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From Walnut Creek to Mountain View, the Bay Area’s most exciting downtowns are in the suburbs (article here)

 Since the pandemic, there’s been lots of handwringing over the slow comeback of urban downtowns. But what often goes untold is the story of the many downtowns in the suburbs and other small towns of the Bay Area — where more than two-thirds of the 7.6 million people in the region currently live — that are thriving again.

One of those lively suburbs with lots of people out and about is my hometown of Walnut Creek, which first became an exciting place for me when I was 12 and my parents gave me permission to “go downtown” with my friends.

 On Saturday afternoons, we’d walk from our neighborhood to Walnut Creek’s Main Street and Broadway Plaza. We’d wander along the sidewalks, ride the escalators at Bullock’s (now Nordstrom), try on clothes that were too old for us, go to a movie and eat what we wanted. It was exciting, like in that boppy Petula Clark song where downtown is a place with bright lights and neon signs — “the noise and the hurry.”

Even though Walnut Creek was still considered a bedroom community in the 1970s, its downtown had some edge. On Friday and Saturday nights, out-of-towners turned Main Street into a Northern California destination for “American Graffiti”-style cruising. A few years later, my high school friends and I attended midnight showings of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” The parade of gender-fluid Frank-N-Furter clones on Main Street suggested that the suburbs could easily accommodate the revolutionary ideas of the counterculture unfolding in bigger cities.

Between college and 2001, I got to visit some of the most exciting cities on the planet – Chicago, New York, London, Paris, Istanbul, Moscow, Singapore and Hong Kong, and lived in Bangkok and San Francisco. When I moved back to Walnut Creek for the usual family reasons, I was delighted to find that its downtown was far more interesting than I remembered. Among other things, it had become a top retail destination.

As a reporter covering East Bay cities and lifestyles in the early 2000s, I often heard about neighboring towns wanting some of what Walnut Creek had in terms of foot traffic, community vitality and, of course, sales tax revenues.

I’ve since discovered that a number of Bay Area suburbs do have what Walnut Creek has, especially since the pandemic. Thriving downtowns abound across the region in places like Mountain View, Los Gatos, Morgan Hill, Fremont, San Leandro and the Tri-Valley. Even communities that have struggled, like Hayward or Martinez, have begun to gain a foothold with their downtowns emphasizing their unique histories, businesses or locations.

Clark’s 62-year-old pop single still speaks to a universal truth: People like to go downtown, which is why many of these communities began working long before COVID to create core areas where locals and visitors can shop, eat, be entertained and socialize. According to data from the Bay Area Economic Institute and Squareup, the region’s suburbs have gained in popularity since the pandemic, as people shifted to remote or hybrid work or sought a relatively lower cost of living.

The Bay Area’s suburban population of some 5 million also has become increasingly diverse, educated and affluent. People of color make up nearly 40% of residents in Walnut Creek, a notable rise from when I was a child. In the Silicon Valley and the Tri Valley – the Bay Area’s fastest growing region – more than half of residents are Asian, Latino, Black or mixed-race, and a growing share of suburbanites are immigrants.

Falling in love with the local scene

The resulting mix is a population that wants some of the benefits of cosmopolitan, urban living, but want it close to home, where they don’t have to deal with traffic, parking issues or the safety concerns they associate with going to “the city.”

“I think people fell in love with their hometowns a bit during COVID because it was really hard to go anywhere,” said Brandon Cardwell, the economic development director for Livermore, which also has a thriving downtown. “I heard from people who were working remotely that they now had a favorite restaurant not in the city where they used to work, but in their own downtown. One of the silver linings of the pandemic is that people have a chance to really get to know and fall in love with the communities they live in.”

Today’s successful downtowns rely on a mix of ingredients, said Steven Falk, the former city manager of Lafayette, who’s served as an interim city executive in Oakland and Richmond and who lectures at UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy. They need retail, restaurants and services, as well as parks and plazas for festivals, outdoor concerts and weekly farmers markets; historic or “culturally meaningful” architecture; and libraries, civic buildings and venues for arts and culture. It’s necessary to have a robust job market nearby, Falk said, and residents who have money to spend.

Their success dovetails with a larger trend: Over the past decade or so, people have begun moving back into downtowns. This reverses a particularly American trend going back to the late 19th century, which had downtowns become strongholds of commerce, manufacturing and government, while people migrated to outlying areas, desiring land for increasingly bigger homes with yards, according to Mitchell Schwarzer, an author and retired professor of architectural and urban history at the California College of the Arts.

“The greatest transformation to the American downtown in recent decades has been the reintroduction of housing,” Schwarzer said. In what he called a global trend, singles, couples, young families and empty nesters are moving into new apartments, townhouses  and loft developments. Some of these projects are mixed use, lining formerly vacant streets with ground-floor stores and restaurants and bringing an urban look to suburban skylines.

Old-timers and NIMBYs may complain that these projects destroy the “small-town” feel of their communities, but Walnut Creek Mayor Kevin Wilk said cities are limited in their ability to say no to new downtown complexes. Dozens of state laws enacted in recent years mandate that cities do their part to address California’s housing crisis by creating new homes at all income levels.

He and Falk both believe density is good for downtowns because it brings more foot traffic, shoppers, shops and variety.

“It’s a virtuous circle,” Falk said.

Walnut Creek: Making a model downtown

There are a number of factors that made Walnut Creek a model for other mid-size suburbs, and they didn’t happen overnight.

“It’s a fantastic downtown,” Falk said. “None of that happened by accident. It’s the result of decades of good planning and oversight.”

Even before any human intervention, Walnut Creek had “the gift of geography” according to Brad Rovanpera, the city’s former public information officer who wrote its official history. Walnut Creek developed at the crossroads of two 19th-century routes, one running between Oakland and east Contra Costa County and the other between Martinez, a shipping town on the Carquinez Strait, and San Jose.

Walnut Creek’s future as a commercial, dining and nightlife destination began near those crossroads with the opening of a hotel, store and saloon in the 1850s. Today, the crossroads is the intersection of Mt. Diablo Boulevard and Main Street, one of the city’s prime retail areas, with Broadway Plaza and the Apple store on one corner and Tiffany and Pottery Barn on the others. This intersection also lies about a half-mile away from another crossroads: the I-680 and Highway 24 interchange.

When Harvard-educated lawyer Dean Lesher surveyed the then- 2,200-person city from an airplane in 1947, he decided to make it the home of his future media empire. When buying the local paper, which he would later rename the Contra Costa Times, he correctly predicted that the East Bay was on the verge of a major expansion and wrote a column that could serve as a manifesto for any American downtown: “The people are flocking here. … They will shop here if the shops offer what they want. They will look for entertainment here if it is available.”

Early in its post-war development, Walnut Creek leaders made a key decision that seems especially prescient, given the recent decline of indoor shopping malls due to the growth of online shopping and the resurgence of downtowns. They approved the construction of an open-air mall near those crossroads, designed to resemble a traditional Main Street rather than a galleria. Opening in 1951, the Broadway Shopping Center, as it was then called, also offered space for several anchor department stores, along with a Woolworth variety store.

“In one broad stroke, the opening of the center changed the financial fortunes of the sleepy downtown that would one day be recognized as one of the top shopping districts in the nation,” Rovanpera wrote in his book, “Walnut Creek: An Illustrated History.” Walnut Creek’s downtown also attracted other kinds of businesses, including financial firms and auto dealerships. Kaiser Permanente notably chose the downtown to build its first state-of-the-art “dream hospital” in Northern California in 1953, as the fledgling nonprofit began to grow its health-care empire.

In the 1960s, Walnut Creek lost a couple of its department stores to Concord’s Sunvalley mall, one of the gleaming new, fully enclosed shopping centers that were seen as the future of retail for auto-dependent suburbanites. Built along I-680, Sunvalley became another Saturday afternoon destination for me and my friends. Wilk admits that he sometimes preferred going to Sunvalley after he got his driver’s license, because Walnut Creek’s downtown seemed so “nondescript.”

Of course, that’s not the case anymore, as Walnut Creek’s downtown continued to thrive, while Sunvalley’s recent struggles have been well-documented. Meanwhile, after Walnut Creek got its BART station near downtown in 1973, it experienced another growth spurt, with thousands pouring in to live and work in new subdivisions and office parks in the city and surrounding communities.

By 1976, Walnut Creek was enough of a destination that President Gerald Ford stopped by to experience it. Like other suburbs, Walnut Creek also experienced growing pains over traffic, congestion and concerns about overdevelopment. But it continued to harbor big-city ambitions, notably in aspiring to become a regional cultural center. It approved the construction of a performing arts center at the north end of town, which was later named for Lesher, an ardent arts supporter. Opening in 1990, it soon provided the momentum for new redevelopment projects and for upscale shops and restaurants finding their way into vintage buildings along Main and Locust streets.

Of course, Walnut Creek was not the only city to put the arts at the heart of community development – Mountain View, for instance, opened its downtown Center for the Performing Arts the following year. But it has provided an example of how this can be a successful strategy for any town aspiring to what planners called “livability.” Economic data from nonprofits like Americans for the Arts and the Knight Foundation show that investing in theaters, museums or public art displays boosts spending, creates jobs and turns downtowns into destinations.

This arts and culture piece fits into a new mantra for city planners — that downtowns need to be more “experience-oriented,” and retail needs to be “experiential,” as Walnut Creek’s economic development manager Mike Nimon said.

People can easily go online and buy what they need, he said, so downtowns also need to be places where people can eat before or after they shop, meet up with friends or just hang out in a pleasant outdoor space.

My 12-year-old self would approve.