Voice of the Coast

The Coastside is going to change a lot in the next 20 years. If we don’t have a shared vision about our community, we’re going to make incremental decisions until we have a random collection of houses and strip malls connected by a few roads.

A recent survey of downtown businesses by the merchants themselves reveals the issues that they confront every day, and helps us to realize just how fragile downtown is. Everyone says they love downtown Half Moon Bay, but we haven’t really discussed what we want it to look like. It’s important to most of us, and it’s a matter of financial life and death for the merchants who have invested in it.

It’s hard to run a store downtown

With an 89% response rate to the survey, half of the merchants who responded said they had been struggling to some degree over the last three years. Three-quarters depend on their spouses, savings, or even loans, to keep going. A quarter said that their business was taking a toll on their health.

It’s challenging to set up shop in Half Moon Bay. About a third say that rent is one of their biggest challenges and another 20% feel it’s hard to find the right employees on the Coastside.

For some reason many Coastsiders prefer the shopping centers, like Linda Mar in Pacifica and Strawflower Village. And two-thirds of downtown merchants are certain that the unfinished Harbor Village in Princeton will cost them even more customers.

It’s not surprising that the downtown merchants feel that the key to their success is bringing more residents downtown. Whenever you ask residents what will do this, you hear answers like shoes, clothing, or underwear, and these items showed up in the survey, as well. But that seems like an improbable solution.

The heart of the Coastside

If our Coastside community has a heart, it is downtown Half Moon Bay. We need to strengthen that link. For many of us who live outside of Half Moon Bay, our main connection is through Cunha Middle School or the high school.

Parents and kids spend time downtown before and after school. Cunha kids walk to the high school and vice versa. If the middle school is replaced with an elementary school that serves families who already live near downtown, it could be devastating to downtown business.

The kinds of activities that bring people downtown are entertainment, recreation, meeting friends, and sharing meals. Our proposed new park, within walking distance of downtown, is a critical addition to downtown’s success.

Some say we need a movie theater, but we don’t need big concrete box surrounded by a parking lot in what used to be an empty field. That’s not going to bring anyone downtown. It could keep them away. An old-fashioned movie theatre that opens on the Main Street sidewalk would be lovely, but that probably bucks the trend toward fewer people going to the movies, presumably because of their home entertainment systems.

Planners have made some mistakes, mainly in making downtown into a car haven. The Bank of America parking lot intimidates pedestrians by turning the sidewalk in front of it into a busy intersection. The CCWD building is a block-long blank wall leading to another parking lot intersection. Half Moon Bay’s post office driveway works like a freeway interchange. We need to do better.

We should be thinking about people and not cars. Many people think downtown parking is inadequate. But its usually easy to find a space within a couple of blocks of your destination and everyone who gets out of their car and walks a few blocks adds to sidewalk activity in a positive way.

Downtown, special every day

A downtown designed for entertainment and walking will keep visitors in town after dark, instead of sending them home at the first whiff of fog. Special events like the Halloween and Fourth of July parades, Wine Walk, Pumpkin Festival, and Night of Lights should be part of our strategy for reorienting the community to downtown. But many of the merchants are alienated from them, saying they don’t generate enough foot traffic or sales. These events should be planned with downtown merchants in mind. After all, the business venues are what make downtown a desirable place to hold these events.

Besides the strip mall approach to paving over the Coastside, the other alternative is to become like Carmel, filled with boutique art galleries that don’t even pay sales tax when they ship out of state. The locals in Carmel have lost their downtown. They shop in the strip malls on the edge.

We should all think about what we want downtown to look like. Let’s keep it friendly to pedestrians, welcoming to locals, and open to our children. Let’s meet our friends and celebrate our successes in local restaurants. Let’s fill it with special events and remember that the downtown merchants are our hosts, and not simply a backdrop for our parties. We can buy our meat, fish, bread, and vegetables for dinner in downtown shops. (See Cooking on the Coast on page 6 for great local places to buy fresh food.) And focus on keeping downtown at the heart of our community.