The sidewalks of downtown Los Angeles’ Fashion District were bustling.
Silver-faced, tuxedoed models battle with crazed clowns and beaming Hello Kittys. Baseball caps, Stetsons and sombreros, strollers, toasters and Crock-Pots, lucha libre masks, belts and shoes peek out from vendors’ open storefronts and sidewalk game tables. Steam rose from food trucks and carts.
Matt Haney, a Democratic Assemblyman from San Francisco, did a weave and a bob as he navigated the narrow strait. Dressed in jeans and a monogrammed windbreaker, clutching a cup of coffee, he was casual and unpretentious, perfectly dressed for investigating on a late fall morning.
“Like all of you, I love downtowns, and like all of you, I will not accept that we abandon our downtowns,” he told Los Angeles business leaders earlier in the day. “They are too important. They have a positive impact on people’s lives.
Fashion District President and CEO Anthony Rodriguez, left, shows Assemblymember Matt Haney around the bustling district.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Los Angeles was one of nine stops on his tour of the state’s downtowns. From Sacramento to San Diego, he’s looking for a solution for California’s struggling urban centers.
In Long Beach, he ate potato wedges at an outdoor event space near the city’s convention center. In San Diego, he wandered a street filled with empty storefronts. In San José, he visited student accommodation in a former hotel. In San Francisco, he visited Union Square, where the iconic Macy’s is set to close.
Chairman of the Assembly’s Downtown Recovery Select Committee, Haney plans to introduce legislation next year to help these cities revive their downtowns.
Not so long ago, city centers were booming. The recession was in the past, office space was scarce, and residential development was on the rise. But as COVID-19 lockdowns emptied buildings and left streets deserted, progress ground to a halt, triggering a cascade of unfortunate events.
Office vacancies are at record levels: nearly 25% in Los Angeles and 35% in San Francisco. Some neighborhoods, like Los Angeles’ Fashion District, remain vibrant, but the inescapable realities of homelessness, mental illness and drug use keep many visitors and businesses away.
For Haney, who studied urban development at UC Berkeley before earning a law degree, there is no “sweetening” this reality, nor its urgency.
“Time is running out,” he said. “With each month and year that passes – and things get worse – it becomes more and more difficult for cities to meet the challenges they face. We cannot leave our city centers to the vultures that circle them and take them apart as they decay. It would be a catastrophic failure.
To conclude his tour of the Fashion District, he was confronted with the tension between brick-and-mortar storefronts and sidewalk vendors, while a few blocks away, encampments block the sidewalks of Skid Row, a mall owned by the city is almost deserted and zombies. buildings fill the horizon.
A lone passenger tours downtown San Francisco atop a double-decker bus. Steeped in history, the Bay City today has a questionable reputation for homelessness, rampant crime and a corporate exodus.
(Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)
“The pandemic has made us realize that our downtowns are extremely unresilient,” said Steven Pedigo, assistant dean of the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin and director of its LBJ Urban Lab.
The vulnerability of urban cores, Pedigo said, comes from an overreliance on knowledge-based industries — the tech sector in San Francisco, the government in Sacramento — whose workers have been slow to return to the office .
Expanding this perspective means moving from high-rise economies reliant on a 12-hour workday to 24/7 environments popular day and night.
“The goal is to bring people downtown,” Haney said. “Downtowns cannot survive without people. »
No program is simpler and more complicated. This starts by tackling the public perception that city centers are dangerous and dirty.
Haney is considering Proposition 1, a $6.4 billion bond to fund treatment and housing for homeless people with serious mental illness or substance abuse.
And this involves diversifying the economic base of these neighborhoods.
In Long Beach, Haney stopped at a hotel built in the 1920s that had become a senior living community before its recent reopening as a luxury hotel.
Haney, center, joins Austin Metoyer, president and CEO of Downtown Long Beach Alliance, left, and others for a walking tour of the neighborhood.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
In the Bay Area, he toured part of a hotel complex that San Jose State University has converted into housing for more than 700 students.
In Riverside, he visited the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture, which played a key role in the revitalization of the city’s downtown.
“Each of them is facing very significant challenges, and they are confronting those challenges by reimagining what their downtown is in different ways and with varying degrees of success,” Haney said.
The scale of these problems is so great – and the needs so similar – that Haney believes a statewide strategy is appropriate.
“One of the things that came out on some of these visits is that these cities don’t always talk to each other,” he said. “They don’t always have strong support or connections from the state as a whole. »
The state government could step in, Haney said, but “the state is just not in a hurry to say, ‘Here’s how you can do it, and we’ll approve it and we’ll make it easy.’
Clothing racks fill the sidewalks of Los Angeles’ Fashion District, just blocks from sidewalks blocked by homeless encampments on Skid Row.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Joel Kotkin, an urban studies researcher at Chapman University, said downtowns can succeed if they redefine their purpose.
“I don’t think city centers are dead. I just think they change,” he said. “And they are increasingly dispersed,” as their residents are drawn to urban life on a different scale.
Big cities could learn something from smaller ones whose downtowns are “thriving,” Kotkin said. He cited Orange, Downey and Paramount as examples of cities with “small town centers” that serve their communities by creating destinations where residents want to go.
This kind of redefinition and reimagining is what Haney’s tour is all about. He lives in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood, where opioid overdoses have claimed so many lives that outgoing Mayor London Breed declared a state of emergency in 2021. Haney plans to continue his tour in in the new year, with Richmond, Bakersfield and Stockton on the itinerary.
Haney, left, and Long Beach Mayor Rex Richardson, center, walk past an empty storefront while discussing ways to revitalize the city’s downtown.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
While he is still crafting his bill, Haney hopes to include incentives for universities and community colleges to develop student housing downtown, for the state to sell unused downtown buildings- city, so that convention centers attract more visitors and so that cities cultivate more nightlife.
Additionally, he plans to reintroduce a bill — which Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed last year — that would encourage developers to renovate older buildings by loosening zoning restrictions, eliminating use permits conditional and giving municipalities the opportunity to offer incentives and concessions.
But he acknowledged that downtowns face more than just structural problems. Their image has also taken a hit, he says. In the past, banks, developers, philanthropists and other local leaders and institutions invested in downtowns out of civic pride.
“A lot of these buildings and a lot of developers are controlled by much larger investment forces, so the civic pride or local connection is not as present as it used to be,” Haney said.
“Buildings,” he says, “need to be more than a number on a spreadsheet. »
He has until the end of February to submit his bill.
