Community Corner

Residents Blast City for Approving Apartment Building Design

The community was expecting a Mediterranean-style complex and is now faced with an art deco building that they never approved.

Some Encino residents and local officials are seeing red over a new apartment complex on Ventura Boulevard. In fact, they're seeing red, blue, yellow and gray—the colors on the box-shaped building they complain the community never approved and the city quietly OK'd without their knowledge.

The 125-unit apartment complex at 16704-16720 Ventura Blvd. was originally proposed as a Tuscan-style villa, but when building began to take shape in 2010, residents were appalled to see a multihued, art deco building they consider an eyesore. Now they're asking how the current design was approved.

When the original project proposal came before the community in 2002, developers from Gold Mountain Enterprises said it was going to be a Mediterranean-style apartment complex with low-pitched roofs, balconies, setbacks, trees and landscaping.

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Even then, the community opposed the over-scale, mixed-use complex, which put 125 apartment units on top of 17,000 square feet of retail and 108,000 square feet of underground parking. The city Planning Commission approved the project in 2002 despite objections from Encino homeowners associations, the Chamber of Commerce and nearby residents.

After the city approved the design, Gold Mountain Enterprises went bankrupt and the project changed hands. The project was delayed for several years until the new developer, The Legado Companies and Fassberg Contracting Corp., submitted its final building plans for city approval in 2007. The final blueprints for Legado Encino, however, had a completely redesigned façade.

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Unknown to the Encino community, the city approved the new art deco design without a public hearing, notice or consultation with surrounding property owners.

“Right now, the people of Encino have every right to assert, 'City of L.A., you've got some [explaining] to do,'" 5th District Councilman Paul Koretz said in his Feb. 2 district newsletter. “Many people ... are very unhappy with the look of the façade and its garish mix of red, blue, pink, yellow and white.”

“It looks like a bad preschool building,” Encino resident Barbara Ruggiero told Patch in an e-mail last week. “Has the town figured out how they will handle the 125 plus cars as they hit the light at Petit [Avenue] every morning? I live on Petit and can't wait to see that.”

Koretz said the approval process was unacceptable and is trying to figure out what happened with this development over time. He introduced a City Council motion on Feb. 2 that, if approved, will give the Planning Department, Building and Safety and the city attorney 30 days to thoroughly review the project and its procedural aspects. They will then report back to the council to describe what happened and offer any recommendations to improve the current design such as repainting or landscaping.  

“Pardon the pun, but the city has painted themselves into a corner,” Koretz’s field deputy, Shawn Bayliss, said at the January Encino Neighborhood Council Meeting. “It doesn’t look like we have too many options, but we’re going to see what we can do.”


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