L.A. Zoning Panel Cracks Down on Van Nuys Market

A 7-Eleven market in Van Nuys is a public nuisance that fosters prostitution, drug sales, drunken-ness and lewd conduct, and the store must hire a security guard and close late at night, a Los Angeles city zoning panel ruled Tuesday.

The order by the Board of Zoning Appeals to owners of the store at 15317 Vanowen St. was the second such action involving a 7-Eleven in the San Fernando Valley in recent months.

Several months ago, the city imposed similar regulations on a store in Lake View Terrace.

The Van Nuys store is located at the corner of Vanowen Street and Sepulveda Boulevard, in an area with a crime rate twice the citywide average.

“This is your bible,” board member Nikolas Patsaouras warned owner Abdul Ghulamhussian at a hearing Tuesday, referring to the restrictions imposed on him.

If the owner fails to comply with the conditions, the city can revoke his permit to sell liquor.

The new rules, which still may be appealed to the Los Angeles City Council, permit the store to operate only from 6 a.m. to 1 a.m. on weekdays and Saturdays and until midnight on Sunday.

Other conditions require that a uniformed security guard patrol the property nightly from 9 p.m. to 1:30 a.m.; prohibit video games and the sale or display of sexually oriented material on the site, and prohibit the sale of hard liquor.

Currently, the store operates 24 hours a day, has two video games and is patrolled by a security service that stops by occasionally.

Despite the restrictions it specified, the board actually eased limitations previously imposed by a lower-ranking zoning official who had wanted to limit store hours to 8 a.m. to 11 p.m. and to require a 24-hour on-site security guard.

Ghulamhussian and representatives of the Southland Corp., the Texas-based company that franchises the stores, complained that the conditions originally proposed by Associate Zoning Administrator Ray Crisp would drive the store out of business.

Also defending the store were local supporters who complained that the 7-Eleven should not be punished for the area’s drug-dealers and prostitutes. “He can’t push them off the sidewalk,” local resident Dorothy Horton said. “He didn’t create the problem.”

Joe Gomes, operations division manager for Southland, said in an interview that his company is troubled by the city’s attempts to blame Ghulamhussian for the area’s problems.

But Don Schultz, president of the Van Nuys Homeowners Assn., said the mandatory conditions need to be imposed even though the store has moved in recent months to take voluntary steps toward self-regulation. “In the last five months, I can’t deny that there have been improvements,” Schultz said. But the improvements have come only because of the threat of mandatory limits, he argued.