"Ideal for redevelopment." That's how the brokerage marketed the building at 2323 Roscomare Road when it hit the market in 2017. Nobody redeveloped it. Instead, the same street number now belongs to a bakery, and the grocery store that occupied it for the better part of seventy years is gone.
If you live in the Roscomare Valley pocket of Bel Air, this is not a minor footnote. It is close to the only commercial news your immediate neighborhood ever generates, because this stretch of road has functioned as the entire retail district for a part of Los Angeles that otherwise has none.
The Only Storefront for Miles
Bel Air is not built for errands. The broader Bel Air-Beverly Crest area carries one of the lowest Walk Scores in the city, a rating that places it among the more car-dependent pockets of Los Angeles. There is no corner market you can walk to from most addresses up here, no strip of shops you'd stumble into on a stroll. The East and West Gates control entry to the estate sections, and the terrain does the rest.
What that means in practice is that a single small commercial building carries outsized weight. Down in the Roscomare Valley section of Bel Air Hills, near Roscomare Road Elementary School, the short stretch of Roscomare Road around number 2323 has been doing the job that an entire commercial corridor does in a neighborhood like Brentwood or Westwood. One building. One parking lot. Whatever goes in or out of it is, for a real portion of Bel Air, the whole conversation.
Four Owners, One Address, Seventy Years
The store that gave this building its identity was Bel Air Foods, and its ownership history reads like a short history of the neighborhood itself.
- 1952: established by E. Steinkamp, the first large-scale commercial presence in the area
- 1954: sold to Ed Spear, whose family ran it for the next 40 years
- 1994: sold to Shawn Naraeda, who operated it for roughly 17 years
- 2011: sold again to new ownership, who renovated the store and kept the deli-and-grocery format going
Four owners in nearly sixty years is not a lot of turnover for a small commercial property. It tells you the business itself was stable even as the surrounding city changed underneath it. What's easy to miss, and what actually matters if you're trying to understand what happened next, is that the store and the building were never quite the same asset. The business changed hands in 2011. The property it sat inside kept belonging to an entity called Spear Bel Air Properties, tracing back to the family that bought the store in 1954.
The Listing That Called It "Ideal for Redevelopment"
That distinction is why the building could go up for sale in 2017 while the grocery store kept operating inside it. The 11,000 square foot property, along with its 45-space parking lot, hit the market that year without a stated asking price, marketed to buyers as a one-acre parcel with potential for apartments or condos. Bel Air Foods and two other tenants had leases running through 2021, which the marketing framed as a bonus: a buyer could collect rent from the existing tenants while working through the permitting process for something bigger.
Nothing bigger got built. No condos went up on Roscomare Road. Whatever combination of zoning friction, neighborhood pushback, or simple market timing kept a multifamily project from breaking ground, the building stayed a single-story retail strip. That in itself says something about how hard it actually is to change land use in this pocket of the city, even when a property is explicitly marketed for exactly that purpose.
The Proposal Bel Air Actually Organized Against
The redevelopment idea faded quietly. The next threat to the building's identity did not.
At some point after the 2017 listing, an application landed with the city's Department of Cannabis Regulation proposing a retail cannabis dispensary at 2323 Roscomare Road, the same address that had housed the neighborhood grocery store since 1952. The Bel Air Hills Association did not treat this as a routine zoning matter. The group engaged legal counsel and filed a formal notice of opposition, and its members wrote letters arguing that a dispensary would be an incompatible use for that stretch of road.
There's a small irony worth sitting with here. The Bel Air Hills Association's own listed mailing address is a suite at 2337 Roscomare Road, fourteen doors down from the address it was fighting over. The group organizing against a change to this tiny commercial strip gets its own mail from inside that same tiny commercial strip. When your entire neighborhood's retail footprint is one short block, everyone involved in deciding what happens there is, in some sense, a tenant of the outcome.
What's There Now
The dispensary never opened. Bel Air Foods, meanwhile, is now listed as permanently closed. What operates at 2323 Roscomare Road today is Joanie & Leigh's Cakes, a bakery with weekday and Saturday hours, doing business out of the same street address that held the deli counter and grocery aisles for generations. A few doors down, Bel Air Nails and Hair Salon still runs at 2337 Roscomare Road, the same building the homeowners association calls home.
So the arc is complete: grocery store, ownership change, redevelopment listing, a contested dispensary application, and now a bakery, all inside the footprint of one small commercial building. Nothing here got bigger. The parking lot didn't turn into condos. The deli counter didn't turn into a dispensary counter. What changed is what's sold inside the same four walls, twice in fifteen years.
Why One Building Still Runs This Whole Conversation
The lesson isn't really about grocery stores or bakeries. It's about scarcity. In a neighborhood with almost no walkable commercial space, the fate of a single building becomes disproportionately important, because there is no second building down the street to absorb the change. A dispensary proposal that might barely register as neighborhood news in a commercial corridor with dozens of storefronts became, on this stretch of Roscomare Road, significant enough for a homeowners association to hire a lawyer.
That's worth knowing if you're someone who already lives up here and has wondered, at some point, why a nail salon and a bakery feel like they matter more than they probably should. They do matter more, because there isn't much else. The building at 2323 Roscomare Road isn't just a bakery now. It's still, as it has been since 1952, close to the only commercial address this part of Bel Air has ever had.
If you're thinking about a move within Bel Air, or trying to understand how a specific pocket like Roscomare Valley actually functions day to day before you commit to it, that's exactly the kind of on-the-ground detail worth talking through with someone who tracks it closely. Simon Mashian works this market street by street, not just by the numbers on a listing sheet, and is happy to walk you through what a given address actually means for daily life here.
