California’s biggest downtown areas are crumbling under the weight of homelessness and drug addiction, causing a vital part of its economy to dry out.
Cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco have made countless headlines since the pandemic about their drug-infested streets where businesses are quickly pulling out due to high crime rates and low consumer passage.
But for people like Matt Haney, a Democratic Assembly member from San Francisco – who lives in its terrorized Tenderloin District – these deteriorated downtowns are vital to a city’s survival and community building.
‘The clock is ticking,’ Haney told The Los Angeles Times. ‘With each month and year that goes by – and things get worse – it gets harder for cities to come out of the challenges that they’re facing.
‘We can’t leave our downtowns to the vultures to circle and take them apart as they decay. That would be a catastrophic failure.’
Haney is a big believer in downtown areas and told LA business leaders that it ‘impacts people’s live in so many positive ways.’
‘Like all of you, I love downtowns, and I, like all of you, will not accept that we give up on our downtowns,’ he told them.
The assemblyman is on a mission to visit nine of state’s biggest downtowns – including Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose and Sacramento – to hopefully find a cure to their stagnancy.
Cities like Los Angeles (pictured) and San Francisco have made countless headlines since the pandemic about its drug-infested streets where businesses are quickly pulling out due to high crime rates and low consumer passage.
But for people like Matt Haney, a Democratic Assembly member from San Francisco (pictured) – who lives in its terrorized Tenderloin District – these crumbling downtowns are vital to a city’s survival and community building and need rebuilding
‘We can’t leave our downtowns to the vultures to circle and take them apart as they decay. That would be a catastrophic failure,’ he said
In Long Beach, he ate potato wedges near the city’s convention center. In San Diego, he walked the streets full of empty storefronts. In San Jose, he visited student housing constructed inside a former hotel.
In his hometown, he visited the famed Union Square, where the large Macy’s flagship location is set to close down.
Haney, who is the chair of the Assembly’s Downtown Recovery Select Committee, plans on introducing legislation next year to that hopefully take the disaster zones and make them into something profitable and inviting to locals, he told The Times.
Haney’s hope for thriving downtowns may be a hard-won fight as many locals fear the decaying areas and office vacancies are at record highs. Los Angeles has roughly 25 percent of offices vacant, while San Francisco is closer to 35 percent.
It stems from the COVID-19 pandemic, where office workers packed up their desks and began working from home, significantly decreasing consumer activity in the once-heavily-pack downtowns, leaving space for the homeless and addicts to take residency.
For Haney, there’s an urgency to fix the decaying areas.
‘The pandemic made us aware that our downtowns are hugely un-resilient,’ Steven Pedigo, an assistant dean at the University of Texas at Austin, told The Times.
Pedigo believes the decline in lively downtowns comes from cities like Sacramento heavily relying on government workers and San Francisco with tech workers, all of which have been slow to make a return to office.
The assemblyman is on a mission to visit nine of state’s biggest downtowns – including Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose, and Sacramento (pictured) – to hopefully find a cure to their ailments
Haney, who is the chair of the Assembly’s Downtown Recovery Select Committee, plans on introducing legislation next year to that hopefully take the disaster zones and make them into something profitable and inviting to locals (pictured: San Diego)
He wants to see more activity at the state level. Last year, Governor Gavin Newsom (pictured) vetoed a bill that encouraged developers to renovate older buildings by easing zoning laws. Haney plans to reintroduce the bill
For Haney, that means bringing the people back to downtowns.
‘Downtowns cannot survive without people,’ he told The Times.
He’s looking to get Proposition 1 passed, a $6.4 billion bond that will fund treatment and housing for the homeless with mental illness or addiction problems.
‘One of the things that came up in some of these visits is these cities are not always talking to each other,’ he said. ‘They don’t always have strong support or connections from the state as a whole.’
He wants to see more activity at the state level.
Last year, Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill that encouraged developers to renovate older buildings by easing zoning laws. Haney plans to reintroduce the bill.
‘A lot of these buildings and many of the developers are controlled by much larger forces of investment, so that civic pride or a local connection is not as present as it used to be,’ he told The Times.
‘Buildings must be more than a number on [a] spreadsheet.’
He also thinks big cities, like LA, could learn from smaller cities, like Downey and Paramount, who revitalized their ‘little downtowns’ to make them attractive to residents.
