Los Angeles ‘graffii towers’ see scaffolding removed

Workers began removing scaffolding protecting a temporary walkway that officials say said has helped trespassers enter the property.

“They were able to hide inside the walkway area and tunnel their way in by tearing holes in the fence,” police Sgt. Gordon Helper said.

The next step will be to install a better fence at the project, which is drawing significant police resources and where city leaders fear someone will die, especially after social media videos showed people BASE jumping — parachuting from the towers.

“We can’t have anybody getting hurt here or injuring themselves or even a fatality,” Helper said. “We don’t want that to happen here.”

The towers were going to house a hotel and luxury condominiums, but the project stalled in 2019 when the Beijing-based developer ran out of money, the Los Angeles Times reported. Locally dubbed the “graffiti towers,” they are a project of China Oceanwide Holdings, a real-estate developer that is being wound up (i.e., liquidated) in Hong Kong, according to a January filing with the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

Oceanwide had first announced the ambitious project in downtown L.A. in 2015, an era when it was expanding aggressively in the U.S., only for the election of Donald Trump in 2016, and Xi Jinping’s reaction to it, to drastically change each country’s policy climate for heavily leveraged Chinese conglomerates. In San Francisco, for instance, Oceanwide was planning a billion-dollar development that would become the city’s second-tallest building, but shortly after breaking ground in 2016 that was left similarly unfinished to L.A.’s graffiti towers.

The extent of tagging and vandalism began drawing attention in recent weeks,…