Bla bla bla.
BURBANK – Store owners in the unique and historic Magnolia Park neighborhood of Burbank are concerned that spiking rents are forcing them to leave. On Monday night, dozens of business owners and community members met for a town hall to discuss what they call the gentrification of their neighborhood …
Sorry, but there’s nothing new about any of this.
It was only a few years ago that these overpriced boutique-erias replaced most of the truly cool thrift shops and coin stores and book places in the neighborhood, and so now they’re bitching about the very same fate they helped bring upon those worthy MP merchants of the past. Same as it ever was.
Short of buying their own buildings — which, even if they could afford to do so, no local landlord would be crazy enough to oblige — the only solution to this problem is commercial rent control. And where do you think you live again?
This is all part of a generalized scam anyway. MP landlords know that their commercial tenants can’t afford $7,000 a month selling fancy pop or sugar treats from Brooklyn. What they’re really trying to do is induce as many storefront vacancies as they can so that our staff and council people will soon begin to clamor for a “mixed use” solution to the “plight” of Magnolia Park.
We can hear it now, if only because we’ve heard it before. It’s positively in the spirit of Burbank2035 to rebuild Magnolia Park! And just think of all the wonderful new housing we’ll be creating on the upper floors!
What a fantastic opportunity to improve the neighborhood! A real win-win.
Don’t believe it? Just wait a few years. At best this is a credulous and clueless group. Unlike location-savvy Melrose, rich people’s businesses won’t be moving into Burbank. It’ll be mixed-use apartment houses instead.
Burbank, California 
Melrose is empty also just people that need a loss in their portfolio or some t-shirt place that people line up to buy and resell. The cool stores like Aardvark have been gone a long time. Even the Jonnie Rockets has been empty a decade.
Semi
“Breaking News!’
Ashley Erikson,
After changing the landscape of Magnolia Park,
is calling it quits this December.
She turned many mom and pop shops upside down
with an invasion by the very young population!
Young people are not spending near the amount
that these stores need to take in to pay their rent.
They’re having a fabulous time and merchants can’t
pay their rent now.
The real spenders are burnt out trying to find a parking spot.
I pray that MPMA is put to sleep like the old Pbid !
Which did zero for the property owners and the store
merchants along Magnolia Blvd.
If you check out the old Pbid?
They fleeced the property owners big time!
With all the empty promises,
they were a despicable and arrogant group of city employees!
Yeah, I’ve said this before, but I realized early on that Ashley only really cared about the salons and boutique/novelty businesses. The younger, flashier, easy stuff.
Staff needs to lean on the MP landlords. You gonna double the rent on some little guy? OK, the inspectors are now down there every day looking through every pore of the building. Word will soon get around that if you fuck with your tenants you might just end up fucking yourself.
Then again, this is Burbank. The Business Friendly Town!
The meeting to SaveMagnoliaPark appeared to have at least 150 people attending. People did not show up in droves because their businesses are flourishing. Konstantine Anthony had a suggestion that the suffering merchants buy a building and unite together. When someone owes someone twenty bucks, they stiff them. Sure, lets buy commercial property together! It’s beyond ridiculous. People sat at the meeting with their incredulous faces and as usual,, not one person yelled out, “Stop the bullshit! This is disgusting!” It’s criminal what is going on.
Try to do that and the LANDLORDS will all band together to evict the tenants in retaliation. For real.
Burbank landlords conspire all the time anyway. Years ago I wrote about what they did once to hide the large number of excessive vacancies that they’d created when they hugely jacked up people’s rents in a very short three- or four-month time period.
What did they do? They kept these open units off the rental market in order to squeeze potential new applicants into accepting higher rents. New tenants thought there were few or no vacancies, and so they paid the asking rate.
Without a doubt, Burbank landlords en masse hid from view most of their new vacancies. This went on for between six months and a year, circa 2001 to 2002.
Someone could hit the whole streach from Buena Vista to Hollywood way on ADA compliance alone.
The PBid soured landlords in Magnolia Park with all the lies and thievery.
The city took away parking restrictions after the PBid failed and absolutely wrecked parking. To add insult to injury, the city now tells merchants they don’t have funds for a parking patrol jeep to give out citations. They probably want to use PBid money to pay for the jeep after they so carelessly allowed parking issues to escalate! But then again, they probably want all the PBid money to be wasted as before.
Oh, I’m sure staff retaliated against the MP merchants for voting out the PBID. I remember that specific meeting, and those six-figure staff employees were absolutely BESIDE THEMSELVES at the result.
This was the same era when chief Sue Georgino would claim that something like “94 percent of the Downtown PBID membership voted to retain this or that…”
No, it was 94 percent of the weighted vote. The actual vote was something like nine merchants in favor but 158 against. Those 158 though only possessed a small percentage of the total Downtown property. As always, they got outvoted.
Meter maids btw make money on the tickets. So — once again — you’re being lied to by the City.
That was a moment in Burbank history when the Redevelopment staff realized that their bullying and controlling during the P-Bid was literally voted out and over! They were shocked!
Why would Talamantes even suggest that the P-Bid be reinstated? Does he realize that initiation will erupt a hornets nest? It was a dismal failure in Magnolia Park. He probably has no idea the depth of the residual anger amongst landlords.
The city was shocked it was voted out because in Burbank, people are afraid to speak up but all the furious property owners figured out how to vote “NO”! Thanks to Jim, Sam and Gary for reaching out to us!
Will Target be a weighted vote? How convenient.
Chief Sue Georgino was rude, rude, rude and condescending with her posse Gayle Stewart and Mary Alvord. It was beyond scandalous.
They wouldn’t even return calls when people tried to get businesses approved. People were afraid to rat the crew out for fear of retaliation.
The Magnolia Park P-Bid was a dirty little Burbank secret- Big time!
I went to the meeting.
People were whispering about what
a waste of time it was and the suggestion
To have your neighbors on Magnolia
Co-sign for others to buy a building
was absurd.
Most merchants are in a serious struggle
and they’re not co-signing for a struggling
neighbor.
It was ‘Saturday Night Live!
Bob Frutos and Sharon Springer
were there. Frutos left early!
Sharon Springer looked like she
Thought the evening was informative?
She is ‘ Lost in Space!’
The city of wants to bring the P bid back, it was dishonest from the get go and benefitted only the city. Talamantes wants to bring it back to push the small businesses out to make mixed-use new developments , pushing the Landlords to raise rents to merchants who can’t make a living with no parking and now want to punish the merchants even further.
When does this nonsense stop ? The city cannot manage the money they have now: who next will they punish to get more ?
These PBIDs also pay the salaries of those six-figure ex-Redevelopment Agency employees that they insisted on keeping around after the forced demise of every Redevelopment Agency in California.
Here’s a little piece of information: Most landlords are not thrilled with the district having such a young demographics overall. It’s very difficult to get tenants who can pay the rent when they are only tapping that market. Also, many of the landlords get the entire picture and are rather disgusted with many of the district’s policies. Believe it or not, several of the landlords have zero plans of gouging their tenants.
P-Bid renewal: Not in this lifetime!
Any person who pushes to get a Magnolia Park P-Bid has to realize that it will cause major dissension amongst the tenants and amongst the property owners. People are very antagonized and it’s not healthy. The brakes need to be put on favoritism and agendas over there. When boats start sinking, the hole needs to be taken care of. Time to slow down and correct some of the recent damage.
Great posts here fellow Burbankians. Thanks.