At the NW corner of Victory and Sepulveda you will find a discordant, cheap, ugly, billboard infested mini-mall, built in 1985. It houses a variety of businesses, and a lot of empty stores. It’s constructed in the ye-olde-Rural England vinyl and plastic style of the middle 1980s.
This corner is among the busiest in the area, with the nearby 405 pouring hundreds of thousands of vehicles into the intersection. There are bus stops, pedestrians, people on bikes, and people on bikes pulling bikes.
Marring the environment are old wooden power poles that bring 1888 electrical aesthetics to modern day Los Angeles. Garish, oversized billboards; pornographic cash cows; earn advertising revenue for the mall while creating a ghetto look for the passerby.
I wondered what it would look like to replace the hideous mini-mall with a nice apartment building that surrounded a landscaped park. Through the help of Gemini this is what it created:
First, I removed all the billboards. It already looks cleaner.
Then a three story tall apartment building was built to replace the tacky stores. Notice that there are retail shops on the ground floor.
The parking lot was removed and in its place a lovely, shaded park with decorative iron fencing.
This is how the NW corner of Victory and Sepulveda would look after it was developed in a civilized and urbane way. Power lines are buried, billboards prohibited.
One more thing.
Because this is Los Angeles we have to build defensively to protect. This means that the corner should have large boulders to stop speeding vehicles from crashing into the fence, injuring or killing people.
As a further deterrent, there should be a ground floor LAPD community station which would further protect and enhance security in the area, especially in the park.
Here in Van Nuys 