The story of 2225 Sunset Boulevard in Echo Park sounds like a sequel to a movie Los Angeles has already seen. The nearly finished 176-unit apartment complex is currently sitting dark and empty. But for Bruce Fairty, Chief Development Officer at Cypress Equity Investments (CEI), who oversees the project, it’s much worse. He’s in a daily struggle with the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP), the notoriously unmovable agency responsible for providing power to this and every building within the city of Los Angeles. But after multiple, almost farcical delays, he’s also weathering a very substantial price overrun that eerily feels like the crisis at the Casitas office project in Atwater Village.
In a recent interview, Fairty laid out a harrowing timeline of delays, broken promises, and astronomical costs that threaten not just this project, but the very future of residential development in Los Angeles.
The saga began in August 2021, when Fairty and his team initiated the project with LADWP, and the agency confirmed that a March 2024 completion date is achievable.
That optimism was short-lived. The agency declared the existing electrical grid near the new Sunset Boulevard site insufficient and required extending it to a power line just over a mile away. That would add time, not to mention $600,000, to the project, but even this early step was derailed when the utility took over a year to issue design drawings, only then to pivot from overhead to below-grade (underground) lines for the extension. The agency told CEI that, despite their original agreement, they no longer perform extensions using above-ground lines, and that the $600,000 price tag quintupled.
Then, nothing happens. Between early 2024 and mid-2025, the site sat idle as an assigned inspector failed to return calls or appear for months. When a replacement inspector finally arrives, he rejects the previously approved work, forcing crews to chip out existing concrete slabs for costly grounding rework.
Even after a transformer was belatedly released in late 2025, cable crews abandoned the site after just one week, citing a labor shortage.
Relief arrives in January and February 2026, in the form of three written confirmations for a mid-February 2024 power date. Just when CEI thought an end was in sight, the crew was diverted at the last minute to work on, of all things, projects related to the 2028 Summer Olympics.
As of mid-March, electrification has been pushed to the end of March 2026, a full two years behind the original commitment. Even now, the project remains in limbo, with no visible workforce on-site, suggesting that this latest deadline may slip as well.
The building remains dark, and the LADWP, said Fairty, remains unaccountable. Los Angeles City Councilmembers Nithya Raman and Bob Blumenfield passed a motion in July 2025 to address the utility’s systemic failures, and Mayor Karen Bass’s office assigned a top troubleshooter to CEI’s case, but the needle has barely moved.
The consequences of this particular debacle reach far beyond Echo Park, of course. Fairty warned that the "LADWP factor" is becoming a primary reason why institutional investors are redlining Los Angeles.
The uncertainty surrounding basic utility connections has created a risk profile that many funds want no part of. When a utility can unilaterally add two years and untold sums to a project’s bottom line, builders have no choice but to look elsewhere.
Fairty is not alone. His challenges match those of Greg Hall at SteelWave and their creative office campus project in Atwater Village. That project, a massive investment designed to revitalize a former industrial corridor, became a textbook example of LADWP inaction. Despite power poles literally standing in front of the building, SteelWave was forced to navigate a four-year bureaucratic maze.
The best-case scenario now sees the project finishing late and, unfortunately, filled with financial burdens. Fairty says that until LADWP is fixed, no developer could possibly want to build in Los Angeles. If the city wants to solve its housing crisis, he says, it must first ensure that its own departments aren't the ones standing in the way.
Once the Echo Park project is complete, Fairty says he’ll keep building. Just not in Los Angeles.
“I'll go to other parts of the state and other parts of the country,” he says. “And everybody else is saying the same thing.”
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