Dear Friends and Neighbors, Below is a letter of concern written in support of our local businesses at Pine Tree Circle. Please read and sign if you would like to show your support by adding your name to form.jotform.com/202057173462147. We will send this to the new owners of Pine Tree Circle after gathering signatures. Please feel free to forward to those who may be interested. Thanks, —Rick Ellis, Jens Koepke Dear Nathan Daneshgar, Joseph Daneshgar, and 3D Investments,  Welcome to our Topanga community. We are many of the local patrons of Pine Tree Circle. We are writing to you as concerned citizens and sincerely hope that this letter will inspire you to take a moment to reflect on the impact your decisions are making and will make on our community. Our motivation is personal, as well as for the well-being of our broader community. This letter is a request for your consideration of our community at large. We are a tight-knit community whose lives are often interwoven through necessity. The Pine Tree Circle has served as an important hub in Topanga, which has provided a space for many community businesses, services, and events. Since 3D Investments has acquired Pine Tree Circle, we have seen that many of our businesses have found it much more challenging to stay profitable and open, and some have closed their doors given the new considerably higher costs to maintain business. With the repercussions of COVID-19, it has become even more difficult. We are worried that we will lose more of our dearest businesses at a huge cost to our community in Topanga.  The businesses and services at Pine Tree are integral to many of our lives. Yoga Desa has served as a consistent community resource for nearly 20 years. Besides being an incredible yoga studio with some of the finest teachers in Los Angeles and in the United States, it also serves us with workshops and events of great diversity, including women’s monthly gatherings, karate, African dance, 5 Rhythms Dance class, Sound Healing, and concerts of diverse music from around the world. It also has served as a place to celebrate, and as a gathering place to mourn and share our love when tragedy has befallen our community. I imagine you might not know what Yoga Desa means to our community, which is understandable since you haven’t had these experiences. Please consider the larger impact your business decisions will have on our community. Losing Yoga Desa would be a great loss.  Pacific Canyon Cleaners is another long-time service in our community where we connect and do business locally. If either of you has not met Vika, please say hello to her. Her consistently great attitude, hard work, and service is an unmeasurable asset to our community. I don’t know if you are aware of Vika’s story, but she also is the sole provider for her family and cares for a disabled loving husband and beautiful young daughter. Pacific Canyon Cleaners has been serving our community for more than twenty-one years. These businesses matter to us and are the fabric of our community. We could elaborate on what all these businesses bring beyond their obvious services. Jane at Topanga Homegrown, Peter at Canyon Gourmet, Maria at the Waterlily, Gidget at Flower Power, Nancy at Canyon Chiropractic, Larry at the Canyon Bistro, Paul and Melissa at Coldwell Banker, Ron at Kramer Insurance, Jessica at Bouboulina, the Topanga Canyon Gallery, Jocelyn at Pilates In Topanga, Glynn Design Build, The Topanga Historical Society, and City Hearts, are all folks who have invested in our community with their businesses and lives. Although visitors from the city or even tourists do occasionally support the local stores, it is overwhelmingly Topangans who provide the core revenue for the businesses in Pine Tree Circle. Please understand what a unique benefit it is in today’s world to be able to support and enjoy local businesses that are embedded in a community. We want to make clear that we value these local businesses. We’ve heard that you have some creative ideas for Pine Tree and have expressed some interest in working with our community to achieve that. This is our hope.  Our concern is that you may misjudge the uniqueness and traditions in our community and try to impose a business model that ultimately doesn’t work here for you or us. This is not Santa Monica or Malibu Cross Creek or Brentwood. We are Topanga. Most of us who live here, celebrate our uniqueness. We are writing to you in hopes of not losing many of our finest resources and businesses. We are asking you to deeply consider finding ways to work with our longtime local businesses, adjusting costs to help them thrive and finding ways to make it through this COVID crisis and beyond. Although we may only seem to represent a figure on your spreadsheet, we sincerely hope you will also see that those figures are actually intertwined businesses, families, and lives that matter here in this community. If these businesses thrive, the new tenants you bring will as well. We are hoping to get behind your plans and the creative spark you may bring in a win-win scenario. Thank you for taking the time to listen and consider our views. Please let us know if we can be of any help. —Concerned patrons of Pine Tree Circle