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A new guard of developers and property owners has quietly crept into Westwood Village, buying up key commercial buildings, hiring architects and leasing out stores in a neighborhood that has seen steady decline for more than a decade.
The changes in ownership are widely regarded as a prelude to an influx of new merchants, marking the best chance for a revitalized Westwood since the 1920s, when the Janss Investment Corp. first announced its plans for a "high-quality shopping complex."
"You're going to start seeing people on the streets at 7 o'clock on a Saturday night," said urban economist Joel Kotkin, a senior fellow at the Pepperdine Institute for Public Policy. "It's not going to be what it is now--a dead district that has all the excitement of downtown Des Moines--because you're going to have investors who want to have people shopping."
Throughout most of its history, Westwood was one of the Southland's premier shopping and entertainment destinations. But by the early 1990s, the holding companies that dominated the village offered mostly aging properties and unacceptably high rents.
Tony store owners fled for the sparkling Century City Mall and thriving Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica, both of which offered better shopping and--in sharp contrast to Westwood--ample cheap parking. T-shirt shops, frozen yogurt joints and empty storefronts prevailed in the village. Shoppers and moviegoers, also made anxious by several highly publicized incidents of violence involving teenagers, dwindled.
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Now the improving economy has brought investors back and encouraged Westwood's largest property owner to begin selling. Meanwhile, a $4-million program financed by local business owners is adding decorative tile intersections and walkways, a larger pedestrian plaza in the village core and new lighting.
As jackhammers pound and dust flies along ripped-up Westwood Boulevard, many neighbors cheer the long-awaited resurrection and merchants talk optimistically of the future.
"It's time to come," said Michael Chow, of Mr. Chow's restaurant in Beverly Hills, who is planning a new Asian-Italian eatery, called Eurochow, in Westwood's Dome Building. Secure about the area's revitalization, Chow signed a 10-year lease on the space and plans to spend $1.5 million in renovations. "When one starts investing, everybody starts, and then it happens, right?"
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The biggest of the new power brokers is real estate developer...