The sidewalks of the Fashion District in downtown Los Angeles were bustling.
Silver-faced, tuxedoed mannequins tussled with crazy clowns and beaming Hello Kittys. Ball caps, Stetsons and sombreros, baby strollers, toasters and Crock-Pots, lucha libre masks, belts and shoes burst from open storefronts and vendors’ sidewalk card tables. Steam rose up from food trucks and carts.
Matt Haney, a Democratic Assembly member from San Francisco, did a weave and a bob as he navigated the narrow straits. Dressed in denim and a monogrammed windbreaker, cradling a cup of coffee, he was casual and unassuming, perfectly attired for fact-finding on a late fall morning.
“Like all of you, I love downtowns, and I, like all of you, will not accept that we give up on our downtowns,” he‘d told L.A. business leaders earlier in the day. “They are too important. They impact people’s lives in so many positive ways.”
Fashion District President and Chief Executive Anthony Rodriguez, left, shows Assemblymember Matt Haney around the bustling neighborhood.
(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 in search of a prescription for California’s ailing urban cores.
In Long Beach, he ate potato wedges at an outdoor event space by the city’s convention center. In San Diego, he wandered a street of empty storefronts. In San Jose, he visited student housing in a former hotel. In San Francisco, he took in Union Square, where the iconic Macy’s is slated to close.
Chair 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, downtowns were on the upswing. The recession was in the past, office space at a premium and residential development on the rise. But as COVID-19 lockdowns emptied buildings and left streets deserted, progress came to a halt, setting in motion a cascade of unfortunate events.
Office vacancies are at record highs — close to 25% in Los Angeles and 35% in San Francisco. Some areas, such as L.A.’s Fashion District, remain lively, 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 getting a law degree, there is no “sugarcoating” this reality, nor its urgency.
“The clock is ticking,” he said. “With each month and year that goes by — and things get worse — it gets harder for cities to come out of the challenges that they’re facing. We can’t leave our downtowns to the vultures to circle and take them apart as they decay. That would be a catastrophic failure.”
Wrapping up his tour of the Fashion District, he was confronted with the tension between brick-and-mortar storefronts and sidewalk vendors, while just blocks away, encampments block sidewalks in Skid Row, a city-owned shopping mall is nearly deserted, and zombie buildings fill the skyline.
A lone passenger tours downtown San Francisco on top of a double-decker bus. Steeped in history, the city by the Bay now has a dubious reputation for intractable homelessness, rampant crime and an exodus of businesses.
(Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)
“The pandemic made us aware that our downtowns are hugely unresilient,” said Steven Pedigo, assistant dean at 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, government in Sacramento — whose workers have been slow to return to the office.
Broadening that focus will mean shifting from high-rise economies contingent on 12-hour workdays to 24/7 environments, popular day and night.
“The goal is to bring people to downtown,” Haney said. “Downtowns cannot survive without people.”
No agenda is more simple and complicated. It begins by addressing the public perception that downtowns are dangerous and dirty.
Haney is looking to Proposition 1, a $6.4-billion bond to fund treatment and housing for homeless people with severe mental illness or addiction.
And it means diversifying the economic base of these neighborhoods.
In Long Beach, Haney stopped at a hotel built in the 1920s, which became a senior living facility before its recent reopening as a luxury hotel.
Haney, center, joins Downtown Long Beach Alliance President and CEO Austin Metoyer, left, and others on 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 José State University converted into housing for more than 700 students.
In Riverside, he visited the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture, which has played a key role in the city’s downtown revitalization.
“Each of them has very significant challenges, and they’re facing these challenges by reimagining what their downtown is in different ways and in 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 up in some of these visits is these cities are not always talking 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 up, Haney said, but “the urgency just isn’t there from the state to say, ‘This is how you can do this, and we will approve it, and we’ll make it easy.’”
Clothing displays fill sidewalks in L.A.’s Fashion District, blocks away from sidewalks blocked by homeless encampments in Skid Row.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Joel Kotkin, a fellow in urban studies at Chapman University, said downtowns can succeed if they redefine their purpose.
“I don’t think downtowns are dead. I just think they’re changing,” he said. “And they’re increasingly dispersed,” as their residents are drawn to urban life on a different scale.
Larger cities could learn something from the smaller ones whose downtowns are “flourishing,” Kotkin said. He cited Orange, Downey and Paramount as examples of cities with “little downtowns” that serve their communities by creating destinations where residents want to go.
This sort of redefining and reimagining are behind Haney’s tour. He lives in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, where opioid overdoses have taken such a toll that outgoing Mayor London Breed declared a state of emergency in 2021. Haney intends to continue his tour in the new year, with Richmond, Bakersfield and Stockton on the itinerary.
Haney, left, and Long Beach Mayor Rex Richardson, center, pass an empty storefront while discussing ways to revitalize the city’s downtown.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
While he is still sketching out his proposed legislation, Haney hopes to include incentives for universities and community colleges to develop downtown student housing, for the state to sell unused downtown buildings, for convention centers to draw more visitors and for cities to cultivate more nightlife.
In addition, he plans to reintroduce a bill — vetoed by Gov. Gavin Newsom last year — that would encourage developers to renovate older buildings by easing zoning restrictions, eliminating conditional use permits and giving municipalities the ability to offer incentives and concessions.
But he acknowledged that downtowns face more than just structural problems. Their image has also taken a hit, he said. 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 many of the developers are controlled by much larger forces of investment, so that civic pride or a local connection is not as present as it used to be,” Haney said.
“Buildings,” he said, “must be more than a number on spreadsheet.”
He has until the end of February to submit his bill.