By Eric Gray | As a continuation of 20 Reasons to Move to Downtown Long Beach, published in July, I wanted to share my ideas on how I believe Downtown Long Beach could become a better place to live, work, and play:
1. First and foremost, continue to make the City of Long Beach more business friendly. Here is some background information: The City of Long Beach receives 1% of the 8.75% sales tax charged locally. At a recent budget meeting, it was stated by a city leader that revenue from that 1% totaled approximately $40 million last year across the entire City of Long Beach. It is no secret to many people involved that a lot of new businesses wanting to open their doors have to jump through a massive amount of hoops and fees to open up. Making the City of Long Beach more business friendly would in turn help to open up more jobs to Long Beach citizens. This could have a snowball effect, creating additional prosperity and economic activity locally. I’ve heard from City leaders that changes are being made to the new business process and I am hopeful to see progress.
2. Up the profile of the Terrace Theatre Plaza in Downtown Long Beach. It is a beautiful space to host additional Fine Art and Music events etc. and could be activated full time with coffee and creative food kiosks.
3. Find a home for the Long Beach Heritage Museum Downtown. We have a rich history here and have many people who embrace our city’s history, so why not showcase it.
4. Close down Pine Avenue to pedestrians only from 1st through 3rd streets and then eventually all the way to 8th
Street. Configure it in a way so that local restaurants and businesses could still receive necessary deliveries effectively. Weekend closures to begin would be great.
5. Turn the open diamond parking lot on 1st Street and Pine Avenue into a park with seating around a fountain. This park could also include among other things, a pedestrian walkway to connect Pine Avenue to the Promenade so that pedestrians could easily flow through.
6. Place more attractive signage on the City Place garages downtown and clean these garages up so that people feel safe and want to park there to stroll into Downtown businesses and landmarks.
7. Put restrictions on Walmart and other businesses where there is high crime. If small businesses have to play by the rules, so should large businesses.
8. Change code enforcement rules across Downtown specifically related to sidewalk signage. Some of these codes are outdated and detract from the profit and creativity of the business.
9. Reconfigure the Breakwater. The natural cleansing out of the ocean in combination with the beauty of our coastline would have enormous positive effects. (make sure that with the reconfiguration of the breakwater, that homes on the Peninsula would remain safe).
10. Fix up the little things in Downtown Long Beach that people would appreciate like the restoration of many of our worn out looking parking meters (local artists could perform these tasks), fill in empty tree wells, add new tree cuts with appropriate trees.
11. Enhance both The Pike and City Place with finer architectural qualities.
12. Start greening up the L.A. River.
13. Restore the Jergins Tunnel.
14. Fix up Long Beach Boulevard and our train stations.
15. Develop artist warehouses that are affordable and keep adding additional art Downtown.
16. Change the noise ordinance so that it is a win-win situation for both residents and business owners. No one should have to suffer on either end. With the appropriate lowering of “amplified” music, allow “ambient” music to be played on outdoor restaurant patios.
17. Create a more vibrant music scene Downtown.
18. Include a percentage of the street paving budget to fix our alleyways.
19. With new development, consider cobblestone or something similar as part of the project.
20. This last idea is a shout out to Long Beach’s amazing local bike taxis company, the Long Beach Pedaler Society. Let’s bring a couple of bike taxis to Downtown for the weekends.
Many of the ideas above would take creativity, collaboration, courage, and of course dollars to get done. These ideas are meant to be food for thought and conversation for city leaders, residents and business owners to work together and find solutions to continue the positive trend of our coastal city, Long Beach, California.