On Local Government
By Bob Pinzler
Redondo’s “creative destruction”
When an object rolls downhill, its momentum increases as the pull of gravity takes greater and greater effect.
Such it is with the bricks and mortar retail industry.
The determinant of the health of that part of the retailing sector is how well it performs during the Holiday season. For 2016, continuing the increasingly dismal trend of the past few years, the news was very, very bad. As a result, retail chains such as Macy’s, Kohl’s, Walmart and The Limited have announced partial or complete closures of their “brick and mortar” operations.
Despite this, the totality of holiday was up significantly over a year earlier. Once again, a momentum has developed, but, in this case, it is for online purchasing.
In this environment, what is the thinking behind the desire of the City of Redondo Beach to make a long, long, long term bet on the future of retail as the primary use for its most perishable commodity, its shoreline? However one feels about the aesthetics of The Waterfront, as the development project is called, there is no logical reasoning from a business perspective which indicates that this is a proper, permanent long-term use of this resource.
The City already has experience with failed shoreline initiatives. The area above the parking garage, known by various names, some of them printable, was to be an example of how to expand the use of the waterfront in ways that would benefit the City and blend with the surrounding residential infrastructure.
It was an immediate failure. In fact, at one point in the early 1990’s, the City had an opportunity to purchase the site for about $1 million and passed on it. That was how far this property’s value had fallen.
There were numerous reasons for this failure, but one of the most important lessons that must be learned is that the permanence of that misbegotten development made it nearly impossible for the City to deal with essential day-to-day activities which involve the health and safety of visitors to the Pier area. Specifically, I mean the parking garage upon which this development sits.
“Creative destruction” is a term coined by an economist, Joseph Schumpeter, which defines the process by which new industries rise to replace old ones. We are going through the start of that period right now in retail. It is gaining momentum. It is going to continue.
It is imperative that, if the City Council doesn’t see the error of its ways, the people must tell them to see it. By turning our waterfront into a museum for a formerly successful means of selling goods, the value of that priceless area of our City diminishes to the point of worthlessness.
It will be of no value to the future of our City to have a group of aesthetically pleasing, empty buildings. As we have seen, fixing a mistake of this magnitude is exceedingly difficult. It is better to have not made that egregious mistake in the first place.
