The business of Rick Caruso: How a mayoral candidate amassed his fortune
LOS ANGELES — Encino residents weren’t happy in the early 1990s about a planned shopping center at Hayvenhurst Avenue and Ventura Boulevard. They were even less happy when the developer went bankrupt after digging up the contaminated soil at the site, a former gas station, leaving behind a deep crater that filled with water.
Rick Caruso, then a real estate rookie, took over the site, derisively nicknamed “Lake Hayvenhurst,” and proceeded with a strategy he would deploy many times in the future: wooing the locals, spending lavishly to move the project forward.
He asked residents of the affluent Los Angeles community to offer suggestions for his retail center’s design and ambiance, even hiring a shuttle bus to take them to a tree farm to allow them to select varieties for the development.
What neighbors had wanted at their mall “was really just simple stuff in my opinion,” he told Los Angeles Magazine years later, “and we got 100% support.”
Encino Marketplace, as he called it, was a step up from a typical neighborhood shopping center of the time. It had its grocery store and drugstore, but Caruso dressed up the place with arches, cupolas and patios. People came to linger by a burbling fountain outside of Starbucks.
At the center’s 1994 grand opening, Caruso arranged appearances by TV stars John Goodman and Phil Hartman. He invited a crowd of community residents to a fancy celebratory dinner.
Over the ensuing decades, Caruso forged a career as one of Los Angeles’ most prominent real estate developers and retail operators by finding the sweet spot between what the neighbors want and what he is willing to build.
That approach has enabled him to construct some of the region’s most popular shopping centers while bringing him a sizable fortune — estimated by Forbes at $4.3 billion — that has propelled his mayoral
