Real estate investor Peter Cohen was taking a look around Bakersfield for what he recalled as his first time, in the boom times of the mid-2000s, when he laid eyes on the city’s tallest building, Stockdale Tower.
He didn’t buy the tower then — not until 2016 did a partnership he led purchase the property. Instead, in 2005, Cohen led a partnership that split the purchase of a one-story medical building on Westwind Drive that has since put him at the center of Bakersfield’s veterans clinic controversy.
Cohen later told The Californian how struck he was by the 12-story office tower during his initial drive along California Avenue, that he recalled seeing “this amazing building stand out from all the others.”
Cohen thinks big, not just in Bakersfield, and often gets what he wants. He is at the center of a real estate empire based in Beverly Hills with a portfolio of more than 1.5 million square feet of office and retail properties around California, Nevada and Washington.
But it’s his actions in Bakersfield that have won him local notoriety. An organization set up by Cohen’s group has filed appeals and lawsuits effectively blocking construction of the veterans clinic Congress authorized in 2009 to replace the clinic on Westwind.
If the new clinic is built and opens, Cohen’s group will lose the more than $400,000 per month it now collects from the U.S. Veterans Affairs Department, with payments increasing 10% every six months.
Local veterans have condemned the Cohen group’s protests, and spoken in favor of a new facility, to no avail: Just when it seems the new building proposal gains momentum, a new hurdle arises.
Bakersfield commercial real estate broker Bo Lundy, whose investor partnership owns the property where the new VA is proposed, said he doesn’t think Cohen’s fight is personal. Cohen is only trying to save his tenant at Westwind, Lundy said, “and quite honestly, it’s an inexpensive way of doing so.”
“It’s my opinion that he doesn’t really care if it’s the VA or AAA,” he said.
Bakersfield office broker Jeff Andrew, who represented Cohen in the Stockdale Tower acquisition and called Cohen one of his best clients, sees the conflict as a businessman standing up to a federal agency that hasn’t worked within its own rules.
“I don’t think anyone ever listens to his side of the story,” Andrew said.
Cohen did not respond to a request for comment, and neither did another representative of his organization.
Cohen owns a stake in at least one other property in Bakersfield: California Corporate Center, a six-floor, 195,530-square-foot office building complex at 4550 California Ave.
His various business entities do more than buy commercial properties. Besides owning and managing various holding companies and joint venture partnerships, his Cardinal Equities LLC develops luxury single-family homes and condo projects in high-end communities such as Bel Air and West Hollywood.
In one of its highest-profile purchases, Cardinal Equities was involved in the 2017 acquisition of the former headquarters of Death Row Records, a 30,000-square-foot boutique office building in Beverly Hills bought in 2000 by record company executive Suge Knight.
The three-story building on Wilshire Boulevard boasted a giant billboard on the roof, a reptile room, a grow room and a rooftop conference room with a roof deck. Knight reportedly paid $2.95 million for it six years before losing it to bankruptcy. Cardinal reportedly picked it up for $17.5 million.
Cohen’s investments in Bakersfield may be lower profile from a Southern California perspective, but they’ve gained a lot of notice locally.
Last month, one of his subsidiaries filed appeals against the city of Bakersfield’s final reviews of the new, 30,100-square-foot, single-story clinic proposed in northwest Bakersfield at Knudsen and Olive drives. One of the appeals said the project’s site plan is deficient and misleading, while the other alleged errors in the city’s review of an environmental assessment of the proposal.
Cardinal holds that it would be faster and less expensive for the government to remodel its existing, 31-year-old clinic on Westwind.
Since 2018, Cohen’s groups have lodged 15 procurement protests against the government’s award of a lease to the San Diego developer behind the new project. There have also been three protests with the U.S. Court of Federal Claims and two appeals to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.
In April 2021, a suit filed by one of Cohen’s organizations alleged in Kern County Superior County that the city improperly disregarded the California Environmental Quality Act when it approved construction of a new clinic in March 2021.
The lawsuit cited potential contamination and air pollution health concerns related to the property at Knudsen and Olive. It said risks remain from oil production at the site and nearby refining prior to 1950, as well as dismantling work after that time. The suit also accused the city of not considering whether burrowing owls may live in the area.
County property records show that, in January 2004, Westwind Drive LLC paid $4.655 million for the existing clinic property, a 34,560-square-foot, one-story building built in 1992. In August 2005, a Cohen-connected group got 65% ownership and the rest went to Pasadena-based Windsor Pacific LLC.
