Steve Soboroff is a veteran real estate developer as well as a public leader who served 10 years as Los Angeles Police Commissioner. He has also served as a parks commissioner, a vice chair of the Los Angeles Dodgers, chair and chief executive of Playa Vista and was a major proponent of the Staples Center, now Crypto.com Arena.
Soboroff, 75, sat down with the Business Journal at The Park at Cross Creek, a project he developed with partners in Malibu, to talk about his roles in the public and private sectors, difficulties developing in Los Angeles, a desire to do more and his hope that he “made complicated things simple.”
“The key to getting things done is to take complex situations and break them into little, simple pieces and work on those simple pieces every day,” he said.
You served 10 years as Los Angeles Police Commissioner before terming out, and you’ve held many other public sector roles as well. How do they compare to being a real estate developer?
My public service background has been broad based. I’ve learned a lot about a lot. I’ve learned that the way to the finish line in all these places, in all these areas…is through positive reinforcement and appreciation for public servants. It’s almost like appreciation for the bureaucracy because democracy is exhausting…
Development is much easier because it’s not democracy, it’s a benevolent dictatorship or just dictatorship.
Last year you announced a program where apartment owners would subsidize police recruit units to help make it more affordable for them to live in Los Angeles. Can you tell me how that program has gone?
What LAPD has almost uniquely as an obstacle is that in a community policing environment, the cops can’t afford to live in the communities they police…
The idea was a cop, on his or her salary, these are recruits only because we don’t have enough for everyone, based on their salary they could afford to pay about $1,500 to $1,600 a month. So my goal was to…
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