Despite the “land swap,” the Pike has failed to attract retail business and has a high vacancy rate. Photo by Greggory Moore.
In the fall of 2011 I got to wondering about all those vacancies along Pine Avenue, a curiosity that led me to write a three-part story on the subject.
A year later I began the process of revisiting the subject. Some change is easy to see; some expected changes never came. What follows is a look at what has transpired (and what the future may hold) from an internal City perspective.
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Compare “before” and “after” commercial snapshots, and you can’t miss the improvement. The vacancy rate on Pine Avenue, Long Beach’s main downtown drag, is down. Throw the Promenade into the mix—already a success story and poised to become more of one when Michael’s (as in the restaranteur with the Best Pizzeria and Best Italian Restaurant in 2012, according to Zagat) opens a pizzeria next to Beachwood BBQ—and things appear downright rosy.
But things are quite different across Ocean Boulevard. There you encounter the Pike. Almost universally viewed as a wasted opportunity, there was hope that the “land swap” deal completed just over a year ago would infuse that aesthetic failure with business success, as the deal eased restrictions on retail establishments that close to the water. But 2013 has dawned on a Pike that is something of a ghost town for spirits that never appeared, with more vacancies than businesses, the only actual retail being two shops almost next to each other selling T-shirts.
When I spoke with Councilmember Suja Lowenthal for my original articles, she believed the land-swap deal “will almost immediately start reducing the vacancy rate at the Pike,” a belief shared by the Downtown Long Beach Associates (DLBA). Today neither knows why that has not come to pass.
“From my last conversation with them, they were very quick to share with me that they were planning on an approach to the Pike’s retail vacancies,” Lowenthal says. “But that has not come to fruition, so my next step is to get an update from them on what has changed in their business plan from what was shared with me almost a year ago. […] I don’t know what’s happened since then. It sounded exciting, and I was sworn to secrecy, but nothing’s come of it since then. So I’ll have to follow up.”
DLBA President Kraig Kojian speculates that that the Pike’s failure to progress may be “a combination of things, including the marketplace [and] how aggressive they are in repositioning that space. […] Can they be more assertive or aggressive? Perhaps. But you’d have to find out from them what their gameplan is. […] I know that they have the opportunity now [i.e., with the completion of the land swap] to do something different, but you’d have to ask them what that difference is and what that timeline is.” (Multiple calls by the Long Beach Post to DDR, the company responsible for leasing real estate at the Pike, went unreturned.)
A couple of blocks north, the gameplan is apparently exactly what then-DLBA Vice-President Kristopher Larson told me it would be: filling the vacancies with restaurants and entertainment, with a longer-term goal of having retail piggyback on the atmosphere. Kojian provides me with a relatively long list of fairly new or soon-to-open restaurants on the short strip of Pine Ave., including Agaves kitchen/tequila and Gaucho Grill, a new restaurant in the Madison building (which found a new owner in November), and two separate concepts the Cohn Restaurant Group will employ to fill the former Smooth’s location.
Kojian also tells me that the former AMC Theaters complex will finally be rescued from desuetude, slated for transformation into apartments (an annex to the Pacific Court Apartments, the complex occupying the area facing Pacific Avenue). Such a development should help with population density, which both Kojian and Lowenthal view as crucially important.
“This idea of adding density to the Downtown will help retail and restaurants—and businesses in general,” Lowenthal says, noting that an additional 900 people will be working downtown once the Molina Healthcare moves into the former Press-Telegram building. “And many of them, I hope, will want to live downtown.”
Lowenthal points to the Downtown Community Plan (passed in January 2012) as a major factor in the progress that’s been made, especially as it has streamlined the logistics of opening a business.
“We’ve changed our plan-check process and business-licensing approval process,” she explains, “where now, to whatever extents it’s possible, we get every [City] department that is involved in your opening a business in the same room to sit down with you and really help you navigate and chart that course forward. […] So you’re not going from window to window and office to office, which I think can be exhausting. That is a definite improvement. It’s a policy change, but it’s practice, also. It helps people get their businesses open, and if there are some challenges that they have to address, they know of them sooner rather than later.”
An obvious hindrance to progress last year was the dissolution Redevelopment Agencies (RDAs) across the state.
“Look what’s happened in the last year,” Kojian relates. “The [California] Supreme Court came in and shot down the RDA. […] What did that do to whatever momentum had been gained in any of the cities across the state in very precarious economic times? […] We lost a huge resource. Now we have to find different alternatives […] to fill that void that was left behind by RDA. That’s not a Long Beach problem, that’s a California problem.”
But Lowenthal says the City is soldiering on as best it can, such as moving forward, albeit incrementally, with a $3 million streetscape project on the Pine Ave. corridor.
“With the RDA no longer being a partner, we are trying to [keep to the original multimillion-dollar plan] the best we can with the resources that we have,” she says. “Three million dollars into the Pine Ave. corridor is what we’re able to do right now. [We’re going] to work on it in installments. Even incremental progress is a huge success. It’s better than nothing.”
A proliferation of connected corridors—such as between Pine Ave. and the East Village Arts District—is probably essential to creating a Downtown Long Beach significant enough to be a destination location for outlying cities. Kojian sees connected corridors as an invaluable way to highlight one of Long Beach’s selling points: its unique neighborhoods.
“The connectivity is really important, critically important, both synergistically as well as from a physical standpoint,” he says. “[…] I think one of our strengths that we need to play up to is to really market those neighborhoods, the conveniences and amenities that they have to offer,” he says. […] Those neighborhoods are going to be very, very, very critical to the success of Downtown. […] A cookie-cutter development like the Pike [is] attractive to some people, like those that visit the Convention Center and look for some level of familiarity when they come to Downtown. Now, me personally, I look for something unique that the locals gravitate to. I’m not looking for something that is generic. But that’s just me.”
Kojian says he feels Long Beach Transit and the city’s bicycle infrastructure have made great strides in facilitating that connectivity, “but we have to keep building those connections. And residential development helps build those connections.”
Eventually, the Shoreline Gateway project should make an impact on that score. The initial phase of the project, an 18-story tower at Alamitos Ave. and Ocean Blvd. with 221 residential units and 9,500 sq. ft. of ground-floor retail space, is slated to begin construction in late summer. But in the immediate future, it’s more restaurants, as well as wrestling with problems of perception.
“Some of it is decades-old perspective,” Kojian says. “Some people still view [Long Beach] as a merchant/naval town, and we haven’t been able to shed that.”
For her part, Lowenthal gives Long Beach improved marks since I last checked in with her, upping her grade from the B/B- she handed out a year ago to a B+.
“I’m a tough grader,” she says. “My standards are high. […] I think we have a ways to go, but we’re going in the right direction, and that B+ is going to become an A- when all these things that I’ve mentioned, such as the Molina project, actually transact and fall into place.”
How does Pine Avenue progress look from perspectives less inside than those of Lowenthal and Kojian? Tune in tomorrow to find out.