Illegally Built Parking Lot Approved Despite Protests

An illegally built mini-mall parking lot that Studio City homeowners complained intruded into their neighborhood was approved for shoppers’ use Tuesday by Los Angeles zoning officials.

The city’s Board of Zoning Appeals rejected residents’ demands that the paved 23-car lot at the corner of Fruitland Drive and Sunshine Terrace be dug up and permanently closed.

The owner of a nearby mini-mall, needing more parking space for customers, built the lot eight months ago, but the city ordered it closed a short time later after nearby homeowners complained it was built without a permit on residentially zoned land. The lot has been fenced off since September.

Shopping center developer Marty Bender said the failure to obtain city permission to build the lot was due to a mix-up. He said that he had thought the lot’s owner had obtained the permit, and that the owner thought he had.

Board members agreed in a 3-0 vote to authorize use of the lot for three years.

They said the lot can be used between 7:30 a.m. and 10 p.m., but only by patrons and employees of Bender’s shopping center. The design of the lot was also ordered changed to improve safety.

“The lot helps solve a problem in Studio City. It doesn’t create one,” Bender said, referring to a growing shortage of parking space along the busy Ventura Boulevard commercial strip.

Bender was supported by a nearby homeowner, Brent Seltzer, who said the paved lot is better than the empty lot covered with junk and weeds that it replaced.

But another nearby resident, Eliot Midwood, warned that use of the lot would increase fire danger, noise and traffic congestion in an adjacent hillside neighborhood.

Polly Ward, president of Studio City Residents Assn., said legalization of the lot would prompt other developers and landowners to try the same thing.

Howard Raphael, chief aide to City Councilman Joel Wachs, who represents the Studio City area, complained that a commercial parking lot was “not in keeping with the intent of residential zoning.”

“It does not really enhance or benefit the community--the community that lives there, not comes to shop there,” Raphael said.