Sylmar Group Seeks a Buyer for Their Homes : Development: Residents say it no longer is safe to ride horses in streets of the town. They hope to have area rezoned for shopping mall.

Rather than fighting to save their homes, a group of disillusioned Sylmar residents has launched a campaign to destroy their once-rural neighborhood of ranch-style houses to make room for a shopping center.

The residents, some of whom own horses, say they are giving up on the community because it is no longer safe to ride in the streets of Sylmar, once the rural outback of Los Angeles.

They have gathered signatures of 42 of the 58 landowners in the 40-acre neighborhood--bounded by Polk Street, Dronfield Avenue, Astoria Street and Borden Avenue--to ask that the rapidly urbanizing community be rezoned to attract a shopping mall developer.

“I can’t ride my horse down the street anymore,” said Richard Miller, a brewery worker who is the group’s spokesman. “It isn’t safe.”

Most residents in the neighborhood are nearing retirement age, said Jeannie Sikkel, a retired nurse, and many want to take profits from the sale of their homes and move to communities that are rural.

“We’d like to move up to Ukiah in three or four years after my husband retires,” said Sikkel, a 16-year resident of Sylmar. “It got so that it wasn’t safe to back out our driveway with the cattle trailer anymore.”

Lois Manthey, a retired secretary, said: “It was like living in the country when we moved here 28 years ago. Our daughters used to ride their horses right down Polk Street. It was a nice lifestyle.”

Over the years, as condominiums and mini-malls enveloped their neighborhood, many residents sold their horses and other farm animals.

“It’s changed entirely,” Manthey said. “We’re kind of an island. This is no longer a rural area.”

Shopping mall proponents unveiled their plan this week at a meeting of the Sylmar Community Plan Advisory Committee, a panel of residents appointed 18 months ago by Councilman Ernani Bernardi to make recommendations for a new community plan.

With a 30.7% population increase, Sylmar was the city’s fastest-growing community during the 1980s. It has an estimated 70,000 residents and it is the committee’s job to recommend the shape of growth.

“A shopping center has been proposed before,” said committee chairwoman Margaret Whittington. “But this is the first we had heard that the people who actually lived on the property wanted their land to become a mall.”

Residents will meet with members of the committee Tuesday to discuss their proposal.

It may be easier and more profitable to sell the large properties in the area--some as big as two acres--to a developer, they said. In addition to benefiting them by providing a buyer, the residents said they believe that a mall will improve the community.

“There’s no place to shop around here,” Richard Miller said. “I can’t buy a pair of shoes or a decent pair of pants anywhere in Sylmar. We have to drive 30 miles round-trip to the Northridge mall to see a movie. We don’t have many decent restaurants around here.”

The residents envision a mall that would include a major department store, movie theaters, restaurants, bookstores and other shops.

“Let’s give the kids here something to do, now that they can’t ride horses,” Miller said.

Whittington and other committee members argue that streets in the community could not handle the heavy traffic a mall would create.

“It’s a nice idea, but it won’t work,” Whittington said.