Los Angeles Politics Hotsheet for Thursday
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In a real body blow to residents of North Hollywood and surrounding areas, Curbed LA is reporting that the iconic Valley Plaza in North Hollywood, a long time shuttered and vacant retail site will not be coming back to life for the foreseeable future. Valley Plaza had been owned for the last 10 years by developer J.H. Snyder, who promised but never delivered on a $333 million redo complete with restaurants, retail space, movie theaters, and even sound stages for the film industry. Instead, J.H. Snyder has now handed the property back (foreclosure?) to the lender, Istar. A sad day for our friends in NoHo.
Mayor Villaraigosa gave his annual "State of the City" address yesterday, titling it "A New Contract", whatever that means. Something about 300,000 potholes that he's going to fill, port traffic up, fixing education, blah, blah, etc. City Maven live blogged the speech perfectly!
Food sprayer and LACCD candidate Scott Svonkin continues to catch heat for his deceptive absence from Tuesday night's San Gabriel School Board meeting. Our mention yesterday of his lying about being ill in order to attend and schmooze at a LA Democratic Party event at UTLA was picked up and expanded on by the LA Weekly. We're also receiving reports that Scott fled the event as soon as he realized he was being photographed by our sources.
Apparently, we really are the City of Angels.
Labels: antonio villaraigosa, j.h. snyder, scott svonkin, Valley Plaza
Posted by Unknown @ 4/14/2011 12:00:00 AM
7 Comments:
Joe, I so loved the Angels story about LA that I took it for my FB.
Anything for you Kim!
I was pleased to see the next wanna be state assemblymember and current Mayor of West Hollywood is standing up for Scott. The campaign for the 42nd AD has begun. Nice to see so soon just where and who his loyalties are connected to.
The story of Valley Plaza is really a validation of Jerry Brown's efforts to shut down the CRA. The CRA is totally behind the stalling of much needed retail in that area, and that wasn't helped at the time by the economy.
Had the CRA not been involved, this mall would have been developed. There is certainly a demand for retail.
Why would the CRA not support retail here? This is the one area of the valley where the usual development of retail/condo would actually make sense. If you live in NoHo you have to drive south of Riverside to get any serious retail.
Candidates should be rated first by their newsletter, analyse each Council district newsletter or letters, it would give the voters a good start to learn about their councilman.
Retail is missing in Boyle Heigths altogether, and they will not allow private industry to come in because it would give competition to Non-profits developers.
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