DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES — The Downtown News runs a great editorial this week saying that of the projects proposed for Downtown, it's ok that not all of them will happen.

The thing about a boom is that not everything, well, booms. Some aspiring developers lack the requisite experience, money or connections. The reality is that all three are needed to make a difficult project come to life. With that in mind it's clear that a dozen or so of the Downtown projects will never get a shovel in the ground. The market and competition will help determine what should thrive and what should get weeded out.

... Now the second part of understanding Boomtown Downtown: Even if dozens of efforts fail, scores will succeed, including some pretty big pieces of the Downtown Los Angeles puzzle. Our Development issue detailed 22 projects that opened in the last six months, everything from small cafes to eight-figure housing projects to a $140 million arena.

It's so easy to get caught up in the game of thinking that if a project fails, it says something bigger about the market. Sometimes that's true, but so often it simply isn't. Trying to get a project built is just like anything else: you need to have a plan, and that plan needs to pencil out. If it does and you've got the ability to pull it off, your project will get built.

It's unbelievably how much Downtown is really happening. Forget the speculation about pie in the sky ideas: let's focus on the stuff that's in process or opening right now.