Shopping Center Expansion Aims for Pedestrians Along Ventura

An Encino developer said Thursday that he plans to more than double the size of the Town and Country outdoor shopping center to make it more accessible to pedestrians along Ventura Boulevard.

Jacob Kohanzadeh of Plaza Investments said the Town and Country center on 7 1/2 acres is a “depressed center” that suffers from “bad architecture, bad design and bad exposure. I want to turn it from a dead center into an alive-and-today center.”

The proposal is causing controversy among area residents, who disagree about the project’s effects on nearby neighborhoods. The center at 17200 Ventura Blvd. includes a three-screen Laemmle Theatres complex and restaurants such as The Good Earth and Acapulco.

Plans filed with the city’s Planning Department propose increasing the center’s size from 129,900 to 296,906 square feet. The developer would demolish about one-third of the existing center and add more than 1,225 parking spaces.

Kohanzadeh also wants to expand the Plaza De Oro shopping center, which faces Town and Country across Ventura Boulevard, from 86,018 to 133,484 square feet.

‘Very Long-Range’

He said those plans were “very long- range, in the distant future. What’s really important now is taking care of Town and Country.” He said he hoped to have the expansion under way within two years.

The proposals were criticized Thursday by Gerald A. Silver, president of Homeowners of Encino.

“This is going to create true gridlock,” Silver said. “We object to this kind of density in Encino. It’s just going to create many problems, not just with traffic but with all kinds of environmental elements. We’re going to challenge this.”

Silver said that the city’s sewer system cannot adequately handle the additional development and that excavation for an underground parking lot would result in “tens of thousands of pounds” of dirt on nearby streets.

A representative of the developer said that the city’s sewer system can handle the additional sewage and that excavated dirt would be trucked away.

Members of another Encino group, Encino Property Owners Assn., think the expansion is warranted.

“I personally wish Town and Country could stay the same, but nothing ever does,” said Kathy Lewis, the organization’s land use and zoning committee chairwoman. “The developer is doing what he can to mitigate all our concerns. They seem like nice people.”

Plaza Investments has hired consulting firms to evaluate the project’s environmental impact. The city’s Planning Department is soliciting comments from area residents.

According to the developer’s planning documents, the improvements are needed to keep up with the trend along Ventura Boulevard to build stores that pedestrians can reach easily. The documents said the 22-year-old shopping center “needs upgrading and revitalization in order to compete with newer, up-to-date facilities.”

The Town and Country center is separated from Ventura Boulevard by a parking lot.

“All the merchants are hidden, you don’t see the buildings, and the architecture, which has French windows, is out of date,” Kohanzadeh said. “The city wants to have shops along the boulevard for people to window-shop as they’re walking or jogging.”

The documents added that requiring shoppers on Ventura Boulevard to walk across the Town and Country parking lot to reach stores “creates a dangerous pedestrian situation.”

Silver said that using the pedestrian rationale to justify the expansion did not make sense. “Nobody walks on Ventura Boulevard,” he said. “They get to it and get from it by car.”

An attorney for the developer, Benjamin M. Reznik, said he felt Silver was making “absurd claims.

“There are a tremendous amount of people here who walk to the boulevard,” he said. “And they’d be more inclined to walk if there were stores that invited that sort of thing. There’s no store frontage that encourages people to walk.”

Reznik, who is president of the Encino Chamber of Commerce, said that the current site was underdeveloped and that the proposed center would be smaller than the maximum size allowed on the site.

“Under today’s law, we could build a center that was 450,000 square feet,” he said. “We are making an especially limited request. In fact, if everyone along Ventura Boulevard did what we’re doing, there wouldn’t be any problems along there.”