BY DAVE PRICE
Daily Post Editor
Palo Alto’s two commercial areas, University Avenue and California Avenue, are slowly dying right in front of our eyes.
They’re becoming dingy and people don’t feel safe. Ugly incidents happen all the time with the crazy people. We just had a murder in a parking structure.
You get the sense that University Avenue is a high-crime area when you walk into CVS, and everything worth stealing is locked away. Honest shoppers need to find a clerk in order to buy razors. The locked up merchandise sends a message to shoppers.
If city leaders want to bring back these commercial areas, the first thing they need to do is clean them up.
People complain about the empty storefronts, but I’m told there isn’t much demand for retail space anywhere on the West Coast, even on the once highly prized University Avenue.
City Council is leaning toward a vacancy tax to make landlords pay for empty buildings. One councilman suggested that landlords are intentionally holding their buildings off the market in hopes of finding a tenant who will pay high rents.
But the math on that doesn’t add up. Suppose a landlord holds her building back for two years waiting for that high-paying tenant. She could have rented her shop for $10,000 a year during the two-year waiting period. But over seven years, she must charge $14,000 a year to net the same dollars.
From what I hear, landlords are lowering their rents to catch the falling market.
One reason retail is dying is that office workers — the customers upon whom merchants rely — have disappeared. They’re working from home.
Another thing that has crippled retail is e-commerce.
Neither of those problems are unique to Palo Alto. So the city should concentrate on what it can do.
City Council could change its retail zoning. Its current zoning limits retail districts to old school retailers who sell stuff like shoes, dresses and sweaters. Not many of those stores are opening storefront locations anymore in any city.
Instead of taxing landlords to find tenants, the council should admit that times have changed and allow those empty storefronts to be rented by any business with a customer, patient, client, student or any sort of visitor. What’s wrong with filling those empty spaces with dentists, gyms, yoga studios, doctors and financial services providers?
If the city imposes a vacancy tax, landlords might try to avoid the tax by renting their spaces to undesirable tenants. Do we want our commerical districts to be filled with vape shops, massage parlors, payday lenders, cash-for-gold stores, prepaid cellphone shops and liquor stores?
And council should understand that it won’t be easy to pass this tax. Who will trust the city when, in November 2022, the city concealed the fact that it had a $40 million surplus before the business tax election? News about the surplus came out after the election. That kills the city’s credibility.
My advice is to drop the idea of a vacancy tax and clean up the downtown and California Avenue business districts. Add more police walking beats in order to deter crime. And change the zoning to allow a wider array of businesses.
Dave Price’s column appears on Mondays.
I’m all for a vacancy tax and protecting ground floor retail.
In 2019 on Cal Ave at Ash, Sandhill Properties owner Peter Pau evicted several thriving business including a cleaners that had been there for 30 years, Palo Alto Baking Co., Simply Sandwiches and more. All well frequented and appreciated by their many customers.
They never should have been evicted, and all remain empty after 5 years. It’s a dead corner with windows papered over, looking crappy.
There is no excuse for this hollowing out of a chunk of Cal Ave vitality by greedhead Pau. Council should take action ASAP.
What would help our downtown and Cal Ave merchants? Building new homes near downtown and Cal Ave. New residents would walk down the block to spend money on retail.
Who knew the tech bros who will make up the bulk of the new residents went shopping and/or patronized the stores and services on Cal Ave like Leaf and Petal, the eye glass place, the manicure place, the dry cleaners, the cobbler… And too bad about LONG-TIME residents and visitors and out-of-towners, huh?
Re “who will trust the city” is an excellent question when it wastes $5,000,000 om “retail consultants” who know nothing about the city and have never even visited here and who construct absurd surveys re “signage and streetscapes” and while the city has announced the vague goal of removing 4 downtown parking lots without a schedule or budget that the PTC hasn’t even seen!
Did these useless consultants recommend street cleaning for our $5,000,000? Did our well-paid staffers and “leaders” care while wasting OUR money?
If that’s really the plan, why would any retailer invest in a downtown / city that’s so clearly hostile to shoppers and businesses?
Do we really need to waste $5,000,000 on these consultants when our highly paid staff is too lazy to go to nearby cities to see why their retail works and ours doesn’t. Why do we tolerate consultants who get no response from departed retailers on why they left when no one can be bothered to drive the 4.1 miles from City Hall to the Sharon Park Shopping Center and ASK Shady Lane why they left??
But no problem. The City will just keep raising our utility rates with no accountability.
Our city council candidates can stop their virtue-signalling and ask why.