,930 cars, at a reported $620 million.¹⁵

Hold the shape of that in mind. The Culver Steps did not attract Amazon. The studio lot attracted Amazon, and the Culver Steps was the overflow — a small office floorplate that happened to be across the street from a tenant already committing hundreds of millions of dollars to the block. That is a real skill, and it is a different skill from place-making.

The retail took five and a half years and a pandemic

The part that actually earned the building its reputation was slow, and it ran straight through 2020.

Salt & Straw opened a 1,250-square-foot ice cream shop on 19 November 2020; Mendocino Farms opened 3,000 square feet of sandwiches on 9 December; Philz Coffee was penciled for the following quarter. Hackman’s asset management executive pitched the outdoor space as an advantage in a Covid-conscious world where people were looking for open spaces to safely gather.¹⁶ That is the company’s framing of its own asset, and it was also, for once, obviously true — an outdoor staircase was a better thing to own in 2020 than an atrium.

Full lease-up was announced on 22 March 2023, the day Erewhon opened: eleven retail and restaurant tenants across roughly 42,000 square feet, with Amazon Studios above.¹⁷ Commercial Observer put the elapsed cost at nearly $150 million over about five and a half years.¹⁸ Kennedy Wilson’s brokers said they had fielded more than 150 offers for the retail space, and cited Placer.ai foot-traffic data showing a 60% rise in 2022 over 2021.¹⁹ Erewhon’s own build-out was heavy enough to need a new elevator and a reworked truck dock, because the storefront had not been designed for a grocer.¹⁹ Reports of its size differ: 13,000 square feet in the 2023 coverage, about 15,000 in the 2024 loan reporting.^19,20

The block is full and the landlord is not fine

By 2026 the Culver Steps had become the healthiest thing its owner had left, which is why it is for sale.

In January 2026 Hackman Capital and Affinius Capital — the joint venture of USAA Real Estate and Square Mile Capital, and the equity partner in the Culver Steps since it was developed — lost the Radford Studio Center. They had paid $1.85 billion for the ninety-nine-year-old Studio City lot in 2021 against a $1.8 billion appraisal, then defaulted on $1.1 billion of debt that matured in June 2025 and made no payment after. Occupancy was 63% that June, with 36% of leases expiring in August, and revenue was covering about 21% of the cost of servicing the loan. Hackman’s own statement stressed that it has substantial capital behind it, holds half its assets without debt, and keeps 55% of its studios outside the United States.²²

In April a notice of default landed on 9050 Washington Boulevard, a 200,000-square-foot Art Deco campus a few blocks from the Culver Steps that Hackman and Affinius had bought in January 2021 for $160 million. Sony Pictures Animation left in 2024 after decades, the campus now appears empty, and about $101 million is owed on a Goldman Sachs-originated note — roughly $500 a square foot of debt on a vacant building.^24,25 A lender also filed for foreclosure in Queens, where a Hackman-tied partnership is said to owe about $359 million on Kaufman Astoria Studios.²⁴

On 29 April 2026 the Culver Steps went to market through Newmark. Green Street’s Real Estate Alert put a rumoured $150 million on it — about $1,230 a square foot. Amazon’s office lease runs to July 2031; Erewhon’s runs to May 2038.²³ Newmark vice chairman Kevin Shannon called it a trophy product in a bull’s-eye location, and Hackman’s Mike Racine told CoStar that listing a fully occupied project was a natural next step for a mature property of this quality.²⁶ Both statements are the sell side describing its own asset.

Then, on 21 May, Hackman filed a breach-of-contract complaint against Erewhon for more than $275,000 of unpaid rent — while marketing the block as fully leased. The lease was signed in June 2021, commenced in June 2023, and runs to May 2038 at about $86,500 a month rising to roughly $105,000, which is $6 a square foot a month rising to about $7.30 against a Los Angeles retail average below $3.²⁷ Erewhon had been accused of the same thing by a different landlord in Studio City in 2022, and countersued.²⁷ A curated tenant mix is a real asset. It is also a set of counterparties, and the reel’s line that each tenant made the others more valuable has to sit alongside the landlord suing the anchor mid-marketing.

What the submarket actually looks like

The bull’s-eye is real and the vacancy is real, and the sources do not agree on how bad the vacancy is.

CoStar reported in May 2026 that Culver City office vacancy stood at a record high of nearly 23%, with average asking rents around $52 a square foot, among the ten most expensive office submarkets in Los Angeles.²⁶ The Real Deal, a month earlier, put Culver City above a 30% vacancy rate citing Colliers.²⁴ Yardi’s data for calendar 2025 shows 28.94%, with asking rents down 8.97% year on year.²⁸ A local outlet reported the rate as having surged past thirty percent.²⁵ Those are different providers measuring different boundaries and, in some cases, availability rather than vacancy. The honest statement is a range: somewhere between roughly a quarter and a third of Culver City’s offices are empty, at the same moment as its best block is being priced at $1,230 a square foot.

The wider frame from Kidder Mathews for the second quarter of 2026: Los Angeles direct office vacancy 16.4%, up from 16.0% the previous quarter, with negative net absorption of about 1.5 million square feet; West Los Angeles at 18.2% direct vacancy and the highest asking rents in the county at $5.05 a square foot a month.²⁹

What keeps the Culver Steps out of that arithmetic is a single lease. Remove Amazon and the block is 80,000 square feet of empty office in a submarket that cannot fill the office it already has.

The ledger, opened

Put the sourced money in one column and the sourced outcome in the other.

Several of those lines cannot be summed honestly, and saying so is the answer. The land price is missing, so no total cost basis can be built. The equity contribution and its split between Hackman and Affinius have never been published, so no return can be computed. As of this writing no sale of the Culver Steps has been reported at all — the $150 million is what brokers told a trade publication the offering could fetch, and a rumoured ask is the weakest number in real estate, because it costs nothing to say.

What is verifiable is the pair of numbers either side of the build. Nearly $150 million spent by 2023; $130 million appraised in 2024; roughly $150 million asked in 2026.^18,20,23 On the record as it stands, the Culver Steps is a fully leased, architecturally admired, Amazon-anchored block that is worth about what it cost — and that is the good outcome in this portfolio. The same partnership handed back a $1.85 billion studio and let a $160 million office campus fall into default in the same eighteen months.^22,24

The reel’s closing line is that real estate value is built with foot traffic and tenant mix rather than concrete. Foot traffic and tenant mix are why this asset is saleable while its neighbours are not. They did not make it a $150 million win. They made it the one thing in the portfolio that did not lose.

What transfers

A public parcel comes with the public’s design already attached. The stair, the plaza and the orientation toward the hotel and the mansion were chosen by a city council from four competing proposals in 2011, and residents spent that winter arguing that the public seating had to be written into the binding agreement rather than trusted to a rendering.¹ When a project on public land looks generous, read the entitlement before you credit the developer.

Buy the entitlement, not the idea. Hackman’s edge was never conceiving the Culver Steps; it was owning the studio lot next door, and then acquiring a stalled, fully approved project whose value depended entirely on that adjacency.^5,6 The scarce thing was not the design. It was being the only buyer for whom the design was worth more than it cost.

One lease is not diversification. This block reads as a triumph of tenant mix, and the mix is genuinely good, but 80,000 of its 122,000 square feet is a single counterparty on a lease that ends in July 2031, in a submarket carrying somewhere between a quarter and a third vacancy.^23,26,28 Price the day that lease expires, not the day it was signed.

Yield on cost is the number that survives a good story. Nearly $150 million spent, $6.1 million of income, debt at 6.62% — a fully leased trophy earning about 4% on what it cost.^18,20 Full occupancy is not the same as a good return, and a building can be admired, busy, photographed constantly and still be worth roughly what it took to put up.