3:15pm | It has been a long road to remake downtown Long Beach, full of ideas and wondrous projects that all promised much and, unfortunately, in many cases, delivered little.
First, it was the commercial building boom in the 1980s that proponents said would remake downtown Long Beach into a world-class commercial and business center.
Then it was the expansion of the Pine Avenue retail corridor, complete with a mall and promises to remake downtown into a magnet drawing shoppers from near and far.
And there was the Promenade, with promises of creating a Santa Monica-like ambiance for pedestrian shoppers and revelers.
Then there was the Pike—an epic failure of city planning that has yet to deliver on promises to recreate the viability of the Santa Monica Pier and the excitement of the original Long Beach Pike, but instead has just sucked business away from the already struggling Pine Avenue businesses.
And let’s not forget the massive attempt to gentrify downtown which has led to bland valleys of loft, condo and rental buildings with perpetually empty ground floor retail. This rush to populate downtown almost simultaneously led to the creation of a forest of soulless high-rise residential developments that turned Ocean Boulevard into a chasm of Miami-esque and faux-Deco monoliths that literally block out the sun and the view.
This is not to say the downtown of today has not improved in the past 30 years ago—obviously it has. But all of these promise-filled projects and plans have all fallen well short of remaking downtown into what it could be today—into what each of these plans promised Long Beach would be today.
The common threads among all of these attempts to remake downtown Long Beach are simple: a lack of ambition, a lack of imagination, and a lack of leadership.
The culprits are just as easily identifiable: those ensconced in purple robes at City Hall.
But not to worry, those in purple robes have yet another plan to sell—and this time it is sure-fire doozy.
Called the Downtown Community Plan, the square-mile project would include 9,200 new residential units, 2 million square feet of office and retail space and 3,200 hotel rooms to be built over the next 25 years.
The plan also sets some serious standards for all development within the project area.
In and of itself, the plan is a good thing—just as all the other plans before it sounded great when they were proposed.
It’s in the execution that the city’s officials tend to sell the city so short.
Wondrous drawings, blueprints, computer renderings and environmental documents all promise great things. But run, as they all are, through the monochromatic and two-dimensional filter known as City Hall, all excitement, imagination and representation of what Long Beach stands for is lost forever. It is a constant and pervasive acceptance of mediocrity.
At the City Council meeting Tuesday night, where the Downtown Community Plan was discussed at length, Councilmember Suja Lowenthal supported the plan, adding that, “Development is not anti-resident. Development is not anti-community.”
And she is right.
However, given the track record of mediocre projects and less-than-successful planning churned out by City Hall in the past, there is as good a chance as any that THIS development will end up being anti-resident and THIS development will end up being anti-community.
But it need not be this way. Long Beach officials do rise to the occasion at times. The Bikestation project, the Art Exchange, and the Transit & Visitors Information Center are all examples of recent downtown development projects that think outside of the box—that showcase the eclectic vibrancy of Long Beach.
But more often than not, what we get are things like the West Gateway project—a massive city-block residential project that has all the soul of a stuccoed East German housing bloc designed in the worst 1950s earth-tones—albeit with modern double-paned windows and air conditioning.
And is some cases, City Hall is simply obstructive. Look at what the Port of Long Beach proposed when they were considering building a new administration building to replace their seismically-unfit 50-year old building. The design for the $300 million building was architecturally striking, featured state-of-the-art—in some cases innovative—environmental systems throughout, would have met the highest standards for seismic and sustainable construction, and promised to serve as a national model for modern “green” construction.
These were not just some whimsical design features, these were the result of the original goals set down by the port when they first considered the new building nearly a decade ago—basically to create a building that represented Long Beach to the world not only in design but also in concept.
Despite the imagination, innovation and thought behind the plan, the port building is not likely to be built. Not because the port can not afford it—it can. It won’t be built because City Hall doesn’t want it built. Mayor Foster feels that it is inappropriate in these fiscally challenging times to spend such funds on a new port building. This despite the fact that the building would be built without one penny of taxpayer money—it would be funded by port lease revenue and docking fees charged to port tenants.
Cruelly ironic is that the proposed port building is exactly the kind of building that the Downtown Community Plan guidelines call for.
But, yet again, the bold and creative views of development in Long Beach, no matter how thought out in proposals like the Downtown Community Plan, are lost through the muddled views, puerile egos and freshman politics of City Hall.
What City Hall really needs, instead of plan after plan that attempts to fix the problems created by the failures of the previous plans, is a concise defined view of what Long Beach is, what Long Beach can be and what Long Beach should be. What is needed is a defined list of design guidelines that set the minimum standards for what this city will tolerate when it comes to development.
And to the credit of the City Hall staff that drafted it, this is exactly what the Downtown Community Plan purports to be. Reading the draft of the plan, and what it calls for in the way of standards of development, would make anyone long to live in that hypothetical city.
But where the Downtown Community Plan comes up short is that it does not include any kind of enforcement to assure that City Hall officials follow it’s recommendations. Many of the guidelines in the plan are simply suggestions, with no teeth to make sure they are enforced. These standards can, and likely will be, easily forgotten the first time a developer promises to build part of the project at little or no cost to the city (e.g., the Pike).
The guidelines in the Downtown Community Plan need to be codified—carved in stone to make sure that the low-road bent of City Hall officials does not water them down. And not just the technical guidelines, but more importantly the subjective guidelines like calling for things like bold dynamic architecture that promotes a vibrant city core and “green” construction that promotes Long Beach as a model community.
Of course, the Downtown Community Plan is still a draft and could in its final version include measures to hold City Hall officials accountable to these guidelines. But keep in mind that many of the guidelines proposed in the plan have been around for sometime and they have not, as of late, resulted in the bold, vibrant and green development they call for.
No, City Hall has just piled mediocrity on top of mediocrity in the face of these guidelines, all with a seeming “whatever-sticks” philosophy to make downtown into a carbon copy of somewhere else.
Instead of being like Santa Monica, or like Citywalk, or for that matter like anywhere else, shouldn’t the goal be to make Long Beach the model that others want to be like?
And, this is not to eschew development. There is nothing wrong with putting out the sign saying “development welcome.” The more development dollars headed to Long Beach the better. But, there have to be some guaranteed standards and goals that ensure that any development not only adds to the roll of housing units or retail spaces in the city, but also represents the city in character and spirit. And if the city is going to set out high standards such as those in the Downtown Community Plan, there must the power to hold City Hall officials accountable to them—no matter what.
Why should City Hall officials ever be able to settle for the low road of the mundane and mediocre?
And if developers don’t want to agree with these new standards, then hit the road, Jack—there is another developer around the corner that would be more than willing to create a world-class portfolio-quality project just by following these more rigid city standards.
And if City Hall officials don’t abide by the Downtown Community Plan standards, if they revert to their typical acceptance of mediocrity, then they can hit the road, too. There are plenty of people just around the corner willing to wear those purple robes—people more than willing to fight for Long Beach as a bold, vibrant and model community for the rest of the nation.