SLO tore down Chinatown to put up a parking lot. Now a historic adobe may have to go too
My earliest memory is 1969, looking out at the Pacific and listening to the Fifth Dimension sing about the Age of Aquarius. Even at 5 I didn’t buy it. But it was the perfect anthem for the Baby Boom, suggesting in the midst of Vietnam, protests, race riots, inner city decay and environmental collapse that everything was about to get better for no particular reason.
It did: We moved to the exurbs and bought huge SUVs, proving we can all get along if we just avoid each other. But then the planet started melting and boomers got blamed. The latest projection from Climate Central: In 30 years all of Vietnam south of Saigon, where a quarter of the population lives, will disappear under seawater.
And need I mention California is burning?
But we’re on it! Three of SLO’s five goals are a car-free city, carbon neutrality, and supporting the cultural heart of the city. The proposed first step is tearing down a historic building in the Downtown Historic District to build a 400-stall parking garage plus a new SLO Rep theater to hide one side of it.
The garage has been quoted at $24 million. We lose the 100-plus spaces currently there, for a net gain of 300, or $80,000 apiece. Each space needs 330 square feet, the size of a small apartment. So there goes our opportunity for hundreds of walkable downtown housing units.
But wait, there’s more! Building the Palm-Nipomo garage would allow the city to someday demolish (for another $1 million) the 400-space Chinatown garage, a “hypothetical” discussed at the highest levels of city administration. So for the low price of $25 million, you actually get a net reduction of 100 spaces.
Meanwhile, Palm-Nipomo’s Environmental Impact Report says the new SLO Rep (which would take up half of the site proposed for it) cannot be built unless the historic Heyd Adobe (which takes up a 10th of the site) is demolished. It didn’t analyze placing the theater elsewhere or relocating the Heyd on site or off, standards we require of developers’ EIRs but not, apparently, of our own. The ugly consequence has been a coordinated campaign by the Rep for the Heyd Adobe’s destruction, an example of hearing the word “culture” and reaching for one’s revolver — as long as it’s someone else’s culture. SLO’s Cultural Heritage Committee and Planning Commission have both unanimously urged the city to relocate the Heyd.
It was indefensible for the council to tear down Chinatown to put up a parking lot, but that was 1950, when someone else’s culture didn’t matter and cars did. The council’s decision in the ‘80s to build a garage on that prime site doesn’t make sense but seemed easy. In 1995 another council expiated our sins by designating the garage — along with Chinatown’s four remaining historic buildings — the Chinatown Historic District, a “concept … represented symbolically.”
In 2006 the council made it even more conceptual by demolishing one of those historic buildings so the new hotel’s 50,000-square-foot footprint would not be diminished by 1,000 square feet of Shanghai Low at the top left corner.
But wait, there’s more! A new parking structure at Santa Rosa! A few unscientific surveys “estimate” a substantial percentage of traffic in major city centers consists of people looking for parking. Build enough perimeter garages, and (maybe) you decrease downtown “search traffic.”
But you can never build enough parking structures, because rigorous independent studies (Chris McCahill, Rachel Weinberger, etc.) show correlation between parking availability and an increase in overall traffic. Build it, and they will come. Across America, traffic is increasing, vehicles getting bigger, and walker and biker deaths skyrocketing.
I’ve lived in 15 cities without owning a car, so don’t ask me. But when I visit friends in San Francisco who’ve always owned cars, we walk everywhere, bike, take the tram, occasionally Uber. Because it’s a pain to park. Yet businesses thrive and people survive.
Sure, when the climate heats up, even well-meaning people can keep cool by sticking their heads in the sand. But where parking is scarce, people embrace planet-healthy alternatives.
SLO has talked about the Palm-Nipomo garage for 25 years until it’s finally become a terrible idea. They’ll build it all right, because the city’s unwritten goal is Build More Stuff. All we should ask: Name it the Greta Thunberg Parking Garage with “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words” written on the side in Trump’s new low-efficiency lightbulbs.
Then if kids today are braver than boomers, the revolution need not be televised. We can watch it from the proposed upper deck viewing platform.
James Papp is an architectural historian, co-owner of heritage tourism company SLO Walkabout, and member and former chair of the city of San Luis Obispo’s Cultural Heritage Committee. He writes an occasional column for The Tribune.
This story was originally published November 11, 2019 at 5:31 AM.
