About five years ago, a project in downtown Los Angeles, called Oceanwide Plaza, halted construction. I don’t know exactly what happened, but the reports suggest corruption, financing problems, and the Chinese developer running out of money.

Under typical circumstances, once you secure your financing and start construction, it should mean that you have enough money to finish the project. That is unless there are significant cost overruns, you experience a cash crunch somewhere else, and/or somebody does something bad.

In fact, on some projects, the peak equity requirement occurs before construction commencement, meaning that once you do secure your construction facility, you should be able to reduce the amount of equity that you have remaining in the project (i.e. you can pull out some cash).

Here it sounds like a combination of things went sideways. And now today, Oceanwide Plaza looks like this:

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The towers have been tagged pretty much all the way up. And it kind of looks like each artist commandeered their own suite in the building. Not surprisingly, this has been attracting a lot of attention and debate. The project is also across the street from the Crypto.com Arena and so there are a lot of eyeballs on it.

On the one hand, you have artists being creative and doing something with an abandoned set of buildings — ones that are beset with corruption charges and that people are generally upset about. But on the other hand, you have a busted project, and you have artists trespassing and creating what others see as another symbol for a spiralling downtown.

LA police are reporting that the site is going to be better secured and that all of the graffiti will be removed. But until then, this has got to be one of the tallest expressions of graffiti ever created.