California lawmakers looking for ways to revitalize downtown

The sidewalks of downtown Los Angeles’ Fashion District are bustling with activity.

Silver-faced, tuxedo-clad mannequins tussle with crazy clowns and beaming Hello Kitties. Ball caps, Stetson and sombrero hats, strollers, toasters and pots, Mexican wrestling masks, belts and shoes poured out of open storefronts and vendors’ sidewalk card tables. Steam rises from food trucks and carts.

Matt Haney, a Democratic congressman from San Francisco, did a braid and bob move while crossing the narrow channel. Dressed in denim and a monogrammed trench coat, with a cup of coffee in hand, he’s casual and unassuming, perfect for a fact-finding session on a late-autumn morning.

“Like all of you, I love downtown, and I, like all of you, will not accept that we give up downtown,” he told Los Angeles business leaders earlier in the day. “They are so important. They impact people’s lives in so many positive ways.

Los Angeles was one of nine stops on his tour of the state’s downtown core. From Sacramento to San Diego, he’s looking for a cure for California’s troubled urban core.

In Long Beach, he ate potato wedges at an outdoor venue next to the city’s convention center. In San Diego, he strolled down a street of empty storefronts. In San Jose, he visited student housing in a former hotel. In San Francisco, he visited Union Square, where the iconic Macy’s department store is closing.

As chairman of the Assembly’s Select Committee on Downtown Revitalization, Haney plans to introduce legislation next year to help these cities revitalize their downtowns.

Not so long ago, downtown was on the rise. The recession is a thing of the past, office space is at a premium, and residential development is increasing. But progress stalled as COVID-19 lockdowns left buildings empty and streets deserted, triggering a chain of unfortunate events.

Office vacancy rates are at record highs—nearly 25% in Los Angeles and nearly 35% in San Francisco. Some areas, such as Los Angeles’ Fashion District, remain bustling, but the inescapable realities of homelessness, mental illness and drug addiction keep many visitors and businesses away.

For Haney, who studied urban development at UC Berkeley before earning a law degree, this reality and its urgency are not “whitewashed.”

“The clock is ticking,” he said. “As time goes by and things get worse, it becomes harder and harder for cities to escape the challenges they face. We cannot let vultures hover around our city centers and tear them apart as they rot. That would be Catastrophic failure.

At the end of his tour of the fashion district, he was confronted with the tension between brick-and-mortar storefronts and roadside vendors, while just blocks away encampments clog favela sidewalks and city-owned shopping malls are nearly empty. No one is around, and zombies are everywhere.

A lone passenger tours downtown San Francisco on a double-decker bus. The historic bayside city is now notorious for its intractable homelessness problem, rampant crime and business exodus.

(Louis Zinco/Los Angeles Times)

“The pandemic has made us realize how much our downtowns are lacking,” said Steven Pedigo, associate dean at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs and director of the Lyndon B. Johnson Urban Lab at the University of Texas at Austin. elasticity.

Pedigo said the fragility of urban cores stems from an overreliance on knowledge industries — tech in San Francisco, government in Sacramento — whose workers have been slow to return to the office.

Expanding this focus will mean moving away from an upper-level economy that relies on 12-hour work days to a 24/7 environment.

“Our goal is to bring people downtown,” Haney said. “Downtown can’t survive without people.”

There is no agenda more simple or complex. It began by addressing public perceptions of the city center as dangerous and dirty.

Haney is seeking Proposition 1, a $6.4 billion bond issue to fund treatment and housing for homeless people with severe mental illness or addiction.

This means that these communities have a diverse economic base.

In Long Beach, Haney stopped at a hotel built in the 1920s that served as a senior living facility before recently reopening as a luxury hotel.

Haney (center) joins Austin Metoyer (left), president and CEO of the Downtown Long Beach Alliance, and others on a walking tour of the neighborhood.

(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)

In the Bay Area, he visited part of a hotel building converted into housing for more than 700 students at San Jose State University.

In Riverside, he visited the Chichi Marin Center for Chicano Arts and Culture, which has played a key role in the revitalization of the city’s downtown.

“Each of them faced very significant challenges, and they responded to them by reimagining their downtowns in different ways, with varying degrees of success,” Haney said.

The scale of the problems was so large, and the needs so similar, that Haney believed a statewide strategy was appropriate.

“One of the things I discovered during these visits is that these cities don’t always talk to each other,” he said. “They don’t always have strong support or connections across the country.”

Haney said the state can take action, but “the state is not eager to say, ‘This is what you can do, we’re going to approve it, we’re going to make it easy.'”

Clothing displays line the sidewalks of Los Angeles’ Fashion District, just blocks away from blocked sidewalks at Skid Row homeless encampments.

(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)

Joel Kotkin, an urban studies researcher at Chapman University, said downtowns can succeed if they redefine their goals.

“I don’t think downtowns are dead. I just think they’re changing,” he said. “And they’re increasingly dispersed” as their residents are attracted to urban living on different scales.

Kotkin said big cities could learn something from smaller cities with “booming” urban centers. He cited Orange, Downey and Paramount as examples of cities with “small downtowns” that serve their communities by creating destinations where residents want to go.

It’s this redefinition and reimagining behind the Honey Tour. He lives in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood, where opioid overdoses have taken such a toll that outgoing Mayor London Breed declared a state of emergency in 2021. The itinerary includes Richmond, Bakersfield and Stockton.

Haney (left) and Long Beach Mayor Rex Richardson (center) pass an empty storefront as they discuss ways to revitalize downtown.

(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)

While Haney is still drafting the proposed legislation, he hopes to include incentives that would encourage universities and community colleges to develop downtown student housing, encourage the state to sell vacant downtown buildings, encourage convention centers to attract more visitors and encourage cities to cultivate more Lots of nightlife.

Additionally, he plans to reintroduce a bill that Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed last year that would have encouraged developers by loosening zoning restrictions, eliminating conditional use permits and giving municipalities the ability to provide incentives and concessions. Ability to renovate old buildings.

But he acknowledges that downtown faces more than just structural problems. Their image has also taken a hit, he said. In the past, banks, developers, philanthropists and other local leaders and institutions have invested in downtown out of a sense of civic pride.

“A lot of these buildings and a lot of the developers are controlled by larger investment forces, so the civic pride or the local connection isn’t there like it once was,” Haney said.

“Buildings,” he said, “are certainly more than just numbers on a spreadsheet.”

He has until the end of February to submit the bill.