Yesterday the San Jose Mercury News published an interesting article by Alan Hess about "Why Santana Row succeeds."
Why is this article relevant to a website about the proposed stadium?
Well, at least one City Council Member has emphasized the desire to create an entertainment district in the area of Santa Clara where the stadium is planned. It is useful, therefore, to think about what makes an entertainment area successful.
Santana Row is clearly an example of such a district.
As Hess notes,
Residents of the townhomes on the upper levels of Santana Row's blocks can look from their windows and balconies and see something pretty much like real life on the streets below: fitness freaks on their way to the health club at dawn, mothers with strollers sitting in the parks in the mid-morning sun, business people business-lunching at sidewalk cafes at noon, shoppers cruising in and out of stores all day long, and San Jose residents of different sorts arriving to dine, drink, shop, buy a book, watch movies or dance until late at night.
Have you tried to go there on a Friday or Saturday night? It may be hard to find a parking spot, but once you get there, there's lively street life. On other days, there are free concerts, a farmers' market, open-air movies, and other events and activities.
It may have its origins in mall development, but as Hess writes
Santana Row realizes that we want to be with our fellow humans for reasons other than selling or being sold to. We dine at sidewalk cafes to enjoy good food and good friends, not to increase the stock price of an agribusiness corporation. We want to be near the action. We want to see what other people are doing - and we want other people to know what we are doing, wearing and saying.
A stadium used less than 30 days a year, on the other hand, would not enable the kind of daily interaction needed to create a vibrant social scene.
And one more important point — Santana Row was built through private financing. As Hess explains,
So, "with imagination and a bit of daring" what could Santa Clara do to create an entertainment district that would succeed like Santana Row has?Ironically it's everything that the publicly funded San Jose Redevelopment Agency has been trying to achieve in downtown San Jose for 20 years. The privately financed Santana Row made it happen first.
True, Santana Row is much smaller than downtown San Jose. The real difference, though, is the design.
1 comment:
Actually, the City Council Adopted Goals For 2005-2007 explicitly state:
Encourage enhancement of "Entertainment Theme" In Convention Center/Theme Park Area
-- Study methods to enhance entertainment theme.
-- Update Redevelopment Agency project status for Ballroom Expansion; parking garage; and Phase II Youth Soccer Park.
Well, it's 2007 already. I must have slept through the call for proposals.
What were the specific goals for the entertainment district, what was the budget ceiling and where are the key decision-making criteria?
The smart folks on our City Staff would never have issued a request for proposals that would tie up over a third of the City Operating Budget in an undiversified subsidy, with no clear economic payback. Especially in a time of economic down-turn, when reserves are thin & city staffing thinner.
Rather than studying methods to enhance the entertainment theme, City Council are allowing themselves to be bullied into an up-down vote on subsidizing a big dark mausoleum of a stadium that will see use less than 10% of the year.
What's so entertaining about that?
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