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BAY AREA CITY READIES FOR RETAIL RENAISSANCE

By Rick DelVecchio

This abandoned factory in Richmond, Calif., where Ford built its Model T’s in the 1930s, is being redeveloped.

It’s a rainy day on a dock on San Francisco Bay. A sign in three languages warns that eating the local scavenger fish could be a health hazard. Against a panoramic view of the skyscrapers of downtown San Francisco, a lone fisherman tries to hook mackerel — a safe species, he says.

Behind the fisherman is an enormous abandoned industrial building, all glass, brick and steel. The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake cracked bricks off the parapet on the side facing the bay, and rubble litters the dock.

A sleek sailboat whispers toward its berth in a nearby exclusive marina community. Cargo cranes top the immediate skyline. Roland Parker, at the end of his shift as a security guard, offers an impromptu tour of the huge abandoned building, where Ford built Model T’s in the 1930s and tanks during World War II. The cavernous shed echoes with dripping rain, and Parker says the plant, designed by famed factory architect Albert Kahn, is full of the ghosts of the industrial hive it once was.

This is Richmond, Calif., a city of 94,000 northeast of San Francisco. It’s a harbor town trying to make a big comeback in a short time. Its assets: a 32-mile shoreline facing the sunset over the Golden Gate; plenty of rail, road and water transportation; a surplus of relatively cheap land ripe for turnover to housing; clean industry and retail; and a history as one of the hardest-working cities on the World War II home front.

Shipyards, all gone but one, launched 747 Liberty and Victory ships during the war. The city’s population ballooned from 23,000 to 123,000 in two years. A new Rosie the Riveter park memorializes the civilian war effort, and redevelopment plans for the Ford plant include a home front history museum to be operated by the National Park Service. City officials hope the museum will make Richmond a national travel spot.

Local resident Art Mowry said much of Richmond was built on a temporary basis — almost an emergency basis. This means the city has more than its share of rusted metal, contaminated ground and sewers in need of repair. But it also means opportunity.

Planners have been busy taking advantage of a hot Bay Area economy to remold large areas of their city. They have expanded the city’s redevelopment areas by 50%, to almost 4,000 acres, and merged smaller areas in order to focus the city’s financial resources on projects big enough to transform neighborhoods, especially among the shipbuilding graveyards on the southern shoreline.

Manufacturing still leads the city’s economy, generating three times more economic activity than retail and wholesale combined, and employing as many workers. But the city has strategies to draw a mix of housing, jobs and retail that better reflects the Bay Area as a whole.

Larkspur and Tiburon, communities across the bay in Marin, represent one model. They are harbor towns that evolved into waterfront lifestyle satellites of San Francisco, full of good shops, homes, schools and recreation. Another model is Fourth Street in Berkeley, where a retail center booms in the middle of an old industrial and residential neighborhood.

“The whole shoreline is being looked at by the community and developers,” said Tom Mitchell, who heads redevelopment projects for the city.

The Ford building and the nearby 1,900-unit Marina Bay community offer Richmond’s greatest potential for new retail.

Marina Bay residents have plenty of money but few opportunities to spend it in the neighborhood, other than a restaurant and a general store. The city plans an additional 60,000 square feet of retail, including a cafe, grocery store and specialty shops.

The shops would also serve a new state health laboratory and nearby technology companies that are overflowing from a congested Silicon Valley. Reclaimed industrial tracts such as those in Richmond give Silicon Valley companies, whose workers have to confront crowded roads and expensive housing, room to spread out without leaving the Bay Area. For those who don’t mind an unglamorous address, Richmond is one of the best deals around: In the last quarter of 2000, asking rent for office space east of San Francisco Bay was about $33 a square foot, compared with $46 in Silicon Valley and $73 in San Francisco.

The harbor town of Richmond, Calif., is trying to make a comeback.

“Over the next five years, we think there’s going to be 5,000 to 10,000 new jobs down there,” Mitchell said.

The 25-acre Ford site, in a deal between the city and Forest City Residential West of Cleveland, will have a captive retail audience: the occupants of 260 live-work units that are to be carved out of the plant’s work bays. The $100 million project calls for 15,000 square feet of retail — primarily shops and restaurants — to serve the high-tech business and residential tenants. In a city that lacks entertainment venues, the plan also includes a 500-seat banquet room.

Parker, the security guard, has plenty of time to ponder history, architecture and the fate of his blue-collar city as he makes his lonely rounds; he says an outbuilding behind the main plant would make a good restaurant and club.

Another pocket neighborhood is forming on the shore north of the Marina Bay and Ford sites. The city plans 40 luxury flats and 152 town homes on the site of an old Port of Richmond terminal.

On the northern shoreline, the city is negotiating with the Navy on the transfer of Point Molate, a rocky, 290-acre stretch of waterfront that served as a military fuel depot from World War II until 1995. City officials believe Point Molate is prime for another hideaway shoreline community, but the deal is clouded by a debate over what uses make sense for a site that is on the other side of a hill from some of the gasoline-making units of Chevron’s Richmond refinery.

Away from the shoreline, intercity and local commuter railways offer retail opportunities. A $55 million transit village at the local Bay Area Rapid Transit and Amtrak stations will include 228 owner-occupied town homes and 27,000 square feet of retail.

Richmond has long served as a regional retail spot. The landmark is Hilltop Mall, anchored by Macy’s. The center serves an area that includes the suburbs fringing Richmond and wealthier cities like Berkeley. The average household income in the trade area is $60,000 a year, compared with a 1990 median household income of less than $37,000 for the city of Richmond.

But the hard-put residential flatlands of Richmond are changing along with the shoreline. Among the vacant stores of old shopping centers that died, a boom in ethnic retail reflects the influx of immigrants from Southeast Asia and Spanish-speaking newcomers from more expensive communities closer to San Francisco.

As planners recruit developers to restore industrial sites and attract residents to the shoreline, the newcomers are quietly providing an economic stimulus by buying, repairing and landscaping the careworn homes of the city that sprang up overnight on the wartime home front.

 

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