• printer friendly
• mail this article
• iPod format
• digg

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.