Ninth District Councilmember Steve Neal had a few questions on Tuesday night. The first is: Why are there more liquor stores—with the least amount of restrictions in the City—located in North Long Beach when a staggering 38% of its population is under the age of 21 and 71% of its population are families with children? The second: Why are a third of Long Beach’s liquor stores concentrated in an area that accounts for less than 20% of the city’s population?
The impact of these numbers should not be easily dismissed. The density of liquor stores—three times higher than the rest of the city—paired with the city’s largest population of people of color and most marginalized has severe consequences, both business-wise and socially, according to Neal.
So Neal proposed a solution—to have North Long Beach become a pilot-study area in which, via the Planning Commission, current zoning regulations would be reviewed and performance standards known as Conditional Use Permits (CUPs) could potentially be implemented on area liquor stores that have operated unregulated for decades.
If the pilot study proves effective, then an ordinance may be passed that would extend the CUPs to grandfathered-in liquor licenses operating in the rest of the city. The Council voted unanimously Tuesday Night (Fourth District Councilmember Patrick O’Donnell was absent) to have the program forwarded to the Planning Commission for further study.
The current saturation causes children to consistently pass by these stores on their way to school or to a park (it is estimated that the average child in North Long Beach passes more than two liquor stores a day), an image that permits the child to think such stores—which, according to residents and supporters of ordinance, sell drug paraphernalia and eerily realistic toy guns—are part of the social fabric.
New businesses feel detracted from opening in these neighborhoods given the unsavory appearance that these liquor stores have, particularly given how many of them have been open for decades.
Neal’s solution was met with support from the recently sworn-in Eighth District Councilmember Al Austin, who stated “this is the exact reason I went into the City Council.” Austin was quick to point out that this ordinance was not anti-business.
“We are not here to stop business. We want to help businesses be successful,” he said. “At the same time, we want these businesses to be of value to our community and not a detriment. I believe this ordinance is absolutely necessary.”
Some of the CUP conditions proposed, according to Amy Bodek, director of Long Beach Development Services, included the controlling of hours of operation, exterior nuisances such as payphones and vending machines, require closed-circuit television cameras, reduction and alteration in signage, amount of cooler space, as well as limit the amount of alcohol that can be sold in total, as well limiting sizes of individual bottles and the sale of “singles,” i.e. individual cans or bottles from packages that contain 6 or 12.
Updated 11:42AM | A previous version of this story said that an ordinance had been passed to instate the CUP program with North Long Beach as a pilot area when in fact, the Council voted to pass the program idea on to the Planning Commission who will then decide if a pilot study is needed, and if so, to consider North Long Beach as the pilot area.