In the eyes of more than a few Westwood merchants, getting more
people to shop in the Village ““ and making Westwood a more
attractive place in general ““ basically boils down to one
thing: more parking.
About 60 merchants and property owners got together for an
informal meeting at Jerry’s Deli on Wednesday to discuss how
to improve business conditions and set priorities to make Westwood
village more commercially attractive.
Overwhelmingly, those attending agreed that the Village’s
lack of parking keeps many potential visitors away.
Also items of importance were dealing with the large number of
homeless people populating the the streets of the Village, and
preventing the Village from becoming too generic by encouraging a
mix of unique businesses to move into Westwood.
Through the 1980s, the Village’s commercial economy, which
was largely driven by youth culture and movie theaters, was so
successful that those who remember the time say Westwood was
referred to as “Times Square West” ““ filled wall
to wall with people on the weekends.
But with the large crowds came isolated incidents of gang
related violence, and in a 1987 shooting an innocent bystander was
killed.
Some merchants blame the subsequent “bad press” for
driving the crowds elsewhere ““ largely to the newly opened
Century City mall and later the Santa Monica Promenade, both of
which have plenty of parking and newer multiplex movie
theaters.
By the early 1990s commercial vacancy rates soared. In order to
reverse an ominous trend, Westwood merchants got together and
formed a Business Improvement District in 1995.
Those within the district agreed to pay an assessment fee based
on property size which would be spent supplementing maintenance
services the city government provided infrequently, such as street
sweeping, sidewalk cleaning and tree trimming.
But the BID was also formed with the intention of creating more
parking spaces in the Village, and in the seven years since then
only one city owned parking lot on Broxton has been added to the
village. Many merchants involved with the BID felt out of the loop,
frustrated with a management staff that they say never seemed to
address their concerns or to be visible within the community.
The meeting was called in the wake of much community aggravation
over Los Angeles Councilman Jack Weiss’s dissolving of the
BID this September when he decided against renewing its
charter.
To it’s organizers, the meeting was largely
successful.
“We weren’t trying to find solutions, (instead) we
got a really good cross section of ideas,” said Phil Gabriel,
a former BID board member and owner of Scrubs Unlimited. “I
haven’t seen a turnout for that kind of meeting in
years,” Gabriel said.