In 1980, anticipating victory in the April 1981 Santa Monica City Council elections, a group of Santa Monica residents, organizing themselves under the banner of Santa Monicans for Renters’ Rights, prepared an extensive platform to serve as a blueprint for municipal action. One part of this platform presaged the revitalization of the old Santa Monica Mall into what we now know as the Third Street Promenade. It envisioned a vigorous “human scale” downtown that would serve as the “heart of Santa Monica,” a center for community life. These activists saw the economic prosperity of downtown as consequence of a vigorous civic and cultural life, as well as the means whereby that vigor was sustained.
In 1987, after the Santa Monica City Council had approved a community-developed Specific Plan for the Third Street Promenade and construction was soon to begin, no one could say with confidence that this effort would bring any new life at all to the then dormant Santa Monica downtown. The downtown had been dormant for more than twenty years; few property owners or merchants had any confidence whatever. In addition, no other city in America had succeeded in such an effort, especially while maintaining a continued commitment to a “pedestrian mall.”
The rest is history. The Third Street Promenade became an overnight community and commercial success, demonstrating that there existed a significant latent demand within our community for a downtown where real life can happen, as distinguished from the stale, formula-driven shopping malls.
The key to success of the Promenade was the aggressive intervention by the City of Santa Monica into a marketplace dynamic that was not serving community’s or anybody’s needs.
The key catalytic event leading to the Promenade’s success also involved aggressive government intervention on behalf of community values.
Shortly after the adoption of the plan, but before construction had begun, unexpectedly, five multiplex cinema projects were proposed in Santa Monica; only one on the Promenade. The City council was quick to act. An ordinance was approved to prohibit cinema developments any where in Santa Monica other than the Third Street Promenade.
At the time, property owners on the Promenade and elsewhere in the downtown welcomed this aggressive government action. Twenty plus years of stagnation had made it clear that the “marketplace” alone would not remedy the problems confronting downtown Santa Monica.
Now we know that the Promenades’ commercial success has far exceeded what anyone involved with its planning could have envisioned. Unfortunately, this “success” threatens to transform the Promenade into a sterile imitation of itself, the new West Coast center of corporate retail,
The process is straightforward. Many of the smaller, indigenous restaurant, cafe and retail operators who took the risk to come to the Promenade when it was unproven, helped make it work and gave it a uniquely Santa Monica character, are now threatened with displacement by heavily capitalized national retail operators who can pay far greater rents. Its an old story, local merchants take the risk and help prove the market works, the national operators swoop in to take advantage of the now risk free opportunity.
Of course, this process, if allowed to continue unabated, will assure that the Promenade soon will no longer be the Promenade. Local residents, on whose behalf the revitalization was begun in the first place, will find themselves on an unfamiliar street that looks strangely like every shopping mall they thought they were avoiding.
Yet, just as the solution to commercial stagnation was aggressive and creative public intervention, the solution to the commercial homogenization that is eminent on the Promenade and the cultural stagnation that will follow is the same: aggressive and creative action by the City on behalf of its community.
The city has zoning and other tools to preserve the mix and scale of uses and the significant presence of local, indigenous merchants and operators who made the Third Street Promenade both a commercial success and the real “heart of Santa Monica.” Effective use of these tools can help us avoid a catastrophic rush to more “flagship” operations of national chains and a loss of the Promenade’s local soul.
Of course, we shouldn’t be surprised to hear loud objections from some of the property owners and real estate brokers who have already been enriched beyond their wildest dreams from the previous successful intervention by the public sector. Now they will, of course, say, “Let the marketplace decide.”
Ignore them. They are just too flush with our success.