A proposed 90-foot digital billboard near the former Tower Records site drew a wave of resident opposition Thursday night as the Planning Commission’s Sunset Arts and Advertising Subcommittee took up the project at 8801 Sunset Boulevard. Neighbors came angry. Some said they’d found out about the meeting that morning.
The Supreme streetwear store sits where Sunset, Horn Avenue, and Holloway Drive converge. That’s where the billboard would go. It would stand 30 feet above the maximum height the City’s Sunset Specific Plan allows. Getting it built requires a development agreement, a zone map amendment, and a creative billboard permit. The full agenda packet with the Staff report, renderings and public comments submitted can be found here.
Two full-motion animated digital faces. The larger one faces west — approximately 50 feet tall, 30 feet wide, 1,500 square feet of moving image aimed at eastbound traffic on Sunset. The smaller east-facing sign, 480 square feet, would be visible from Holloway Drive. There’s no billboard on the site now. There never has been.
The concept
BIG Outdoor is the media operator. The architecture firm is OFFICEUNTITLED. Designer Ben Anderson told the subcommittee the concept came out of skateboarding culture and what Tower Records once meant to the neighborhood. “It sort of became an epicenter of subculture,” he said. “It’s clearly a very iconic brand in its time.” Micro-perforated stainless steel panels. Sculptural form, not a pole. The design has been revised multiple times since it first received a concept designation under the City’s design excellence process.
‘Why weren’t any of us notified?’
The outrage started before anyone got to the design.
Dozens of written comments submitted to the City told the same story. Residents who’d lived on Horn Avenue and the surrounding streets for decades — some 35, some 46 years — said they got notice the day of the meeting, or the night before. Several said the hearing should be postponed outright.
“We, local residents, only received notice of this meeting at 8am this morning,” wrote one 35-year West Hollywood resident. “Hardly time for a fully formed written response.”
The applicant said a community meeting was held in 2023. Elyse Eisenberg, president of the WeHo Heights Neighborhood Association and a member of the City’s Business License Commission, wasn’t buying it. “Aaron, I have no recollection of you having a neighborhood meeting on this project,” she said during public comment. “None whatsoever.” Elyse was addressing Aaron Green, president of Afriat Consulting Group, the West Hollywood lobbying and land use firm representing the project.
A West Hollywood resident who asked not to be identified told WEHOonline the developer hasn’t taken neighborhood concerns seriously — on this project or others along the strip.
Light, traffic, and a neighborhood that says enough
The letters described conditions people said were already bad before anyone proposed another billboard.
One long-term resident living directly next to the Supreme property wrote that he’d been calling the operator of the Sunset Spectacular for years, begging them to turn down the brightness at night. Got it to “barely tolerable,” he wrote — and still ended up buying blackout curtains out of his own pocket. “Bright moving lights still occasionally filter in and severely disrupt our sleep,” he wrote. “It can be like having police sirens spinning outside your window non-stop.”
Multiple residents called Horn and Sunset one of the most dangerous intersections in the City. The vice president of the Horn Plaza Homeowners Association wrote that westbound drivers blow the red light there regularly. Several letter writers said neighbors had been hit by cars at that corner.
Janie Wood, who said she lives at 8780 Shoreham Drive, kept it simple during the meeting. “Light pollution is a real thing,” Wood said. “It does impact the quality of the residents’ life.”
After the meeting, Eisenberg issued a formal statement to WEHOonline. “A micro forest is not enough of a public benefit to detract from the public liability of the enormous massing of the billboard support structure and the nonstop bombardment of extremely bright animated images reflecting off nearby buildings and into people’s living rooms,” she said. The microforest — a dense planting of native California canopy trees, pollinator grasses, and wildflowers using the Miyawaki method — is proposed for a hillside at the rear of the Supreme property and represents the project’s primary public benefit offering. She called the intersection “notorious for the many accidents that occur on a regular basis, including many that have landed people in the hospital.” Two of her immediate neighbors, she said, had been hit by distracted drivers there.
Eisenberg had something to say about the City’s framing of the site as needing activation. “For the Sunset Arts and Advertising staff to think that more visual assault is needed at this location can only be attributed to their youth, inexperience, and clearly lack of familiarity with driving on Sunset,” she said. At the meeting she was careful to separate opposition to this project from opposition to the property owner. “I do not want the owner of the property to struggle financially,” she said. “I’m not opposed to a billboard on the site — I do want to see the developer make money so he doesn’t have to develop the property. But I would like to see it be within the normal standards.”
Subcommittee: Too big, too white
All three subcommittee members said the thing was too large. Commissioner Lynn Hoopingarner said so directly. “I don’t love this, honestly. It’s very large. It’s very white.” The drone renderings the applicant presented, she said, didn’t show anyone’s actual experience. “Nobody has that view. What is the pedestrian experience?”
She also thought the design missed something. “In this day of selfies and pink walls and whatever, what is that moment? I don’t see that here.” Supreme’s own customers, she said, were an argument for doing better. “Aren’t they the ones doing all the pictures in front of the big walls?”
Hoopingarner pushed back on the staff report’s suggestion that development agreement negotiations would automatically follow the meeting. “When we start talking about negotiating a development agreement, obviously, that is contingent upon a lot of things that may or may not change as a result of what we just talked about tonight,” she said.
Chair Stacey Jones went broader. Sacramento has spent years stripping cities of local discretion over housing and development through laws like SB 9 and SB 10. Billboard design is one of the few areas where local governments still have real authority. Jones said the City should use it. “We’re not bound by state law,” she said. “We can actually have an opinion about the way things look and the timelines for them.”
She’d been saying this for a while, she noted. “Better projects always come out of more community involvement. I’ve said this from the beginning.”
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