HOWS Market is a neighborhood grocery store where residents can get in, shop and get out. As a regular customer, I foresee a quick trip to the market becoming a thing of the past for me and hundreds of other west Malibu families if LaSalle Investment Management’s shopping center expansion proceeds as planned.
The developer proposes to eliminate one of the two mono-directional driveways on Trancas Canyon and all parking between Trancas and HOWS. In its place, a single two-way service road and a common area in which shoppers and diners will be encouraged to “linger.” The problem being that when shoppers linger, so do their cars. HOWS parking lot is already full on hot summer weekends. Additional retailers will generate more traffic and residents will suffer.
Per the proposed plan, western Malibu residents will enter the shopping center via the service road in front of the Garden Center and drive clear around HOWS and the new shops for parking close to the market entrance. Finding none (at least on weekends and during the summer), they will drive back around HOWS past the busy loading dock to park in the decomposed granite overflow lot next to the Garden Center. They will then walk across the busy service road back around HOWS through the common area to the entrance. Once finished shopping they-and their fully loaded carts-will trundle around HOWS again, through the common area filled with energetic children, across the service road onto the dog lot to their waiting vehicle.
Have you ever pushed a shopping cart across decomposed granite? In the rain?
HOWS serves many seniors, parents with young children and other residents with limited mobility. Handicapped parking notwithstanding, the size, scope and configuration of the proposed expansion inconveniences residents who depend on HOWS and risk their safety. It does not serve the community, as the developer would like us to believe.
LaSalle Investment claims to have the best interest of local residents at heart. If so, they should have no argument with reducing the size and scope of the shopping center and rethinking the site plan.
Katherine R. Spangle