Beach 2016: Manhattan Beach develops a ‘Plan’ for its downtown

At a packed city council meeting in December, Manhattan Beach passed the Downtown Specific Plan, a zoning document intended to govern land-use in the area. The resulting plan makes important changes, but it is far from clear whether approving the plan will be able to reverse or slow the broader forces buffeting the town’s central gathering place.

In the last 30 years, Manhattan went from sleepy beach town to one of the wealthiest communities in California, and real estate prices skyrocketed accordingly. About three years ago, the imprint of these changes on the city’s downtown became unmistakable, as several longtime tenants, most of them small and independent and struggling to to meet the area’s ever-increasing rents, left and were replaced with banks and real estate offices.

Urban planning experts tend to agree that these “office/professional” uses, especially in ground-floor spaces, have a deadening effect on the streetscape, because they provide little reason for people to be there, other than those working or having business there. Surrounding businesses that depend on foot-traffic and walk-in customers — almost all retailers and restaurants — could gradually die off.

This was the conclusion of the Urban Land Institute, a Washington, D.C. urban planning nonprofit commissioned by the city to study downtown in the wake of the store departures. The report suggested a variety of changes to downtown that could help preserve it amidst a changing economy. But while the plan offered some ideas that met with approval, some of its proposals, particularly those calling for expanded building heights in the downtown area, sparked a backlash. In a lengthy series of community visioning meetings, a growing consensus emerged that the plan should above all preserve downtown’s quaint, small-town character.

“Downtown is not the ‘commercial center’ of Manhattan Beach. It’s the community center, and it has a commercial component,” resident Neil Leventhal told the Planning Commission.

The city passed a moratorium on land-use changes in 2014 to limit further transformations to banks and real estate offices while the Specific Plan was being crafted. The moratorium was renewed, but expired in July of this year, and by state law could not be renewed again.

This set up the first real showdown of the year on the issue. At a city council meeting days before the moratorium was set to expire, some business owners and residents criticized city officials for not having addressed the issue earlier. The council eventually adopted an interim ordinance that achieved many of the same things as the moratorium, and gave the city a bit more breathing room to finish crafting the plan.

City staff released a final draft of the plan in late October. And although commercial property owners in the city continued to voice concerns about the land-use limitations that had originally inspired the City Council to develop the Specific Plan, by that point public debate had largely shifted to impacts that the enacting the plan would have on quality of life.

The biggest area of concern was the document’s approach to second-floor outdoor dining. Under then-existing code, the practice was permitted in all commercially zoned parcels in downtown, and only one example of it — the Strand House — existed. The draft plan featured a map that pared eligible areas by creating a buffer with downtown residences, required second-story dining to face main streets, and mandated decibel-level studies for alcohol-serving establishments open late. But even though the proposed regulations were stricter than what they would replace, residents resented the prospect of so large an area being eligible for outdoor dining.

“There is already a serious problem from noise at ground level. And noise at a second-story is much harder to contain. Downtown is simply too small,” said Carol Perrin, head of the Downtown Residents Group.

Concerns about the impact of second-story dining on noise, and associated restaurant impacts like trash and congestion, packed residents into action at the City Council meeting where the plan was ultimately approved. Residents shared what they liked about the document, and spoke far more extensively about what they did not like. The council mostly listened, accommodating a parade of concerns vastly different than those that first spurred the city into action.

Comments on second-story outdoor dining dominated, and the council jettisoned the suggested outdoor dining map and regulations in favor of a ban on the practice. But in the same breath, many residents also voiced concern over a portion of the plan’s vision statement that “acknolwedg[ed] the role visitors play in supporting the downtown,” a phrase that the council also ultimately excised.

Downtown business interests, who depend to some degree on tourists to keep them afloat, were silent. But Community Development Director Marisa Lundstedt said that the excised provision could later be reinserted by the California Coastal Commission, whose approval is needed for the Specific Plan to take effect, because of state laws protecting visitor access to the coast.
Residents insisted that their opposition was not rooted in hostility to outsiders, but of a desire to protect something simultaneously amorphous yet treasured, potent yet vulnerable: the “small-town charm” of downtown.

“It’s not that any of us don’t like non-locals. But Manhattan Beach as it is right now has a beat to it, it has a throb,” said resident and former Planning Commissioner Bob Valentine.

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