Losing Laguna : Businessmen Say Day Tourism ‘Trivializing’ Once-Quaint Village

Excuse Bobbie Minkin and the others if they get a bit nostalgic talking about the way things used to be. It’s just that everything seemed so perfect in the old Laguna Beach, like something out of a fairy tale, almost too good to be true.

Sure there were tourists, but these were the right kind of tourists, the type who might write a check for $500 for a piece of local art. Laguna, after all, was an artist colony, and its tourists always were a little bit better educated and wealthier than most.

And there was the village Laguna, with its quaint coffee shops and bakeries, small appliance stores and shoe repair shops--an idyllic, self-contained community that sheltered residents from the sterile shopping malls and bumper-to-bumper traffic so common to Southern California.

That was the Laguna Beach residents like to remember: picturesque, a bit snobbish in its appeal, tolerant of alternative life styles, a haven for artists and counterculturists.

Rents Go Through the Roof

But Laguna Beach has changed. Rents have gone through the roof, sometimes tripling overnight. Many of the small family-run appliance stores, bakeries, and even art galleries that gave the village its soul have disappeared.

Many of the artists who thrived in Laguna’s tolerance and progressiveness have found that they can no longer afford the rent. They, too, are slowly drifting away.

T-shirt shops, beach-wear boutiques, cookie stores and frozen-yogurt shops now hold sway on Forest Avenue, the popular city center, and along the Coast Highway, which hugs the beach along Laguna’s six miles of oceanfront.

Even the tourists have begun to change, with the moneyed traveler and art connoisseur slowly giving way to the “day tourist” from nearby towns and cities.

“First you see the shoe store go out of business and you think, my gosh, isn’t that too bad?” said Minkin, a former Laguna Beach mayor and a resident of the town of 20,000 since 1972.

‘Place Has Changed’

“And then the pet store goes. And then another place goes. It happens slowly and you don’t notice it at first. And then you look around and the place has changed.”

What has Minkin and other Laguna residents concerned is that it’s not just the shoe store and pet shop that are gone. Although no one knows exactly how many, a whole slew of small businesses serving local residents--from pharmacies to hardware stores to small appliance repair shops--have closed their doors in the last several years because of rising rents.

And more often than not, they have been replaced by the boutiques and take-out food emporiums that cater to tourists more interested in a suntan than an original piece of art.

Even the venerable Renaissance Bakery, a Laguna landmark that first opened in 1927, closed recently. Some of the regular customers were so upset that they threatened to chain themselves to the bakery’s antique oak tables in protest.

“One of the problems is that so much of the property is owned by people who don’t live here. So there is not that commitment to provide services for the local residents,” Minkin said. “We are not opposed to tourist trade because much of our economy depends on that. But there has been a tremendous amount of day-tourist shops--ice cream shops and that kind of thing.

“(But) if we continue to have this drift away from quality tourists--those who like a first-rate art gallery or an upscale shop--we’re going to get sort of a carnival atmosphere. It destroys the art colony lifeblood of Laguna Beach. That’s why a lot of the tourists have come here--to be with the artists. This is drifting into the Waikiki kind of thing.”

Like many other residents, Minkin mourns the loss of the mom and pop stores serving the locals. Those were the days, she said, “when you could go downtown, find a place to park and do five or six errands.”

Lucky to Find Parking Place

“You could get your shoes fixed, go to the paint store, drop by City Hall and get a cup of coffee at the Renaissance Bakery and see all your friends there. Now you’re lucky if you can find a place to park, much less do the rest of that stuff.”

Bill Thomas, 66, is one of the casualties of the tremendous rise in rents and property values over the last five to six years. A local businessman for the last 43 years, Thomas operated a camera store under his own name on Forest Avenue from 1971 until 1986 when, unexpectedly, the building was sold and his rent more than tripled.

“In 1971, I started off paying $750 a month,” he said. “When I left, I was paying $2,300 a month and they wanted almost $7,000 under the new lease. I couldn’t afford it, so I left.”

Bill Thomas Cameras now sits on Ocean Avenue, a less traveled street in the downtown area where the rent is more reasonable. From there, Thomas laments what he sees as the trivialization of Laguna.

“The quality life has already deteriorated here,” he said recently. “Even the quality of the weekend tourist has deteriorated. They’re brown-baggers. They come down from the Saddleback Valley and maybe buy an ice cream cone. They don’t really spend any money.”

Mary Jo Wertz, 19, is one of those “brown-baggers” Thomas was referring to. A Cerritos resident, Wertz ventures to Laguna Beach several times each summer to catch the sun at the beach.

‘We Just Like It Here’

“Sometimes I don’t spend any money when I come here, and sometimes maybe I’ll get my hair cut here,” Wertz said while watching the waves roll in from Laguna’s beachfront park. “It’s really pretty here and sometimes I’ll bring my friends. But we don’t spend a lot of money. We just like it here.”

“It’s true the type of tourist is changing,” said Hugh Tucker, a computer salesman and Laguna Beach resident. “But I don’t know what you’re going to do about it. You can’t find a place to park anyway, so the only businesses that can make it are the ones that depend on the people walking by.

“We don’t even come down here in the summertime anymore. It’s just too crowded.”

Like Bill Thomas and his camera shop, Eric Freeman also got caught in the cycle of rising rents. But unlike Thomas, he chose to leave Laguna Beach altogether. For 18 years, the Freeman family’s business, J&H; Appliances, had been one of the few places in Laguna Beach that sold and serviced refrigerators, washers and dryers.

Last February, Freeman and his father, Jim, had the opportunity to buy the small building where they worked. Knowing that property values were rising rapidly, the family bid $10,000 more than the asking price.

$100,000 Over Asking Price

The building was sold to a rival bidder who paid $100,000 above the asking price.

“We could have stayed, but the new owner wanted to triple the rent, and we didn’t even have a parking lot. We wanted to stay, but we left,” the younger Freeman said. The family moved to a strip shopping center in Laguna Niguel.

“I miss seeing all the people who used to shop with us, but the sad thing is that Laguna is turning into just another tourist trap,” Freeman said. “It’s changing from a town of normal town services into basically a tourist town. There are plenty of T-shirt shops and places to eat, but try getting an appliance repaired there. It’s almost impossible.”

“It’s more of a carnival atmosphere now,” added Kenneth Middleton, who ran a small television repair shop before being forced out of his building in 1983. “The place has lost a lot of the sweetness of the old family atmosphere. It doesn’t have jugglers and clowns, but it’s a carnival anyway.”

In the face of the exodus of so many resident-serving businesses, the City Council enacted an emergency ordinance several years ago to control and restrict the types of businesses that moved into the central business district and along Forest Avenue.

Enough T-shirt shops and frozen-dessert stores, the thinking went, and to some degree it has succeeded.

What Market Will Bear

“I can’t remember the last time we allowed a T-shirt shop or a frozen-dessert store in under our conditional use ordinance,” said Elizabeth Brown, a member of the city Planning Commission. “Of course the problem has been what will the market bear. Eventually you have to think that these rents will come down.

“It’s all a balance. You don’t want to unfairly restrict people from making a living, but you don’t want the whole place to go tacky. The greatest fear around here is that the local hardware store will leave and then there will be no place to buy a pencil,” she said.

Brown said the city created a special downtown zone in which resident-serving businesses were encouraged to locate. It was an attempt, she said, to lure back the shoe shops and appliance stores that fled because of the high rents.

“We certainly have tried to put in some controls,” she said. “But we’ve even had problems with some of the older businesses suddenly displaying T-shirts. You know, a hardware store will sell T-shirts in the summer just to get people to walk in the door.”

Yet another problem, city officials said, has been a tendency among some landlords to charge exorbitant “key fees” to renters. A key fee is an additional charge above the normal rent.

Key fees as high as $75,000 have been reported in some of the higher-rent districts of Laguna Beach.

Ex-mayor Minkin is one who believes that the city’s conditional use permit and the market, itself, will eventually bring down the rents.

“Rents just can’t keep going up,” she said. “At some point, even the high-volume touristy places aren’t going to be able to afford it.”

Trying to Retain Identity

Others, such as City Councilman Robert F. Gentry, look on the problem in the broader context of a community fighting to retain its identity.

“The bottom line,” said Gentry, “is that the community of Laguna Beach is going to have to be very strong and very precise about the identity of its downtown. The coastal developers want to label this place the Riviera of America.

“I am really worried for the survival of Laguna Beach as an Old-World, charming art colony where people who consider themselves individual thinkers and somewhat different congregate.”

From a cafe high above the Pacific Ocean on Laguna’s coastal highway, Lorraine Zimmerman scanned the beach area and reminisced about the way things were, and how they may be in the future.

“There is an aspect to Laguna that is fantasyland,” said Zimmerman, owner of the Fahrenheit 451 bookstore, a gathering place for Laguna Beach’s intelligentsia. “It is hard to find a handicapped person, an ugly person, a fat person here. It’s beautiful here, but sometimes it seems like we’ve been really sheltered.

“So now a lot is changing, and there’s a T-shirt shop where there used to be a good used-book store, and there’s a cookie place where there used to be this very particular Oriental store selling all kinds of interesting things. Laguna has always attracted such an eclectic group. The stores fit the people. There were creative people and creative stores.

“But Forest Avenue is getting less and less interesting. It used to be a village, but now it’s becoming a town. But you know, all things come around. When the shoe store closed, there was nothing for a while, and now there are two really good shoe stores.

“So it could happen again here. But in the life of one citizen, maybe not.”