REVIVING DOWNTOWN The Inside Scoop of the Downtown Specific Brentwood Development Plan
	September 2005

by Howard Sword, Gina Rozenski, Jeff Zilm, and Mike Leana
Photos by Russell Byrne

For the past decade or more Brentwood has been going through a period of explosive growth. We are now experiencing the same economic and social energies that enabled places like Danville, Pleasanton, and Pleasant Hill to transform themselves. We’re responding to the challenge of managing growth by our Downtown Specific Plan, which is an amendment to the General Plan and Zoning Ordinance — the roadmap for the progress of our community that we adopted in 1993 and revised in 2001.

Our current downtown has lovely areas for shopping and relaxation, but it came about through no coordinated planning. Single-story buildings, surface parking areas, and vacant lots are arranged in no particular order. Businesses, offices, and restaurants are in no practical or aesthetic arrangement. Until sixteen years ago, Highway 4 used to run down Second Street past Liberty High, right on Oak, and left at the current Chevron station. The new alignment of the highway resulted in a downtown that was left in the backwaters as the stream of traffic moved on its new path. Abandoned gas stations and other automotive use buildings are left-overs from those days. Most people currently driving down Brentwood Boulevard have no inkling of the downtown area that lies so close at hand.

Under the Downtown Specific Plan we’re planning to increase downtown retail availability by 80,000 square feet in two phases over the next decade. We’re making this change in order to bring downtown shopping opportunities up to the level of critical mass, which is defined as retail and restaurant sites sufficient to occupy most casual shoppers for several hours, including a stop for lunch or dinner.

Any area that attains this critical mass becomes a destination — a place people might choose to go when they have a day off. It is a spot where they can hang out for a while, as opposed to simply being a place they might go only for some more specific purpose, such as dinner at a local restaurant or a shopping trip to a store.

Following a great deal of community discussions, we are releasing details of the development plan that will enable us to bring downtown Brentwood to this level. We’ll plan to have an initial 40,000 square feet available for businesses within a few years.

Planning to Succeed
Our downtown plan includes the area from Brentwood Boulevard to Fir Street and from Third Street to Walnut Boulevard. We’re covering many bases in our downtown renewal project, including the revitalization of current businesses, which will be joined by a number of new services and shops. The pieces of the development story include a new city hall, retail shops, galleries, sidewalk cafés and other eateries, salons, coffee shops, a center for the performing arts, architectural and accounting firms, legal and realty offices, day spas and physical therapists, studios and stores, the park and transit center, and the civic center and a refurbished town square.

The real vision we have for the future downtown does not actually center around our plans for new structures; the plan really centers upon people. From earliest sunrise to the dark of the night we imagine that streets, parks, public buildings, offices, and restaurants will be scenes of bustling activity. Shopkeepers and their customers, city officials and citizens, seniors and children, parents and their kids, teachers and their students, people in adult instruction classes, theater-goers, diners, artists, and joggers will all play a daily part in the shifting human kaleidoscope of our re-energized community’s downtown life.

It is clear to us that five factors will contribute to healthy development: building a major attraction to serve as a downtown anchor, creating parking solutions, providing expanded civic and cultural centers, increasing downtown housing, and developing a multi-model transit station. Here are some details about these five factors.

1. Building a Downtown Anchor
We will create a tremendous opportunity for growth by developing an anchor that will provide a magnet to attract people to the downtown area. We will either provide a destination shopping experience that will define our downtown’s unique marketing niche, or a multi-screen theater. Either would be capable of attracting the traffic that will keep our downtown vibrant and bustling with life.

Such facilities have normal and high-season periods. During the high-season times, which would include holidays and summers, such a place might attract an average of 10,000 visitors a week. The average during the normal season will probably be 5,000 weekly visitors.

These numbers represent a tremendous potential for foot traffic because some of the people attending the theater or shopping in the anchor store will have a meal, snack, or a drink in some other local establishment. Other residual benefits will come from impromptu or spur-of-the-moment shopping that theatergoers or shoppers might do before or after they complete the task that they came downtown for.

Brentwood is ready for such an anchor. For example, we’ve been approached by five different companies interested in developing a multiplex theater in Brentwood. We are seeking to develop a shopping and entertainment experience that will differentiate our downtown from the other outlying shopping venues.

2. Creating Parking Solutions
We know that people complain about the difficulty of finding parking in downtown Brentwood. However, in one sense this is a good thing. Downtown communities that have plenty of parking are usually in poor economic health. So our parking problems point to a healthy downtown.

The limitation of parking spaces definitely restricts our potential for growth. We can easily solve a big part of the problem by simply increasing the efficiency of current parking spaces. In particular, we need to reserve parking spaces adjacent to downtown businesses for customers and clients of those businesses. It is annoying to any business owner if he hangs out his Open sign and ten minutes later an employee, for example, parks directly in front of the business, gets out of the car, and heads for a day at the office or shop. We need to keep such spaces clear of cars belonging to employees of downtown shops and businesses, residents, commuters, and city employees.

When we get the transit hub and anchor into place, downtown traffic will dramatically increase and we will need to put into place a parking structure to accommodate the additional cars. There wasn’t as much controversy about the structure itself as there was about where to locate this. We are collaborating with local business people about the decision. It is clear that the parking structure should be located close to the planned transportation center and the anchor store or multiplex. We’re currently planning to construct this multi-storied parking structure on Brentwood Boulevard between Maple and Oak Streets or between Chestnut and Birch Streets.

Wherever it is finally located, the parking structure will have a ground floor with retail space. Not only does the design represent an elegant conservation of space for retail purposes, but research shows that when people are walking by retail spaces, they perceive the distance to be shorter than when walking past the bare walls of a garage.

The retail space on the ground floor also increases the incidental shopping done by people who are in town for some other purpose, which is so important to the health of a downtown area, as we said earlier. On the way to their car, for example, a family might pop into a café for a quick lunch or stop by a store to do some casual shopping.

3. Providing Expanded Civic and Cultural Centers
The third factor in our healthy downtown development is Brentwood’s commitment to keeping the majority of its civic and cultural centers downtown. With the building of the new City Hall, for example, we hope to free up other city buildings for interim civic and cultural activities. We have long-term plans to build a new community center.

We’re going to conserve our City Park as an important resource in maintaining the downtown as a center for community activity. Our park is a jewel in our development crown and is utilized for many formal and informal gatherings, such as our summer Starry Nights musical concerts and our October Walk in the Park art and wine festival. The City Park will continue to be a pleasant, muliti-use, outdoor experience. When our new community is completed, we plan to refurbish the park and eventually to extend Third Street to Maple so that we can define a downtown square.

Properly designed town squares provide an organizing principle for downtown areas around which civic buildings, restaurants, and retail areas can arrange themselves. In such picturesque places as Sonoma and Healdsburg, for example, the town square becomes the activity center for the whole city, serving as both the symbolic and practical center of social and commercial activity.

Prominent city centers convey a powerful message to people visiting a city. Libraries, parks, and public gathering areas speak worlds about the value that a municipality places upon serving the residents of that community.

4. Increasing Downtown-accessible Housing
New homes are envisioned along Chestnut Street, along Walnut west of Brentwood Boulevard, and along First Street north of Maple. This area is adjacent to the downtown retail core. We are planning new residential, mixed-use, and residentially compatible commercial development including civic, office, and lodging. These will extend the vibrancy of the downtown core into predominantly residential neighborhoods. The wide variety of housing will ultimately be available, supplying a population of young couples, families, seniors, and single people who are within walking distance of the downtown shops, restaurants, and cultural centers.

New townhouses, apartments, low-rise multifamily developments, and live-work units will provide opportunities for community members to live in a mixed-use residential neighborhood. New buildings are sited with open space on all sides, providing opportunities for side yards to contain small gardens or provide walking paths to rear yards and off-street parking areas. Front doors face the street, and in combination with porches, terraces, and stoops, create outdoor environments in which neighbors feel safe knowing that there are plenty of “eyes on the street.”

5. Developing a Multi-model Transit Hub
Downtown accessibility will be greatly enhanced by a planned transportation center. Not only will the facility provide alternate ways for visitors to get downtown, but downtown residents will be able to board buses and trains to get to their places of work, or to link them with the Bay Area’s major public transportation networks.

The transportation center will be located within or adjacent to downtown, and will be integrated into the natural flow of pedestrian and vehicles traveling to and from the City’s center. The station will also serve as a Park and Ride lot for bus lines, including Dime-a-Ride, as well as Delta Express and other fixed-route lines.

An E-bart station is once again in the works. The railway that was so instrumental to Brentwood’s earliest days will once again play a fundamental role in increasing the economic viability of Brentwood’s downtown.

Right People with the Right Stuff
We have the potential of becoming the only real, vital, active, historic downtown in East County. The combination of opportunities in the five areas of development is tremendous, but we need to quickly capitalize on the opportunities, because of the new regional shopping developments. We need to draw people in a timely way back to the town center before their shopping patterns, centering around the outlying shopping centers, become ingrained and difficult to change.

We’re encouraged to believe that we will be able to do this successfully, because in 1986 Howard served as President of the Pleasanton Downtown Association. Most people cannot remember Pleasanton in those early days when the downtown, comprised of bars and failing retail elements, was in decline.

The merchants at that time blamed Stoneridge Mall. However, the downtown businessmen finally realized that they could create their own unique, boutique-quality, restaurant market niche and organized themselves as a Downtown Association. Now people in that area will often go to Stoneridge for the department store experience, and then go downtown for their eating and window-shopping experiences. Both areas are thriving.

Our City Manager, Donna Landeros, was manager of Ventura while that city went through a transition remarkably similar in some ways to our downtown renovation plans. In fact, she implemented a downtown plan created by Freedman, Tung, and Bottomley, the same group who is helping us. Donna believes with all her heart that Brentwood can make the same kind of changes that Ventura did.

The Tough, Wonderful Road Ahead
All of us know from experience that the changes we are proposing will not be easy to implement, but we also know by experience that they are very possible. We involved area residents in the decision process because we had to define the interlocking regional and local issues in order to create plans that are comprehensive enough to include all the complexities. The task wasn’t easy. We faced hard choices calling for tough decisions. It is difficult to change, but we are putting a plan in place to make the changes through the most effective and efficient processes possible.

The Brentwood Redevelopment Agency is dedicating significant resources in giving shape to this Downtown Specific Plan. Identifying a strategy to carry out the plan is as important as defining the plan itself.

The situation is time-critical. If we don’t develop our downtown in a timely manner, we run the risk of losing momentum and seeing this golden opportunity pass us by forever. In that case, there would be nothing to prevent the outlying shopping areas from becoming the dominant centers of economic activity. We must put into place a powerful downtown alternative before the current shifts away from us forever and leaves our town center to shrivel and die in the dusty streambed of our missed opportunity.

We’ve made up our mind that’s not going to happen.

It isn’t too late for you to provide input into the process. Staff anticipates Planning Commission review and recommendations in mid-September and City Council review and approval in mid-October. Staff urges city residents to continue to participate in the process by reviewing and commenting on the draft specific plan.