Efforts Bring Renewed Vigor to Panorama City

If this community were a sick patient, its prognosis might have been described as poor not so long ago. But Panorama City, affectionately called “the heart of the Valley” by its boosters, is beginning to show signs again of a steady pulse.

Its heart, it turns out, was stronger than a lot of people thought.

Even before last week’s announcement of a deal promising transformation of the shuttered General Motors plant into retail stores and an industrial park, the area, similar to so many others in the nature of its decline, was making clear, if slow progress toward economic recovery, according to residents, merchants, political leaders and others.

Among the recent signs of revival: a new $10-million shopping center in place of a long-deserted department store, a slight decrease in crime and plans for a new neighborhood library, a new ice skating rink and a remodeled movie theater. There has also been interest from retailing giant Wal-Mart and an influx of needed services for working-class Latinos who make up about half of the population, including the first Southern California branch of a Latino-owned bank and the flagship L.A. store of La Curacao, a popular Latino-oriented department store.

To be sure, the recovery has barely begun. But the improved prospects in Panorama City already say much about what a group of determined residents and merchants, aided by a well-timed infusion of private investment and government attention, can accomplish. In its tale of how a community worked to heal itself by embracing new diversity may lie a paradigm for other areas limping along in the same, uncertain Southern California economy.

“It’s not one group, or one project that led to the changes we’re starting to see,” said Albert Melena, coordinator of an anti-gang youth group in Panorama City. “It’s that what everybody has been working on together is starting to gel.”

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It was a series of small successes, not a miracle cure, that made the area attractive to private investment, say community activists, business leaders and government officials. There was one neighborhood association’s battle to limit the hours and sales of a liquor store that was once a magnet for crime. A wide-ranging campaign was launched to empower apartment residents to take back troubled buildings from gangs, an effort that benefited from significant police involvement. Merchants picked up brooms and painstakingly swept sidewalks outside their stores every morning because city services weren’t adequate.

Partly because of such efforts, Panorama City now finds itself at an odd crossroads. It is still a place of too many people and too few jobs, a recipe for friction anywhere. Population density has been identified as the source of many ills, ranging from crime and housing woes to overloaded schools. But it also represents a burgeoning consumer base for investors and developers of new retail projects.

“Panorama City, it’s safe to say, is at a tremendous turning point,” said City Councilman Richard Alarcon, who represents the area.

Founded as a planned community in 1947, Panorama City over the next three decades became a comfortable suburban niche for low and middle-income families with jobs in surrounding manufacturing plants and in other parts of the city. Its commercial strip along Van Nuys Boulevard supported a healthy mix of mom-and-pop stores and better-known chains such as Robinson’s and Orbachs, recalled Barry Leonard, a second-generation Panorama City optometrist whose father set up shop on Chase Street in 1957.

“It was always a neat, happening place and growing,” Leonard, 40, recalled. “Whatever chains were here were the fanciest, premiere places in the whole Valley.”

But because of its reliance on manufacturing dollars, hard times hit Panorama City sooner than the rest of the San Fernando Valley, said John Rooney, director of the Valley Economic Development Center. With the loss of relatively good wages as GM scaled back from a high of 5,100 employees in 1979, nearly one-quarter of the white residents moved away during the 1980s.

In their place came thousands of less affluent Latinos and Asians who crowded into apartments on the area’s west side. The result was that while Panorama City’s population swelled by more than one-third during the decade, it was the only part of the Valley where family income declined, according to census figures.

One of the most visible signs of these demographic changes was the closing in 1987 of the Van Nuys Boulevard Robinson’s, the embodiment of the community’s postwar, middle-class ambitions. The empty building became a crumbling eyesore where gangs and drug dealers gathered, weakening the pulse of a business district starting to feel competition from regional shopping malls and the pinch of a national recession.

After GM closed its Panorama City plant for good 3 1/2 years ago, taking with it 2,600 jobs, other established businesses closed too.

“Panorama City and the mall in particular had historically been the retail center for the whole northeast valley,” said Alarcon. “But with the closing of GM and the Robinson’s, it was kind of barely hanging in there, as opposed to areas that have had steady economic progress.”

Disaster-relief money made available by the city to communities damaged during the 1992 riots helped pave the way for revitalization. Enticed by the promise of a $2-million city loan and encouraged by the major face-lift given to a Ralph’s supermarket across the street, two developers, Arieh Greenbaum and Harry Grossman, bought the old Robinson’s property and transformed it into a shopping center, Alarcon said.

Panorama Towne Center opened last month, with a Food 4 Less discount grocery store, a Pep Boys auto supply store and a Sav-On Drugs store. The Latino-owned Pan American Bank is scheduled to join them within weeks.

While the center may lack the glamour of some of its more upscale competitors, “it’s bright, clean and more in line with what the community is all about,” said Mel Wilson, a real estate broker who once had an office nearby.

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Perhaps the best example of the new economic order is La Curacao, the Latino-oriented department store.

Anchoring the northeast corner of the Panorama Mall, its exterior decorated with Aztec-inspired motifs, the store jazzed up the beleaguered downtown area when it opened in August. Huge windows filled with Maytag appliances, stereo equipment and toys beckon shoppers. Inside, Spanish-speaking salespeople in ties and dresses are happy to discuss easy credit terms or help customers arrange to ship merchandise back home to Mexico and El Salvador.

“La Curacao goes to a higher standard,” said salesman William Ramirez. “We don’t look like a swap meet and we have the same products as Circuit City and Montgomery Ward. Here, our customers will find someone to answer their questions and not make them feel less because of no English.”

The Panorama City store was the third L.A.-area La Curacao, and owners Jerry and Ron Azarkman picked the location because of the area’s growing Latino population and the strength of the mall. About 35% of the store’s employees come from Panorama City, many of them transplants who found the area an affordable and safe alternative to Los Angeles.

The demographics that lured La Curacao to Panorama City also appealed to Selleck Properties, one of the developers of the GM site, said co-owner Daniel Selleck. According to Selleck, it does not matter that many of the local residents do not have sizable incomes. With 670,000 people living within a five-mile radius of the plant, the discount, warehouse-style retailers he is trying to attract should have no trouble finding customers, Selleck said.

“This is still the heart of the San Fernando Valley. The demographics have changed, the economy has evolved, but there is still a lot of people and there is still a lot of purchasing power, so we think it is ripe for redevelopment,” Selleck said.

That assessment is echoed by Arkansas-based Wal-Mart, which is considering Panorama City as the site of its first store in the city of Los Angeles.

“We see Panorama City as a submarket of the entire San Fernando Valley,” said John Grimes, real estate manager for Wal-Mart’s West Coast operations. “From a retail standpoint, that area is currently underserved.”

But the same population density--an average of 12 people per acre lived in Panorama City when the 1990 census was taken--that makes the mouths of retailers water has made the crowded apartments and streets difficult to adequately manage and police, making it easier for gangs and drug dealers to operate. Perennially, police say, Panorama City has led the rest of the Van Nuys division of the LAPD in crime.

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Most of the community’s population is on the west side of Van Nuys Boulevard, where a high concentration of multifamily apartment complexes were built during the 1970s for senior citizens and CSUN students. City planners, apartment owners, merchants and police say the area’s fortunes declined when low-income families moved into units designed for one or two people, leading to severe overcrowding.

Developers such as Selleck acknowledge that good demographics notwithstanding, investors would not set up shop in Panorama City if crime were not on the wane. That positive trend, a key factor in the area’s rebirth, was not a matter of luck, but resulted from the hard work of merchants and residents who refused to watch their community die.

Many agree that the Panorama City Neighborhood Assn. was, and still is, a major catalyst for many of the positive changes. Formed in 1993 with little fanfare and a membership of two or three landlords, the group crusaded against slum conditions.

“One of the biggest problems we have in Panorama City is property owners or managers who have drug-infested buildings or gang [problems], and simply have no concept of that, and no interest,” said Ronald J. Mayer, vice president of Foresight Management Co., which manages about 280 low-income apartments in Panorama City.

Operating on the principle that one bad building on a block infects the others, the association launched a unit-by-unit campaign to convince the owners and residents of “problem” apartment buildings that the slummy status quo should not and would not be tolerated.

“We ask residents to tell [problem tenants], ‘You may not loiter in front of my apartment,’ ” said Leslie Yamashita, the association’s director. “We tell the apartment manager, ‘If they’re hanging out in front of the building at 5 p.m. every day, turn on the sprinkler system at 5 p.m.’ Or, ‘Spread fertilizer on the grass.’ Heck yeah! Create as much irritation for them as you can.”

Residents and apartment managers applaud the special help they received from police in the form of a FALCON unit, a team of detectives who investigate a building over a period of weeks, or even months, examining conditions in minute detail, recording building-code violations, arresting dealers and confronting gang members.

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Local merchants launched a parallel effort to clean up Van Nuys Boulevard. Under the auspices of a Business Watch program first organized on Sepulveda Boulevard in Van Nuys, merchants launched their own zero-tolerance program for trash, graffiti and cluttered storefronts.

Business owners such as optometrist Leonard swept the sidewalks in front of their stores every morning. They gathered every Saturday to paint over graffiti and peel off posters glued to telephone polls. Peddlers who plastered fliers on car windshields had their literature mailed back to them, along with a copy of the city ordinance showing that what they had done was illegal.

Whether or not Panorama City has actually become a safer place to shop, such aesthetic improvements make shoppers feel safer, which is what counts for merchants, Smith said.

“People don’t understand. We are fighting back and winning,” said Flip Smith, the owner of Flip’s Tire Center in Van Nuys and organizer of the local Business Watch program. “We are not waiting for the city to clean things up. We are doing it.”

One particularly encouraging sign is that the area recently relinquished its spot at the top of the division’s community crime rankings, dropping to No. 2, said Randy Hoffmaster, senior lead officer for Panorama City.

Crime statistics for Panorama City provided by the LAPD for 1994 and 1995 show a 15% decrease in robberies (from 402 in 1994 to 341 in 1995), a 71% decrease in homicides (from 14 to 4), a 41% drop in vandalism and a 10% decrease in car theft. Burglaries increased about 5%, but overall, crime rates in the area dropped. Officers say the trend seems to be continuing this year.

The improved outlook has even extended to Blythe Street, long known as the worst street in the Valley. Located just yards away from the future redevelopment project on the GM site, Blythe Street was the hub of Panorama City’s gang activity until a special court-ordered anti-gang injunction allowed the police to crack down on known gang members.

While drive-by shooting deaths used to be a regular occurrence here, the last one was in May.

“It’s night and day on Blythe Street,” said the LAPD’s George Flores. “When I started here five years ago, the place was an armpit. Things are beginning to change. There’s still a gang problem. There’s still a drug problem. Blythe Street is still a top priority. But people are starting to realize it’s not just the police’s problem. If they want their community to get better, it’s their problem, too.”

Adds Hoffmaster: “We’re beginning to wipe out that old image, where people apologize to you when you say you live in Panorama City. We’re getting everybody involved.”

The recent changes have been warmly received by local residents.

“This face-lift the area’s getting makes a lot of people feel good,” said the Rev. W.J. Bellamy, a longtime resident and founder of the new Panorama City Optimist Club. “This is a hard-working community, and people really support it. It doesn’t have to do with the kind of money you’ve got, it has to do with pride.”

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Yet no one in Panorama City is ready to rest yet; the recovery is still too fragile. The GM project, for one, was pieced together after the city promised tax breaks and other incentives to developers. It still faces numerous legislative hurdles before it will yield the 2,000 jobs and new police substation its developers have promised. Van Nuys Boulevard, meanwhile, is still dotted with vacant storefronts.

There is a lesson to be learned from the progress being made in Panorama City, according to Rooney.

“It shows that an area that gets organized and works hard can turn itself around.”