The Industrial Revolution

Yuval Bar-Zemer

Yuval Bar-Zemer, the man behind the Toy Factory and Biscuit Company Lofts

By Jennifer Hadley

Some guys have all the luck, and Downtown developer Yuval Bar-Zemer is one of them.

Tucked away between 6th and 7th Streets on the 1800 block of Industrial Street lies one of the most unique pockets of Los Angeles that I’ve ever stumbled upon. Okay, to be honest I didn’t exactly stumble upon it. And more than likely, if I hadn’t had an interview with Yuval Bar-Zemer, many more years may have passed before I might have stumbled into this gorgeous enclave of live-work residences firmly planted in L.A.’s industrial area.

Our interview is to take place at the Toy Factory Lofts Building at 1855 Industrial Way, catty-corner from the Biscuit Company Lofts. Bar-Zemer is one of the partners of Linear City, a Downtown real estate development company, which over the last decade has converted more than 500,000 square feet of industrial space into residential, commercial, retail, and live-work spaces, including the Toy Factory Lofts and the Biscuit Company Lofts.

Bar-Zemer is casually dressed, with a fancy-looking camera slung around his neck when I arrive. I wait for just a few moments before he invites me to his personal residence on the 7th floor of Toy Factory Lofts for our interview. We enter his loft, and I promptly decide that my own apartment sucks. His place is absolutely stunning, from the views to the décor. But I’m not here to review his personal style, I’m here to find out more about Bar-Zemer as a person, and what in particular drove him to take arguably one of the least desirable areas of Los Angeles and transform it into a little oasis of loveliness. That is, I want to know what makes him tick.

His story is one that makes me a bit envious. That’s not to say that he’s had an easy life, but he admits that a lot of his success as a developer is a result of luck. Having completed his mandatory three years of military service in his native Israel, Bar-Zemer moved to Los Angeles for the first time in the late 1980s. By 1987, he had earned his license as an electrical engineer and formed a company, K & B Electric, with a partner. And in his own words, that’s when luck stepped in.

A friend had plans to tear down a house in Santa Monica, and wanted to build a spec home. Bar-Zemer agreed to help. And so they did it. They tore down a house at 11th & Carlyle Avenue and replaced it with a 5,000 square-foot home. Period.

“So you just took a sledgehammer, knocked down a house, and built a new one? How did you know how to build a house? Did you read a book?” I ask, as he’s really making this sound like no big deal, when to me it seems on a par with building Noah’s Ark. “It doesn’t take a Ph.D. to build a house,” he says. “You learn from your mistakes.”

While I doubt it was entirely this simple, it’s true that Bar-Zemer doesn’t have any formal training in real estate development. In fact, he doesn’t have a college degree in the field. He studied music at a school in the Valley, where he played the saxophone and piano. I deduce this probably didn’t come in all that handy when it came to building houses.

But whether it was luck on his side, or a natural aptitude for real estate construction and development that Bar-Zemer is reluctant to admit to, over the next several years Bar-Zemer worked with colleagues to build three more private homes in addition to developing “five or six multi-family” properties.

In 1991, Bar-Zemer did receive a bit of bad luck as his father fell ill with cancer. Together with his wife and two small children, the family returned to Israel. Upon returning, Bar-Zemer initially began helping friends with construction, until he decided to test the entrepreneurial waters again. But this time, it’s in an entirely different industry, the candy industry.

Indeed, inspired by an unnamed candy store in Los Angeles, Bar-Zemer decided to open a candy business where “you [could] buy candies in bulk. They [would be] all the same price per pound.”

“Um, let me stop you there. Where does this entrepreneurial spirit come from? You’re building houses in Los Angeles one minute, and the next you’re opening candy stores in Israel?”

1 | 2 | >

ADVERTISEMENT