By David Raber
Laguna Beach is not an average coastal town. Its unique look and feel are the result of residents who unified to protect the city. It was the residents’ protest that put an early end to City Council’s idea that building big hotels along our beachfront would be a good idea. Residents countered it with a demand to establish a very conservative height limit. It was residents’ protest of City Council allowing the two gas stations and restaurants on what is now Main Beach and their demand that it become the Main Beach that we know today. It was residents that held marches in our canyon to finally stop the City’s complacency toward the Irvine Company’s plans to develop Laguna Canyon.
In each case, developers cried out that the town would be left in shambles and tax revenues would plummet unless development proceeded unfettered. Instead, Laguna Beach continued to find a unique equilibrium with our natural resources, our residents, and our local merchants and restaurateurs. Measure Q will keep Laguna Beach from trying to catch the development wave that other overdeveloped coastal towns are wiping out. We have our own unique value. We have our own equilibrium here that is world-renowned. If we lose that “essence”, then we become just another overdeveloped, overpriced coastal town.
Those three examples should be kept in mind as developers, who have hundreds of millions to gain in the redevelopment of Laguna, find it easy to chip in hundreds of thousands of dollars in this election year to influence the outcome. How ironic that they want us to take advice from them, the developers, on how to keep Laguna, Laguna. How fitting that their advice on how to deal with a few vacancies in our business district is to – of course – develop even more storefronts and restaurants.
Consider the block on the coast side of Coast Highway, north of the Art Museum. That block has been in trouble for a few years now. It has nothing to do with Measure Q. A notorious developer bought the entire block in seven separate real estate transactions to create a Monopoly. Just like in the board game, he plans to build a hotel that will earn more rent. In the meantime, he has snuffed out all of the businesses that were there before his purchase. How quickly we forget that development greed is snuffing out the important fabric of this town – not Measure Q, because it is not even on the books yet.
The same is true for Hotel Laguna. There used to be an art gallery to the right of the front door and three retail shops to the left. They were all terminated by the new owner/developer so that a larger lobby/bar area can be built on the first floor of the hotel. In the meantime, that space has been vacant for years because of developer speculation – not Measure Q.
Consider the vacant and troubled restaurant properties downtown. The former Harly’s on Glenneyre has been vacant, and not due to Measure Q. The White House on Coast Highway is taking a long time to find a new tenant, and not due to Measure Q. Finally, the former Ocean at Main Restaurant was closed for a long time and finally reopened as Suenos. That is the third restaurant in that location recently. This turnover had nothing related to Measure Q.
Two things come to mind here. First, the restaurant business is tough, especially with the feast-and-famine seasonality here. Second, every new restaurant we add to our city (the city that already has the most restaurants per capita in OC) makes it harder for our existing restaurants to turn a profit. To the developers behind No on Q, the answer to all of this is to develop even more restaurants and let our existing businesses deal with it. That’s not city planning. That’s developers running the city for their own benefit. That’s what Measure Q addresses.
Raber is insightful as usual. The only refrain we hear from the No on Q crowd is that some-possible-new-eatery/bar would encounter barriers because it fails to mitigate its negative effects (insufficient parking, increased traffic). No on Q must believe that our only economic path is to convert everything in town into a high-intensity use such as a restaurant or bar. What a narrow vision.