Forget utilities, will landlord pay for dancers?

With a housing building boom downtown, the competition for prospective tenants and buyers is apparently getting tougher. A sweaty guy holding a giant arrow while jumping up and down on the street corner is not going to cut it. So, it seems that downtown building owners are turning to an old sales gimmick: sex.

Real estate blog Curbed LA notes that motorists driving along the Harbor Freeway at night have been distracted by the silhouette of what appears to be either a stripper, Go-Go girl or an unemployed iPod dancer flickering on the windows of the newly built Canvas LA apartments.  Meanwhile,  about a mile south, the Daily Trojan reports that private developer Conquest Housing removed a suggestive billboard from the corner of Figueroa Street and Adams Boulevard that featured a trio of bikini-clad women under the words: "Housing the Hottest Student Bodies."

What next? Donald Sterling in hot pants?

--Jesus Sanchez

Photo: Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times