Dear City Council,
I heard you are considering converting Santa Cruz Ave to a pedestrian mall and commissioned a consultant to study this.
I believe it's worthwhile to consider the case study for Fulton Mall in Fresno, CA:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulton_Mall_(Fresno)
This WAS a six-block conversion of Fresno's main street to a pedestrian mall dedicated in 1964, pursuing the same concept some advocate in Menlo Park. Prior to the conversion, and at dedication, this strip of downtown Fresno had major retailers in stately buildings and an array of restaurants and offices supplying lots of pedestrians.
My wife and I have first-hand experience with this pedestrian mall in the early 1990s on one of our CA road trips. We stayed nearby and walked the 6 block strip; found all the major retail buildings empty, homeless camped in many building front door entryways, the retail still open were skid row type bail bond, cigarette store, low-end diner, etc. It was eerie to see a dilapidated Gottschalks sign on a building that had been vacant for a decade with garbage blowing around on the sidewalk and in entryways.
At the time I was an avid studier of downtown design, and had read a lot of Jane Jacobs. I asked around about what happened and where all the customers and stores went? The answer was: after the pedestrian mall opened, customers didn't want to walk that far to a store, so all the stores and customers moved out to Clovis (a suburb 8 miles north), which then grew fast and essentially replaced/obsoleted Fresno. Meanwhile Fresno's downtown became well known for drugs and crime. The sad fact is that the customers and businesses moved and they have no reason to come back. So the destruction of the vitality is permanent.
Per Wikipedia, by the 1990s the city council begged the government not to designate it a historical place because they wanted to demolish the mall and restore the street. It took them a decade to get a $16m Gov grant to tear up the ped mall and put in new street - that $16m is a three decade old number from a much lower cost area than Menlo Park.
A second local example:
Don't forget Sunnyvale lost its downtown when it was bulldozed to make way for a mall. Then that mall failed 2 decades ago, and they are still trying to replace it with residential and a token amount of retail.
Santa Cruz Ave is subject to even more constraints than Fresno's main drag. Here, the train and ECR impede pedestrian access to Santa Cruz from the east, and lack of sidewalks inhibits pedestrian access from the west. And very long blocks south of downtown (e.g., Live Oak Ave) lengthen access time from the south.
If you do this in Menlo Park, customers and businesses will obsolete downtown by migrating, some to our neighborhood business districts, some farther to Redwood City and Palo Alto. Property owners on the declining Santa Cruz Ave mall will be able to afford to sit on vacant buildings earning property appreciation, offering little impetus to remove blight.
So, I think it is best to immediately cancel work toward fully closing Santa Cruz Ave.
Option:
I think it is possible to reduce Santa Cruz Ave to a one-way street, allowing wider pedestrian and/or outdoor retail areas. But customers and businesses need some standing parking on the street to allow a customer to load a box into a car because you can't walk a delicate cake in a box two blocks to a car without ruining the frosting, and grandma needs to be dropped off right in front of the hair salon or restaurant, etc. The block with Left Bank/Bistro Vida/Suzies Cakes is a good example.
Louis Deziel
Former Menlo Park Planning Commissioner
Menlo Park, CA 94025
