The buildings have names like “Lorenzo” and “Medici,” usually plastered across the five-story stucco edifices in oversized Papyrus font cutouts made of bronze. They’re decorated with columns and fountains and details that architecture critics dismissively call “fauxtalian.” As this city has become more pedestrian-friendly and conscious of its street life, the buildings are deliberately walled off, with skyways to keep residents away from any homeless people they might encounter on the sidewalks below.
They have one developer’s name behind them: Geoffrey Palmer.
Though not well-known outside development circles in Los Angeles, Palmer has emerged as one of the most prolific contemporary developers in L.A.—and one of the most controversial. Across Southern California, his company, G.H. Palmer Associates, owns and manages more than 10,000 units of housing, and he’s adding more. He’s come under fire for everything from laundering campaign contributions to “accidentally” bulldozing a historic house that got in his way.
And last month, thanks to a $2 million donation to the Rebuilding America Now PAC, Palmer emerged in FEC filings as the single largest Donald Trump donor in the United States.
In a normal campaign, the largest donor would likely be a big-spending GOP backer with a name like Koch or Adelson. But this year the party’s traditional funders are keeping their distance from their unpredictable candidate, leaving the door open for a lesser-known group of political outliers.
The real-estate magnate didn’t respond to repeated requests for comment about why he donated to Trump, and it’s unclear whether the two are friends. (Since the FEC report, his donation has also reportedly been topped.) But Palmer’s track record has a very familiar ring to it: a series of brash and showy developments; a penchant for lawsuits; a use of local politics to help get deals done; a contempt for affordable housing.
Born into wealth, both Trump and Palmer got into the real estate game at a young age and have weathered their fair share of professional scandal since. Palmer grew up on the tony Pacific shore in Malibu, California, and began working in real estate in L.A. during the 1970s; by the late 80s, was regularly developing land on the outskirts of the oozing Los Angeles metropolis. Palmer’s first major development, 384 town homes, opened up in 1985 in a city now known as Santa Clarita.
Like Trump, who used his father’s political connections to smooth his way into Manhattan real estate, Palmer realized that politics was going to be a ticket to help him get things done. At the time, the land Palmer was developing fell under the jurisdiction of Los Angeles County. But as he built, a coalition of activists began advocating for the land and its surroundings to be incorporated into the city of Santa Clarita. Palmer vigorously opposed the process, which would likely impose new regulations on future development in the area, but he lost the battle in 1987, when Santa Clarita officially became a city.
In 1991, the California State Fair Political Practices Commission charged Palmer with 15 counts of illegally laundering campaign contributions to try to prevent Santal Clarita from incorporating, after an anonymous tip hinted that Palmer had encouraged employees of his company to donate to a PAC opposed to the incorporation and had reimbursed those employees with both company and personal funds. Palmer and his company ended up paying $30,000 in fines for the violations.
During the 1990s, Palmer kept a lower profile, sticking mostly to building town homes in far-flung suburbs of Los Angeles. Two hundred and fifty six homes here, 776 homes there; by the end of the 1990s, Palmer and his company managed nearly 5,000 town homes and apartments across Southern California.
But in 2003, Palmer came under heavy fire again—this time for illegally demolishing the last remaining 19th century home in the Bunker Hill neighborhood of Downtown L.A.
In the 1960s, Bunker Hill had been controversially redeveloped under the auspices of “slum clearance.” Very few homes of the neighborhood’s historic homes escaped the wrecking ball, but one that did was a run-down Queen Anne cottage built in 1887 known as the Giese House. In 2001, Palmer purchased the land the cottage was sitting on, and set in motion the processes to transform the mostly vacant and undeveloped land surrounding the Giese House into the “Orsini,” 1,072 units of “Italianate resort style living.”
As Palmer moved forward with his plans, a private owner expressed interest in saving and restoring the Giese House by moving it to Angelino Heights, a historic neighborhood known for its high preservation standards. California environmental law required a lengthy environmental impact review process before the house could be moved.
But on Easter Sunday in 2003, with the review process to move the house underway, the Giese House was reduced to wood chips. As Palmer’s attorney Ben Reznik explained at the time, an out-of-control bulldozer “accidently” backed over the cottage, the last Victorian on Bunker Hill.
“This was an illegal demolition, and it came at a point when we knew preservation was in the process,” said Linda Dishman, president of the Los Angeles Conservancy. “It was very unfortunate to lose when we knew it was going to be preserved. There really aren’t any houses from the 1880s left in L.A.”
Because Palmer demolished the house without permission, the city of Los Angeles had grounds to enforce a “scorched earth” provision—a five-year moratorium on building after unpermitted demolitions. Unhappy with the law, Palmer sued the city. Instead of winning the case, Palmer settled, agreeing to pay $200,000, as well as to build a parking lot for an adult school adjacent his development and include a “public access amenity” with the Orsini. That amenity turned out to be a tiny little fountain on a street corner with images of early Chinese immigrants—homage to the Orsini’s location in L.A.’s Chinatown neighborhood—tiled into the ground around it.
But to many in Los Angeles, more concerning than Palmer’s demolition of a historic home has been his demolition of municipal affordable housing rules. Over the past 15 years, Palmer has sought to unravel city requirements stipulating that he set aside 15 percent of the apartments in his immense downtown developments as affordable housing units.
The first of his lawsuits against the city was filed in 2001. Palmer argued L.A.’s affordable housing rules violated a 1995 law that allows residential landlords to “set the initial rent levels at the commencement of tenancy.” Palmer eventually negotiated a $2.8 million settlement with Los Angeles that allowed the “Visconti” to be built with exclusively market-rate apartments.
Dissatisfied that L.A. still required affordable housing in his other developments, Palmer filed another lawsuit against the city on the same grounds in 2007, involving his “Piero” project. This time, Palmer won in court. Los Angeles appealed the decision, but lost; now no city in the state of California can compel developers to include affordable housing in new constructions. A studio apartment in one of Palmer’s developments will run up to $2,317 monthly. A two-bedroom unit can run an aspiring tenant more than $3,800 monthly.
California is the most unaffordable housing market in the United States. Strict state environmental legislation makes development a costly and laborious process, and Palmer’s lawsuit makes it all the more challenging for less profitable affordable and low-income housing to be built. As such, November ballots this year throughout the state will be filled with voter measures, like Build Better L.A., attempting to reinstate some sort of legislative grounds whereby cities can encourage or require development of below-market rate housing.
Palmer doesn’t like this, obviously. While taking a group of University of Southern California students on a tour through his Lorenzo project in 2015, Palmer called rules compelling developers to build affordable housing “social engineering,” and concluded simply “it’s not American.”
Palmer’s donation to Trump isn’t his first foray into politics. A quick survey of his contributions in Los Angeles city elections reveals that he has donated more than $25,000 locally throughout the past decade, including to a former city attorney, several City Council members who represent districts where his fortresses were eventually built and former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.
On a national level, Palmer’s donor activity is staunchly Republican. In 2012, he threw just over $500,000 at Mitt Romney’s failed presidential campaign. He made a $100,000 donation to Karl Rove’s American Crossroads in 2014 and an equal contribution to the John Bolton super PAC the following year. Palmer has also donated healthily to both the Republican National Committee ($184,000) and the National Republican Congressional Committee ($72,300). Many Republican congressional candidates, like John Boehner and Pete Sessions, populate the Federal Election Commission list of Palmer’s contributions. Curiously, Palmer also extended $14,900 of generosity to Ralph Nader for his 2004 and 2008 campaigns.
In total, according to FEC data, Palmer had poured approximately $1.3 million into elections across the country before 2016—which makes his $2 million donation to Trump this year by far his largest single donation ever. Palmer’s donation was funneled through a PAC founded by longtime Trump friend Tom Barrack, another Los Angeles developer. At the Republican National Convention, Barrack was the second-to-last person to speak before Trump himself took stage. This was unusual, like many aspects of the Trump campaign—but with traditional big GOP donors still mostly keeping their distance from Trump, his funding has come largely from small donors and affluent political outliers like Palmer.
Palmer currently resides in Beverly Hills, where he owns a palatial Tudor-style mansion built in 1912 and assessed at $16.3 million. He’s run into trouble in his own neighborhood as well: Earlier this year, Beverly Hills named him one of the city’s biggest “water wasters.” Apparently, he was using more than 12,000 gallons daily to water his grounds, roughly the same amount the typical American family of four uses in a month. Aside from his home in Beverly Hills, Palmer also owns a $13.6 million Malibu home, along with a $12.7 million mountaintop mansion in Aspen, Colorado.
But it’s his buildings, more than his lifestyle or his politics, that have frustrated Los Angeles. They’d be familiar to anyone who’s seen a Trump building, with its “more is more” aesthetic. Palmer’s signature style is what local architecture critics call “fauxtalian.” His so-called “Renaissance Collection” is a series of enormous, cartoon-like Italianate fortresses across Downtown Los Angeles. The resort-like buildings have names like “Lorenzo” and “Medici,” usually plastered across the five-story stucco edifices in oversized Papyrus font cutouts made of bronze. As Los Angeles has become more conscious of trying to develop its street life, other developments have begun trying to “activate” surrounding street and sidewalk space for pedestrians. Palmer’s are walled off and include skyways to keep residents away from any homeless people they might encounter on the sidewalks below.
Architecture critics and Los Angeles urbanists consider him something of a public enemy of city life. “The fake-Italian look—that’s definitely the No. 1 thing people hate,” L.A. architect Daveed Kapoor told the Los Angeles Times of Palmer’s developments. “Then there’s the size of them. They’re these unrelenting big blocks.” Curbed Los Angeles simply called his buildings “fucking terrible.” When an arsonist burned down an in-progress Palmer development called the Da Vinci in late 2014 (Palmer was sued by the city for not having adequate fire protection on the site), local news sites more or less rejoiced.
“It’s anachronistic architecture, if you want to call it architecture,” said Eric Moss, former director of the Southern California Institute of architecture and proprietor of Eric Owen Moss Architects. “It’s a kind of parochial version of what someone who has never been to Italy might think Italy looks like. You’ve got architecture that is reactive and self-indulgent. It fits right with the Trump campaign.”
Palmer disregards the criticism, insisting instead that each of his buildings is a “timeless beauty.”
Today, Palmer is hard at work developing another pair of enormous Italianate apartment buildings in Downtown Los Angeles, expected to open in the next two years. One of these will be the reconstructed Da Vinci complex, which burned down two years before. On the opposite side of the freeway, Palmer has purchased land for his proposed 1,500 unit Ferrante development. If completed, the Ferrante will be Palmer’s single largest project to date. It will also mean that three of four sides surrounding the 110 and 101 freeway interchange (the world’s first stacked interchange) will be surrounded by Geoff Palmer’s palatial fauxtalian apartment homes.