Downtown: What's Caused The Struggle?
In Which: We remember that we divested on an International Day of Action for Palestine, Landlords and the Loop ruined our Downtown, And Ways we can make things better.
Before we get started, I’ve got two things for you. First, share out the voter guide. I know you have a friend who doesn’t know who they’re voting for and just listens to whatever the Landlord Lobby pays to get on TV. Educate them with this:
Secondly, today is an International Day of Action for Palestine. And although I keep things centered on Hayward, I thought it would be a good time to remember that our City divested your tax dollars from companies assisting in the Genocide of Palestinians. We deserve to be proud of that—but none of us are free until all of us are free.
Downtown Vibes
For many people, a good Place is difficult to describe, but you know it when you see it. It’s somewhere you want to be; cozy and welcoming. It’s the living room of the City where you meet your friends and spend your time. In Hayward, the closest thing we have is a few blocks bordered by Mission, A Street, Foothill, and D Street.
But even though it has all the right ingredients, it’s still not working like it should. Buildings are empty, lots are vacant, and multiple buildings are boarded up or never open. There are bright spots, to be sure: Buffalo Bill’s, Books on B, the movie theater building. But even with the retro buildings, it’s not living up to its potential.
In a City Council race, the health of Downtown can be a sign about how well the incumbents are doing—even if they can’t necessarily control it. With that in mind, we’re going to take a look at Downtown Hayward, why it’s suffering, what the City is doing to fix it, and how much more still needs to be done.
Who Owns Downtown?
Downtown may be the living room of Hayward, but it’s made up of buildings owned by landlords. The Free Market pushes landlords to spend as little as possible and charge as much as possible to make as much money as possible. The buildings on B Street are the oldest commercial buildings in the City—they need seismic retrofits, dry rot mitigation, and a lot of maintenance.
But that’s expensive. So the owners decide to let the roof leak—like at Books on B—or wait until the façade falls down—like it did at the Downtown Event Center—or leave it gutted and empty like 1010 B Street.
“I had concerns that a speculative investor or shell holding company might purchase [the movie theater] property at auction,” City Manager Kelly McAdoo said in early January, “and not do anything with it and let it go vacant and let the movie theater leave and then we’d be stuck with yet another vacant building downtown.” The City worried so much about absentee and investment landlords that they used $8,600,000 to buy the movie theater building rather than see it go into private hands.
The owners of many of the buildings and lots Downtown see them as lines in their investment portfolios. Faceless owners—Gelso Investments or Earl Freddy Investments LLC; names that are just addresses with LP or LLC on the end—own important downtown buildings. And the owners extract their wealth from Hayward to disconnected areas: Palomares Hills in Castro Valley, Danville, Fremont, Orinda, Carmel, San Francisco, or South Lake Tahoe. Some as far as Minneapolis, MN and Alexandria, VA.
Corporate investment groups and people living halfway across the country don’t care whether or not Downtown Hayward is a good Place. Managing properties is a hassle and when they need a few extra million for whatever reason, they can sell it off to someone else. And until then, Bay Area real estate only goes up in price, so it’s a good investment.
The City, to its credit, is trying to do something about it. The City Council has an interest in thinking about Downtown as an environment—a whole connected Place—while a property owner is only concerned about their individual investment. But even though the City cares about Downtown, it’s more than a collection of buildings.
The Loop Is a Nightmare
When someone writes a book about Early 2000’s Hayward History, The Loop will be this City’s biggest development blunder. The City Council at the time sold the Loop as a way to ease congestion and revitalize downtown—a miracle of highway engineering in the city’s core. Where have I heard that before?
But changing to a confusing swirl of one-way mega-streets on Mission, Foothill, and A Street only made things worse. Induced demand increased pass-through traffic, the 70-foot-wide intersections are even more hostile to pedestrians, and the lane widths encourage dangerous speeding. It all works together to turn downtown into a blur between freeways.
And the City knew it was a bad idea as soon as it was finished. The Loop was officially completed in 2013, but three years later they started the Downtown Specific Plan—a blueprint to revitalize downtown after the recession. One of the first things the consultants suggested was undoing The Loop.
Downtown areas are supposed to be coherent walkable Places with narrow, low-speed streets and small-fronted mixed-use buildings. B Street is as close as we get to a this in Hayward and it was cut into pieces by Mission and Foothill Boulevards. And before long the businesses on Foothill withered, patronage for downtown restaurants plummeted, and traffic ballooned.
The Loop destroyed downtown with the broken promises of a bygone City Council. It’s up to the current City Council to fix it.
How Do We Get There?
The City is already taking the first steps toward shaping up the bad landlord situation. By getting into the real estate market, the City can do things that corporate landlords won’t: use a vacant storefront for temporary civic space, incentivize businesses that complement existing businesses, or even lower the rent. No one knows whether or not the City Council will do any of these things, but at least there’s a chance.
The Loop also has to go. It’s going to be expensive and the construction is going to be painful, but a 5 lane highway has no business in a downtown area. Experts on walkability insist that downtown roads should be no more than two, 10-foot lanes wide. That would be a radical change from where we are now. Car through-traffic would plummet, foot traffic would increase, and a 2 lane Mission Boulevard would turn the East and West sides of downtown into one coherent Place.
The final piece is to start thinking about Downtown as a coherent place for people, not cars. We have to rethink parking, existing municipal lots need to be infilled with buildings and walkable alleys, and people need to be able to live downtown. With Hayward’s car-centric design, this is going to be a difficult concept to sell. But if City Council wants a great Downtown, this is what it takes. And the best part is that it will pay for itself in short order.
Cautious Optimism
Taking radical steps like using City resources to buy buildings is something that can objectively make Downtown Hayward better. But doing so takes vision and political will. It’s too easy for politicians to choose the “middle ground” when confronted with transformative projects.
It feels like the reasonable option because it spends money, but isn’t too expensive. It solves some problems, but isn’t going to make too many people mad. It’s progressive without being radical. For example, when confronted with the cost of completely undoing the loop and returning to a grid, the City Council opted for a ridiculous ovalabout.
Regular residents also operate on gut feelings and a general fear of change, though. Anyone who followed the development of bike lanes on Patrick Avenue knows exactly how a good idea gets ruined by uneducated and angry people. Those noisy few can scare the City Council into flinching—but we need them to be stronger than that.
We can’t play around the edges anymore—our economic and environmental futures depend on it. Our city deserves a vision that will transform our built environment into one that serves people over cars and residents over investors. And it’s up to us to make sure that our City decision-makers know what needs to be done and that they have the mandate to make it happen.