A New View

The week before it reopened for business, the renovated $100-million, 1.1-million-square-foot Pacific View Ventura Mall still looked like a work in progress: Rod- and reel-inspired ceiling fans were encased in plastic, the escalators went nowhere and the food court was barren.

But somehow, it all came together in a week. And when the doors finally open today, the complex that for 34 years had been Buenaventura Mall will be bright and shiny, and sport a sleek new name and a giant cylindrical lighthouse jutting above midtown Ventura.

But those last few days represent a mere moment in what has been a decade-long saga of costly legal wrangling, referendums and intracity fighting that observers came to call “the Mall Wars.”

What matters to manager Cayse Osterlund now is that the mall--newly decked out in a kind of California beach house theme--is open for the holiday season.

Sears, which has left Oxnard’s Esplanade Mall, opened at the Ventura mall on Saturday to a fanfare of city officials and visiting daytime soap stars. Robinsons-May, another anchor from the Esplanade, opens Friday, and a community holiday parade the next day will bring Santa Claus through the mall’s doors.

About 85% of the mall’s space--which will be home to about 150 stores--is leased by such new stores as Bath & Body Works, Sam Goody and Victoria’s Secret, which will be open for the holidays. Other stores, including Abercrombie & Fitch, Old Navy and the Gap, will open in the spring.

Although the renovated mall should get a strong holiday boost, some experts wonder just how well it can do in the long-term in a changing retail landscape dominated by outlets and the rebirth of the downtown shopping experience.

The coming months are expected to bring in record numbers of curious mall-walkers from throughout the county and unprecedented sales tax revenues. The city, though, will miss out on much of that money.

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Ventura expects to more than double its sales tax revenue from the mall this year, from $800,000 a year to around $1.8 million, said City Manager Donna Landeros. But a good chunk of that money funnels right back to the shopping center.

As part of their plan to save the long-neglected Buenaventura Mall, city officials agreed to a deal in which the mall paid $12.6 million upfront for public improvements, while the city would pay back $32.3 million over 20 years through the increased tax revenue.

“Things were looking very bleak for Ventura,” said Mark Schniepp, director of the UC Santa Barbara Economic Forecast Project. “It was really the only market that wasn’t expanding. All the evidence was clear; they were justified in making that deal.”

While the mall has seen decreasing business over the years, it still managed to be the city’s largest source of sales tax revenue. Much of the problem, experts say, came from the absence of big-name national chain stores ubiquitous most everywhere else in the county.

In the west, residents have had to travel to The Oaks mall in Thousand Oaks for their Gap and Victoria’s Secret fix.

“You’d have to say that for the buying power that the county has, it’s been really underserved,” said Jack Kyser, chief economist with the Los Angeles Economic Development Corp.

Buenaventura Mall was built to serve a population that has since outgrown its small mall. It was remodeled and enclosed in 1983. It was purchased in 1987 by Macerich Co., which specializes in renovating malls with sagging sales but that have “potential” for growth. The next decade was spent trying to make the renovation happen--through hurdle after hurdle.

“Now that we’ve been under construction for a year and a half, everybody’s saying there was never any doubt,” Landeros said. “That’s easy for them to say. They weren’t losing sleep over it.”

In those years, the city waded through discouraging environmental reports, traffic questions, and several management and leasing changes. There was even a series of legal volleys from the city of Oxnard, which feared that the defection of the Esplanade’s two anchors, Sears and Robinsons-May, and a renovated mall in Ventura would destroy its fading mall and divert about $700,000 of sales tax revenue to Ventura.

No one seems to blame Oxnard for its ultimately fruitless efforts to save its mall and buy some time. And now, most city officials say they look at the mall wars, which ended in a kind of cooperative truce about six months ago, as water under the bridge--a period that saw two cities at each other’s throats.

“We’re so close. And we both have the same goal of increasing business for each city,” said Oxnard City Manager Ed Sotelo. “And the reality now is that they have a viable mall and we don’t. We have to ask ourselves what the impacts of that are.”

What that means, Sotelo said, is Oxnard must be very conservative with new spending and, above all, work closely with the Esplanade’s owners to find new anchors.

Owners of the Esplanade are close to a deal to sell the mall, according to Sotelo. If the sale proceeds, tenants will not likely be in danger of losing their stores, at least in the near future, one official said.

But because Robinsons-May still owns its portion of the mall and is under no time constraint to divest itself of the space, the city may find it difficult to attract a new major retailer, leaving the mall’s future unclear.

While most observers agree that Pacific View will have a devastating effect on the county’s most beleaguered mall, there is less of a consensus on what it will do to the county’s reigning mall.

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Becky Bresson, manager of The Oaks, said she expects the renovated Ventura mall to complement The Oaks’ selection of stores--some of which overlap. She isn’t concerned about the loss of sales from west county residents who will no longer choose to trek east.

There’s a cachet to The Oaks that the west county may never achieve, said William Fulton, a Ventura resident and author of “The Reluctant Metropolis,” which chronicles Southern California urban planning.

“If you talk to sophisticated shoppers, they’ll say the Macy’s in Ventura is not the same as the one in Thousand Oaks,” he said. “And stores continue to believe that the west county is more downscale. If you look at demographics, there’s some validity to that.”

But others can’t see Ventura residents heading to Thousand Oaks for what they can now get in their hometown, which has to affect The Oaks. And, according to Kyser, there is always plenty of interest in a new mall.

“[Pacific View] is the new kid on the block,” he said. “There’s excitement, and everyone will want to go there.”

While many argue the merits of one mall over another, others, like Fulton, see no future for malls at all and say the renovation may hurt the city’s efforts downtown.

Retailing is either heading in one of two directions, according to Fulton. It is going upscale and toward the shopping experience offered by renewed downtowns, such as Pasadena’s Old Town or Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade, he said, or geared entirely to price, such as the successful Camarillo outlets.

“It seems like department stores are circling the wagons,” Fulton said. “I really believe that the premium outlets have them cornered. I would be willing to bet money that they won’t succeed.”

The hallowed Sherman Oaks Galleria wilted. Glendale Fashion Center trudged through its last days.

That’s also in part because recreational shopping is dead, lost to two-career families and longer working hours, Kyser said.

But Pacific View has a good outlook, he said, thanks to the increasing number of stores and the very insurance Oxnard’s Esplanade didn’t have--four anchors.

Certainly any retailer open now is likely to see a good season, Schniepp said. Consumer confidence is high. Unemployment is low. The money should just roll right in.

“This mall is opening at the perfect time for shopping,” Kyser said. “It will get off to one heck of a start.”