With his first full week as chief executive of the Olympic legacy company under his belt, Andrew Altman’s in-tray is bulging. His CV has convinced many he is the right man for the job. But with hurdles around debt, planning and just what should happen to the site post 2012 unresolved, he faces the challenge of his life. Paul Norman reports.
“This is the World Series of regeneration schemes,” enthuses Andrew Altman, the newly anointed chief executive of the 2012 Olympic Park Legacy Company.
Forty-eight hours after officially taking up his £200,000 pa role overseeing the development and management of east London’s 500-acre Olympic Park after the Games end, Altman is bringing a very American perspective to the UK’s largest regeneration project.
“Having this much land in public ownership, in this location, within 15 minutes of central London, is truly historic,” he says. “It is close to impossible to do something on this scale in a major global city.”
The 46-year-old, until recently deputy mayor of his native Philadelphia, is clearly comfortable talking about his long-term plans for the £9.3bn, 25-year project. The task is to find occupiers, operators and investors for a host of iconic venues, including the 80,000-seat Olympics Stadium, the Zaha Hadid-designed Aquatic Centre and 1m sq ft media centre, as well as developers for as many as 10,000 homes. He is finding every minute “as exciting as he had expected”.
New York’s Central Park provides a template for the kind of impact Altman wants the site to have. “In the 1800s, Central Park was an 800-acre outpost, and now it’s the centre of the city,” he says.
But he is less comfortable going into detail about the key issues affecting the project. “These are early days and I will need to understand the multiple perspectives of the people working on this project,” he says.
Eyebrows were undoubtedly raised in some quarters back in May when the special-purpose vehicle’s owners – the government and London’s City Hall – looked beyond the UK to fill a role that will necessarily be immersed in the murky worlds of British politics and planning.
Altman is unfazed by, if a little hazy about, the dizzying number of rules and interested parties he has encountered since moving to London in August. “In these early days,” he says, “we are focused on the set-up of the vehicle, and we are working on this with our government partners – the mayor, the minister of Olympics, ministers in the Department for Communities and Local Government, the boroughs, the many partners.”
He adds that, in his opinion, the most important step for successful regeneration of the land in the rundown areas of Stratford and Hackney Wick has already been taken. “The crucial thing for the investment community is that a company has been set up with a mandate just to focus on legacy at the park,” Altman says. “It is an incredibly far-sighted decision.”
Altman is certainly already going down a storm with the UK property community.
“The creation of the company was the right thing to do, and [legacy chair] Baroness Ford and Andrew Altman are the right people to head it,” says Stephen Jordan, director and head of property for Stratford International developer London & Continental Railways, the owner of 140 acres of the Stratford City site that lies adjacent to the Olympic Park. He adds: “The priority is to have a seamless offer for Stratford and to ensure we have momentum to deliver the rest of our sites after the Games, and Andrew is already showing that he shares our vision for this and the regeneration of the wider area. We have a shared interest in presenting the best possible face to investors.”
Altman “clearly knows his stuff”, adds Jackie Sadek, head of regeneration at CB Richard Ellis. “Better still, he doesn’t pretend to know what he clearly doesn’t know, such as the British planning system, and he is certainly listening.”
And Dan Labbad, chief executive officer Europe at Lend Lease, the builder of the Olympic Village, says that he is already looking forward to the prospect of creating a “strong public/private and community partnership” with Altman.
Alongside the OPLC’s chair, Baroness Margaret Ford, and newly appointed adviser Jones Lang LaSalle, Altman has turned to his first task of creating a business plan to cover the first five years of the operation for the vehicle. This will include a Legacy Masterplan Framework outlining the phased development of a site that will also have museums, schools, an education campus, offices and leisure. “We expect to have this ready in late spring,” he says, confidently.
A credible corporate plan is vital, Altman says, if would-be private sector investors are to be attracted to the park. Eventually, he plans to create an Olympic Park investment fund, although the plans are at a very early stage.
That aside, a major problem has already landed on Altman’s desk, with an unexpected wrangle between central government and the London Development Agency over debt. It is an issue that is holding up final agreement on how the vehicle will operate.
Back in February, when plans for the OPLC were first unveiled, it was widely expected that the LDA would retain ownership of the Olympic Park and the £800m of debt which it accumulated buying t he land. The OPLC would then work for the LDA on a purely contractual basis. Last month, though, it emerged that the LDA has had a change of heart and wants the vehicle to take ownership of the land as well as the debt.
Debt wrangles
Baroness Ford is not as keen on the debt side of this equation, and has begun negotiations with senior government officials about transferring the £800m to the Department for Communities and Local Government.
If Altman is frustrated, he is not showing it. He is, however, determined that the new vehicle will have control of the land and should not be saddled with historic debt.
“The government is sorting out the debt as we speak,” he says. “Key for us is we need to have ownership of the land, as that is an important tool for attracting investors.”
Altman’s new company will also need to deal with the complexities of the British planning system, as he works alongside the five host Olympic boroughs to gain consent for the next phases of development.
There is already a feeling among planning experts that the OPLC has been unnecessarily hamstrung because, unlike the London Developments Dockland Corporation – the quango agency set up by the government in 1981 to regenerate the Docklands in east London – it has not being given autonomous planning powers over local authorities.
Matthew Black, director at CB Richard Ellis, says that the market will, in particular, need to see a clearly defined working relationship between the OPLC and the London Thames Gateway Development Corporation and other bodies to ensure there is “clear visibility on the delivery of planning, land acquisition and CPO powers if necessary to avoid the confused picture that exists today”.
Altman is confident that these issues can be resolved. “It is important that we have a planning structure that brings certainty for private sector investors,” he says. This is likely to follow on from approval for the legacy masterplan framework and the first phases of development after the Games pack up and go.
It won’t be long before Altman is also facing difficult questions about the eventual anchors of key facilities to be built on the site, such as the 80,000-seat Olympics Stadium and the International Press Centre.
Altman says that the OPLC has already decided to “really look at the sports” again, raising once more the prospect that a top-class football or rugby team will be targeted in preference to plans to downsize to a 25,000-seat athletics stadium.
Another priority is working out who will manage the 500-acre parkland, post-Games. Neighbouring quango the Lea Valley Park Authority has been approached, but Altman says it is too early to discuss the issue.
“We are looking at the right operating model for the park,” he says. “There are a number of ways to go. The company could do it itself, it could go with another operator, it could look for a facilities manager. The most important point is, you have to step back and say what is best for the overall creation of this incredible, must-visit location.”
Success in these areas, Altman suggests, will be the key to winning the gold medal when it comes to regeneration in east London – attracting families to live in the area.
“What would attract a family to live here is that it is the premier place in which to live, work and play. If I walk out of the door, I’m going to ask: shall I go to see a great event, or shall I walk over to one of the largest malls in Europe, or I shall I get to central London in 15 minutes?”
Once again, Altman’s very American nose for marketing surfaces. “If I were selling today,” he says, “I would say you are not only getting to buy a unit but a whole lifestyle.”
Altman: the man and the legacy
“I knew at age 10 that I was going to work in urban planning and city development,” Andrew Altman says. To that end, with his stepfather’s help, the precocious youngster sent a letter to his local State University asking if he wasn’t too young to enrol for a city-planning degree.
Altman’s wife has framed the dean’s written reply. “He said, while it was not too young to take an interest, I should reapply once I had finished college,” Altman laughs.
By no means disheartened, the young Altman decided to pursue a career focused on regeneration in cities where there is a “real challenge”. He holds a master’s degree in city planning from MIT and completed a Loeb Fellowship at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
His first job came in March 1991, when he became administrator of the Community Redevelopment Agency in Los Angeles, just in time to be thrown into the thick of rebuilding communities devastated by the Rodney King riots of 1992.
From 1995 to 1999, Altman was director of City Planning for the city of Oakland, California, before moving to Washington as planning director. As president and CEO of the Anacostia Waterfront Corporation, he worked up plans to regenerate 2,800 acres of urban waterfront in the US capital.
After seven years there, he spent a short spell working as an operating partner at New York-based private equity firm Lubert Adler Management before, in March 2008, answering a call to go home to Philadelphia to work as deputy mayor focusing on planning and economic development.
Then the UK government came knocking about a “once in a generation” opportunity.
There have been two constant themes, Altman says – regeneration and waterfronts. “Regeneration around waterfronts is where there is the chance for greatest change,” he believes, “as it is here that the industrial economy is moving to the new economy, and here where there are the poorer neighbourhoods and at the same time the greatest opportunity to regenerate.”
Looking out of his office window at the Stratford site and the interweaving basins leading into the River Thames, Altman feels at home. “Everything is right in London,” he says. “There is the political will and the capital and the courage to undertake something very bold.”
