••• Vintage fans will want to check out the handsome Thrifty Beaches store, now open in the former RH space at 710 State Street (Ortega/De La Guerra).
••• Funk Zone Vintage and Funk Zone Records opened a while ago on Santa Barbara Street in the Funk Zone, but they were news to me when I walked by the other day. And next door is Amorita, which sells leather accessories.
••• The Clearing House, which organizes estate sales, has started a series of summer pop-ups with items from various sources. The first one is July 12 and 13; the location appears to be TBA.
••• I was bummed to discover that the Goodwill donation center next to Tri-County Produce is gone, undoubtedly related to the forthcoming redevelopment of the site.
••• This is the first time I recall seeing a major local real estate agent promote that fees are negotiable.
••• Fred Armisen will be at the Lobero Theatre on September 17.
••• Seimandi & Leprieur is a new art gallery at 33 W. Anapamu Street. According to its Instagram bio, it specializes in French and Caribbean contemporary art, and the inaugural show is of work by Ricardo Ozier-Lafontaine.
••• Knowing how annoyed I am by the typography on the San Ysidro Road off-ramp sign, my husband sent me this while in Ojai.
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I checked out Thrifty Beaches after opening weekend. The space is beautiful. Awesome men’s outerwear and denim selection with great prices (I was surprised to see most of the Levi’s were $20-$30).
I didn’t know fees were dictated before. But if you want to sell your service over price, why not?
Thanks for sharing the signs- while SYR is annoying, the Lake Casitas sign gave me a good laugh.
From Restoration Hardware to a thrift store…. CVS gone, Athleta gone, Starbucks gone. When some of the top retailers in the world are saying State Street is no longer for them maybe we should listen? Nah, let’s continue to force this utopian dream of everyone living and walking downtown before we actually have a critical mass / density of housing units downtown to actually support such a grand concept.
Supporting small businesses and allowing them to thrive is what we should be doing during these tough times. Frankly, I’m glad to see some of the big retailers gone…keeps the downtown interesting.
Actually Jefferson, big retailers are a terrible measure of the financial validity of a locale. They do not look at P/L in the same way nor do they measure effectively the demographic of a particular zone, let alone understand the locals. They use macro data and fit it into their larger strategic plans. As if often in the case in SB, these big entities look at us from afar and mistakenly believe that we are a town of wealth. When in fact, we are a city mostly populated by the poor, (students, immigrants) and the struggling middle class.
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Dave is correct. The best thing we can do is to foster small businesses and give as many as possible a chance at success. A place to start and get a chance! The only way we fix the economy downtown is to grow out of the slump. Let the local market show what works for our locale, not a McKinsey consultant from Boston.
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There should be dozens of start ups on State St. Whether it’s small kiosks or smaller spaces divided in existing buildings that give young businesses a chance. That’s just for retail. If you want a thriving community, attract and foster professional level, for-profit companies with good paying professional jobs. Jobs that pay $200K+ a year. Which is what it takes to have a chance at a decent middle class life in SB these days.
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We have one of the greatest engineering universities in the world and yet instead of taking advantage of this incredible resource, our city does everything in its power to push those great minds to other places. They literally leave by the thousands every year. Most all of them wishing they could stay here, to build a life here. There should be an effort to keep the talent that we create here, here.
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There should be a tax free, bureaucratic free zone for any startup downtown. Instead, our city spends money on subsidized housing and low income support while pushing for hotels, coffee shops, bars and restaurants. None of which employ anyone who can actually afford to buy a home, raise a family and build a community for the long term.
Amen Sam. Although with a 6% CA tax right, it’s not that easy to declare State St. (or whatever) a tax-free, bureaucracy-free zone. But I love the vision of a bunch of housing, startups, etc etc on State St. And if it could work, no cars.
I have worked in retail for 40 years…big and small, corporate and field. The shift has already begun to support and encourage smaller retailers to open up shop in larger cities like San Francisco, LA and Chicago.
I also speak for the dozens of tourists and local shoppers I engage with every day here that find State Street boring and cookie cutter. They crave something unique and different.
I am on the fence on this issue, but don’t agree with your argument as to why State St. is struggling. You are assuming that the decline is related to the pedestrian section and not something else. I would argue otherwise. There are problems that will plague the street even if it’s opened up to cars. If you think opening it to cars is the solution without solving these other problems, we’re just going to end up with a shabby, vacant street with people parading their cars bumping loud music and revving their engines.
First, the most basic things are not being done to make the street attractive to people. Picking up trash, cleaning and rejuvenating the sidewalks, landscaping, policing kids racing on e-bikes, and moving homeless people to other places. It’s pretty obvious that if you let a place look like garbage, people will not choose to spend their time there.
Second, as some have pointed out, there is a shift away from retail, and in particular some kinds of retail. Starbucks is struggling nationwide. At the same time, you have some local boutique coffee shops like Mosaic that have opened.
And third, if you really want to do this right, the State St. corridor is one of the places in town we _should_ be adding housing. You make it attractive again with maintenance and add housing, and you’ll get plenty of tourists, locals, and residents to support the stores.
Fourth, if you actually want know if this will work, you close State St. to vehicles including bikes. Especially e-bikes. Right now it’s in a weird no-man’s land where you can’t walk _or_ drive on the street. It’s functionally a teenager e-bike drag strip. And then you would extend the restaurant seating areas properly into the street — and build them so they look like they belong there, not a makeshift camp.
There is no need for bikes or cars on State St. from a conveyance perspective. Anacapa and Chapala have plenty of capacity for both. And people are not jumping out of a car to shop. They are going to park off Anacapa/Chapala/an adjacent lot and walk back to State St. The humans on foot are swiping the credit cards. The only minor benefit to having cars is the few people who will serendipitously see a new store. But you can more than replace this marketing effect by making it attractive to walk.
Look, successful downtowns all over the world are pedestrian-only, so it’s been proven out. There are many places you can see it working. On the other hand, it’s not right for everywhere. I’m not sure it’s right for Santa Barbara. State St. is frankly, pretty narrow and shaded. Maybe it just wasn’t built right to be a grand downtown. The Cabrillo intersection is thriving — it’s got a lot of light, it’s got the ocean. And the City has to have major vision to get a pedestrian downtown to work.
We have a mayor who wants to open the street to cars, so I have a hunch that he’s intentionally half-assing the whole project so that it will fail. Obviously, pretty conspiratorial, and hopefully not true. But it doesn’t really matter what the intent is. It is being majorly half-assed.
If it was the shift way from retail, than upper state, the mesa, Milpas, and other areas would also be feeling the impact. In those areas sales tax revenue ha increased significantly over the past five years while downtown has been slightly negative. Pedestrian counts are also down significantly on State from prior to the closure.
Please do tell us the populations of all those pedestrian-only successful downtowns – they certainly exist but are in cities with millions of people and the street is lined with 6+ story buildings built property line to property line (something that will never be allowed in Santa Barbara). Of course, no one ever brings up the enormous cost realizing the promenade dream would entail – not only do we not have the money to fund it, if we did it would be much better spent on the creation of additional affordable housing units.
The thriving La Cumbre mall shows that retail isn’t dead, you just need more cars and more parking.
Your sarcasm fell flat with me as I drove through the Home Depot parking lot full of cars to Costco, where I turned around since the parking lot was full. . .
I used to live in downtown Mountain View, in the middle of Silicon Valley. They recently completed a project to transform their main street, Castro, into a pedestrian mall. They essentially did what Any suggested in these comments. It’s been highly successful. I have a friend who also lived there when I did, and she recently visited Mountain View. She has exceptionally good taste and was delighted with what they did with Castro Street, saying it was wonderful. Mountain View and Santa Barbara have nearly identical population sizes. The biggest problem with Santa Barbara is that they can’t agree on a design plan and then proceed, instead appearing more interested in conducting endless studies, leaving State Street to languish in the form of arrested decay.
Please consider taking a drive up to San Luis Obispo. Downtown reminds me of the old , thriving State St with Mom and Pop stores and cars are still allowed.
SB’s population is similar but Mountain View is 15 minutes outside San Jose, a million plus person city, and they only closed three blocks. We’re over an hour from LA and have closed 10 blocks.
Santa Barbara is a vacation and tourist hot spot, with cruise ships and people from all over the world visiting, dining, and shopping, and tourism is a significant part of the local economy. Whereas, Mountain View, not so much. Santa Barbara gets far more visitors from LA than Mountain View does from San Jose, and San Jose has similar and much better pedestrian street malls, like San Pedro Square, Post Street, and Santana Row. If Mountain View can make a pedestrian street mall work on a smaller main street, using only 3 blocks, then certainly 10 blocks would be easier and with more options.