Midtown Palo Alto businesses are organizing, asking the city for help

BY BRADEN CARTWRIGHT
Daily Post Staff Writer

Businesses in the Midtown neighborhood of Palo Alto are struggling, so they’re trying to get organized and ask for the city to help.

Mike Wallau, the owner of Mike’s Diner Bar, is working on reviving the Midtown Merchants Association, a group that has been dormant for at least a decade.

Wallau said he and other business owners have struggled financially, mainly due to overhead costs like rent, utilities and wages, which gave gone up because of inflation.

It’s been hard to hire employees, so Wallau said he hasn’t opened for lunch since a remodel. “There’s still a lot of haunting from the closure from Covid,” he said in an interview yesterday.

Wallau’s friend, Len Filppu, saw the struggles and reached out to Mayor Lydia Kou.

Kou invited neighborhood leaders and business owners to a meeting last week, along with City Manager Ed Shikada, Vice Mayor Greer Stone, Chamber of Commerce President Charlie Weidanz and Steve Guagliardo, Shikada’s assistant who is focused on economic development.

“Lydia, bless her, just jumped on this with both feet, and before we knew it we had a major economic summit,” Filppu said in an interview yesterday.

Economic rebound

Council members have been talking about how to support businesses coming out of the pandemic, and they hired a consultant to come up with an economic development strategy.

The consultant was focusing on University Avenue and California Avenue, and Kou asked them to look more closely at neighborhood-serving shopping centers, like Midtown and the Charleston Shopping Center.

While these shopping centers bring in less than 1% of the city’s sales tax revenue, they are walkable, family-oriented and sell things that the neighborhood needs, Filppu said.

Improvements

At the meeting last week, attendees talked about putting up signs to make it easier to find things and making the area more beautiful with public art and landscaping.

The city could work with landlords to improve vacant storefronts, and events like a farmers market could bring in business too, Wallau said.

The city and the Chamber of Commerce will host a mixer at Walla’s restaurant on July 18.

The hope is that a core group of business owners will be interested in joining the Midtown Merchants Association, and they can air out their problems and solutions too, Filppu said.