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Thursday, Mar 28, 2024

Driven Down

There’s a 550,000-square-foot shadow looming over the mom-and-pop retailers of Woodland Hills called the Village at Topanga. When Westfield Corp. opens its $350 million outdoor shopping center later this month, connecting its existing Topanga and Promenade malls and bringing 88 new retailers to Warner Center, it aims to draw a huge amount of shopper traffic. And no area is more likely to suffer than the long-neglected westernmost stretch of Ventura Boulevard. Although it is just two miles west of the new Village, the wide commercial section of Ventura that crisscrosses north of the 101 freeway feels like a world away. For years, the retail strip has suffered from inadequate parking, sagging façades, dangerously fast vehicle speeds and a lack of basic pedestrian amenities like crosswalks. Local groups have a ready model for how to improve their section of the boulevard. “When you drive Ventura Boulevard through Sherman Oaks, there’s a nice shopping district and traffic is going slow,” said Dennis DiBiase, vice chairman of the Woodland Hills-Warner Center Neighborhood Council. Along many sections of the boulevard, such as in Tarzana, merchants have formed business improvement districts to fund attractive median landscaping, creative signage and crosswalks, lending a friendly vibe to their commercial sectors. But that has not happened in Woodland Hills, where an effort to form a BID failed several years ago, mostly due to a high number of absentee landlords. “In most of Woodland Hills, Ventura looks OK,” DiBiase said. “But the area where the freeway crosses over is a wasteland. It really needs some work.” Now, with the Westfield properties expected to bring in 20 million shopper visits and ring up $1.3 billion in sales annually, there’s a movement afoot to improve the boulevard between Sale and Royer avenues. Several ideas, including adding crosswalks and restriping the boulevard to install slotted or median parking spots, are circulating to local merchants by stakeholders who have enlisted help from Los Angeles City Councilman Bob Blumenfield. “It certainly is an area for opportunity,” Blumenfield said, adding that he is on board with revitalization efforts and would like to see the trolley service that will ferry shoppers around the new malls extended to Ventura as well. Valley ‘speedway’ Originally a segment of El Camino Real, which connected California’s Spanish missions, Ventura is a 14-mile thoroughfare that runs along the base of the Santa Monica Mountains. It served as U.S. Route 101 before the Ventura Freeway opened in 1960 and has been compared to L.A.’s Wilshire Boulevard. Woodland Hills is home to 4.6 miles of the boulevard, the longest stretch of any Valley community. At its western end, the boulevard houses a remarkably diverse collection of businesses, ranging from large national chain stores to independent lighting and interior decor outlets to bookstores and martial arts studios. Many of the businesses, like Sports Limited at 22642 Ventura, have been on the boulevard for decades and seen the area deteriorate. Steve Crane, who started at the ski and surf shop as an employee and eventually bought it, frequently witnesses car accidents between drivers who zoom off and on the freeway to bypass heavy traffic. Old storefronts are another concern to the business owner, along with what he considers overzealous enforcement at the parallel parking meters on the street. “A bunch of my customers get tickets – it’s a racket,” said Crane, who supports the effort to increase parking capacity. So does Mike Whetham, owner of Wheel World, a bike shop at 22718 Ventura. “The more parking, the better,” he said, pointing to the cramped lot behind his store. “If we could get a bike lane out here, that would be great for us, too.” Lack of parking and customer access worry DiBiase and other longtime Woodland Hills residents like Scott Silverstein, a real estate broker who serves as chairman of the neighborhood council. “This part of the street averages 95 feet wide and it’s a speedway, with cars going down it at 60 miles an hour,” said Silverstein as he surveyed the boulevard on a recent afternoon. Many merchants don’t have adequate parking lots and complain that customers who park across the street have to walk up to a half-mile to find crosswalks or dash across traffic to get to their stores. Those who park in nearby neighborhoods risk invoking the wrath of local homeowners. “We understand that this is a throughway, but we have to listen to the stakeholders down here in the retail strip,” Silverstein said. The street is wide enough to accommodate restriping of parking to allow for slotted or median parking spots and midblock crosswalks that would slow traffic to safer levels and make the area more hospitable to business, he said. The Los Angeles Department of Transportation is currently studying the possibility of the street improvements to determine if they are feasible and if so, how much they would cost. DiBiase hopes to hear the traffic engineers’ findings later this month. Once a detailed proposal is available, he plans to get more feedback from residents and business owners and go back to the neighborhood council and Los Angeles City Council for action. Over the past couple of months, Silverstein said, the neighborhood council has been contacted by about 50 merchants, the vast majority of them in favor of a change, though some worry about street construction discouraging business – or improvements prompting landlords to raise rents. Blumenfield said he will push for quick action, something he knows is rare in city bureaucracy. “My role is to take whatever time line people give me, and say it’s not acceptable because it always goes too slow,” he said. “My hope is that it won’t be that much of a big problem. From a common-sense perspective, I look at (the restriping ideas) and say, Let’s get some paint and do this thing.” Kathy Delle Donne, president of a citizens review board that oversees the Ventura-Cahuenga Boulevard corridor, said some of the money might come from a parking fund that merchants along the corridor pay into every month. “The money can be used to improve parking in any of the six communities along the boulevard from Cahuenga Pass to Woodland Hills,” Delle Donne said, adding that there is more than $800,000 in the account. New urgency The retail district’s woes did not come about overnight. But fixing them has taken on a new urgency as the Westfield mall nears completion and the Warner Center 2035 Plan, passed in 2013, encourages large-scale development in Warner Center, a 1.7-square-mile residential and commercial district north of the freeway and east of Topanga Canyon Boulevard. There is concern that the growth of Warner Center will leave Ventura merchants behind. But Blumenfield said he doesn’t believe one Woodland Hills commercial district has to put the other out of business. “My hope is that the vitality that’s being brought to the region by the Westfield project will be the rising tide that raises all boats,” he said. “I’m in no way dismissing the concerns of folks who have trepidation, but my goal is to work with everybody to make sure the entire region prospers.” The kinds of improvements under study can definitely make a difference for business owners, said Todd Nathanson, president of illi Commercial Real Estate, an Encino brokerage that specializes in retail property. While some areas have seen better results than others, he said, enhanced stretches of Ventura Boulevard in Studio City and Sherman Oaks are “flourishing, with amazing activity and regional boutique retailers coming in who are more confident about their marketing and buying.” That level of sophistication allows landlords to ask rental rates that dwarf those in Woodland Hills, which range between $2.25 to the low $3 a square foot. “I just came from Ventura and Whitsett (in Studio City) and we have multiple offers in from seasoned retailers at $4.25,” he said. Already, there are signs that western Ventura could rise to the occasion. Two years ago, Karl Makinen saw an opportunity to expand his hip restaurant and bar, Local Peasant, from its successful location in Sherman Oaks with a second outlet. He chose 22848 Ventura, which had housed Mexican restaurant Casa de Carlos for many years. “Everybody was afraid of (the location),” Makinen recalled recently as he prepared for Friday night happy hour. “But we think this strip is awesome. We just love how it’s between Calabasas and Tarzana, so it draws from both sides of the Valley, plus Woodland Hills. And it’s definitely freeway friendly.” Makinen and his business partner, including the bar’s General Manager Chad Henderson, took a 30-year lease and put $600,000 into revamping the old cantina, taking the building down to its studs. What they created – an open eatery with industrial décor, two bars and a post-Prohibition theme – is changing the perception that the western end of Ventura is stodgy. Although the restaurant doesn’t do traditional advertising and has never hung up a sign, it has been busy since it opened, Makinen said. “We were so overwhelmed right from the start that we didn’t even hook up the phone for two months. People were calling the staff at the surf shop across the street, asking if they would come over here and make reservations,” he said.

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