Can Panorama Project Get Around Roadblocks? By JACQUELINE FOX Staff Reporter Take a spin north on Van Nuys Boulevard into the heart of Panorama City, squint and imagine a bustling, pedestrian-friendly shopping and retail nexus, with bubbling fountains, bright, colorful storefronts, affordable housing and a thriving cultural heartbeat strong enough to rival any Old Pasadena. This vision for Panorama City, an area now dominated by traffic, older mom and pop shops and plagued by urban blight and gang activity, is exactly what a team of volunteer architects, developers, historians, planners and Valley business leaders offered up Oct. 15 in a report called the “Panorama City Commercial Area Concept Plan.” Two years in the making, the plan was crafted by an Urban Design Assistance Team or UDAT, and sponsored by the San Fernando Valley Chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) and the Economic Alliance of the San Fernando Valley. The concept plan calls for revitalizing roughly 280 acres stretching out from Panorama City’s core at Roscoe and Van Nuys boulevards. It includes gateway signage, landscaping, mixed-use housing and retail components, parks, artists’ lofts, senior housing, a hotel and convention center, community gardens and a school for industrial arts. The UDAT team, which began studying the area’s demographics and the socio-economics of Panorama City’s some 70,000 residents right after Sept. 11, 2001, say because their plan is so comprehensive, and because it practically mirrors the boundaries of the city’s approved community design overlay district plan for the area, that it shouldn’t take a mountain of red tape and years to get approved. Others, while optimistic, say it’s going to take some work. “I don’t see this happening in one or even two years, but I have had dozens of telephone calls from people who want to be involved in the next phase and certainly involved in making investments in Panorama City,” said Bob Scott, former Los Angeles city planning commissioner and director of the Civic Center Group in Calabasas. It was Scott who managed to convince the local chapter of the AIA to form a UDAT team for the Valley and identify an area for redevelopment as part of the Alliance’s Vision 20/20 plan, which was unveiled in 2001 but yet to spark much interest from the city or the development community. Until now. The team chose Panorama City because of its urban density, proximity to local freeways, and development potential. Their plan calls for dividing the area into three sections: a northern district with a focus on Panorama City’s Latino heritage; a central district that would link the Panorama Mall and Wal-Mart store with senior housing and other components of the plan, and a southern district, where an industrial arts school and museum would be built to compliment a new high school now under construction. Both city councilmen Tony Cardenas and Alex Padilla’s districts include portions of the project area. Cardenas said he plans to meet with both Padilla and Robert “Bud” Ovrom, director of the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency, over the next few weeks to discuss its viability. Roadblocks ahead? Cardenas said he supports the plan, but noted its likely hefty price tag and the fact that there was no way to accurately predict its viability or the chances that it wouldn’t end up like so many redevelopment plans for the Valley have in the past: stifled by NIMBYISM on one hand, and endless politicking on the other. “It sounds to me like it’s a real plan, not pie in the sky,” said Cardenas. “But, it’s also something that is going to be expensive, appropriately expensive nonetheless. And this is the kind of thing that doesn’t get off the ground one piece at a time. You are going to have myriad investors and developers’ interest.” The plan was well-received during its unveiling by a handful of business leaders and key city officials, including Ovrom. “This is incredibly exciting,” said Ovrom, who, since taking his post earlier this year, has helped kick-start long-stalled plans for a town-center project in North Hollywood, now set to break ground in December after two decades of delays in planning. Ovrom, known as a fierce but respected negotiator among the development community, did not mince words spelling out his plans upon taking office. He said his focus would be on housing and he has since pointed to a policy bent on shifting focus away from scorched-earth developments and on to projects that include livable communities and mixed-used concepts. New direction He indicated that it’s a new day for development in the Valley. “I think the CRA has been guilty of doing projects just for the sake of doing projects,” Ovrom told the UDAT team upon seeing the report. “I think we can very much follow your lead. And, it’s no accident that when (Mayor James Hahn) announced my appointment he did it in the Valley.” Tom Rath, a city planner overseeing the overlay plan for Panorama City, called the concept “One heck of a vision,” but he cautioned that it would need support from every level of the community in order to come to fruition. “I would say that neighborhoods have to be involved from the beginning,” said Rath. “There should be a concept and policy committee and design and advisory committee established that consist of residents, so that they can give feedback to developers along the way for a reduction in controversy.” One of the first things the city must do to move the plan forward is convince the council to approve a resolution declaring the area a redevelopment zone, which would open up access for additional funding through the CRA’s Earthquake Disaster Assistance Project. Other funding could come through city tax incentive programs for revitalization areas and federal Community Development Block Grants through the Targeted Neighborhood Initiative program.