City: Complex would boost funds

CITY HALL — A six-story mixed-use complex proposed for the Los Feliz Boulevard entry into Glendale breezed through its initial design review Tuesday, despite objections from Atwater Village residents who said the project would only add to existing traffic woes there.

While city officials did not disagree with the poor traffic assessments, they also said the 175,749-square-foot proposal at 435 Los Feliz Road comes at a time when the depressed credit market has hamstrung nearly all other market rate development in Glendale, spurring the City Council to offer several permit deadline extensions to keep an unknown number of projects from folding altogether.

As if rising from a completely different economic landscape, the project’s developer, Avalon Land LLC, is “wanting to start this project tomorrow, and they have the means to do so,” the firm’s consultant, Rodney Khan, told the Redevelopment Agency on Tuesday.

That means more jobs, increased property tax value and sales tax income for the city and at a time when the down economy is shaping up to severely constrict development throughout the region — a major selling point for the Redevelopment Agency.

“It is a very unsightly location right now,” agency Chairman and City Councilman Ara Najarian said. “And this is what we’re asking for, we’re asking for developers to come in . . . and develop.”

But for some Atwater Village residents, the mixed-use complex at the corner of Los Feliz Road and Gardena Avenue would “impossibly tax” a corridor that is already experiencing the clogging effects of redevelopment.

“The traffic problem is a real big problem,” Atwater resident Marie Conte told the agency.

Several residents asked the agency to consider the tremendous impacts that other previously approved affordable housing projects in the area would have on San Fernando Boulevard traffic.

Los Feliz Road is already mired with the heavy flow of customers to Costco, Best Buy and other retailers west of the bisecting railway, they contended.

But several council members, who double as members of the Redevelopment Agency, countered that the planned makeup of the six-story glass and steel complex — an Asian-themed grocery store, restaurant, medical- and general-use offices — would not generate the same amount of traffic.