Balboa Peninsula Retailers Look for Resurgence : Business: With help from the city, an effort to draw customers from outside the area gets started Sunday with a classic car show.
Balboa Peninsula is one of those places in Orange County that has always had a certain romance, a certain magic all its own. The wealthy enjoy quaint waterfront homes and luxurious yachts, while those of leaner means take in the ocean breezes on a 35-cent ferry ride or rented in-line skates.
In recent years, low-budget “day trippers”--youths who bus to the beach to tackle the surf, college students who prefer pizza and burgers to scallops and Sauvignon blanc, low-income inlanders with picnic baskets in tow--have become the bane of Balboa Peninsula merchants’ existence.
Some shopkeepers blame what they consider to be penny-pinchers for creating an atmosphere unfriendly to big spenders.
Also, tensions have run high between residents who see the visitors as the source of noise, litter and “undesirable” trade and those merchants who depend on out-of-towners generally for some of their profits.
After years of inaction, city officials and business leaders appear to have a plan to address such issues.
Recent months have seen the city hire retail and marketing consultants, form business improvement districts, and make parking and traffic control changes.
Business owners hope the message is clear: Balboa is on its way back.
“I would like to see Balboa take on the identity that it had in the ‘40s and ‘50s, which was Art Deco and fun,” said Gary E. Malazian, a board member of the Balboa Merchants and Owners Assn.
The Balboa Pier Classic Car Show on Sunday was a coming-out party of sorts.
Malazian and his peers at the association organized the show to bring in visitors and reintroduce the peninsula to locals who may have turned elsewhere for excitement--and it worked. The car show attracted more than 400 entrants from the immediate area, as well as from car clubs in Bakersfield and Henderson, Nev.
“They just don’t promote anything out here,” Malazian complained. “You need events, you need family things. We’re obligated, because we have the facilities, to entertain families. . . . The whole thing is oriented around wholesome, clean-cut fun.”
Like most areas of Newport Beach, peninsula residents alone can’t support the number of businesses that dot the boulevards and shoreline. Retailers depend on outside business.
“There’s just not enough revenue to go around,” agreed Tom Hyans, president of the Central Balboa Community Assn. But he worries that the city is putting the cart before the horse.
“The basic problem is that there’s an awful lot of money being spent on superstructure without really looking at what the market is,” he said. “There’s an awful lot of stuff going on, but there’s no master plan.”
City officials are trying to change that. The biggest single push this year has been the creation of Balboa’s Business Improvement District, a group of merchants and property owners that will collect and spend $20,000 a year to fund promotions and improvements for their area.
“It’s always been hard for us to get smaller owners to participate financially in our association. This way everyone is forced to participate, so it will allow us to do a lot more,” Pulliam said. “There’s so many individual landlords down here, and they don’t necessarily care what goes in next to other stores. We need to work more together.”
Assistant City Manager Ken Delino, who will take over the city Planning Department in July in a reorganization designed to foster economic development, said the car show and other broad-appeal events like an art show planned for May 20 and 21 are geared to bring visitors back.
“The car show is one of those things to bring in more people, and more spenders. The car shows are attractive to a broad spectrum of people, and that’s what we wanted to do,” Delino said. “Families aren’t going there (to the peninsula). Old people don’t go there anymore.”
Delino, who estimates that he and other city officials spent at least 500 hours working on Central Balboa in the past year, hopes his more proactive approach will turn the economic tide and restore the Balboa customer base that eroded through neglect.
“Our only revitalization technique was zoning. That’s all we did” until a year ago, Delino said. “It was (the city’s) Economic Development (Committee) that unveiled those tools, opened the toolshed and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got all these tools.’ Our Planning Department never used those tools.”
The city has spent $15,000 for a citywide analysis of retail trade, which Delino wants to use to help merchants open new businesses in successful locations. Balboa merchants have seen early plans for facade designs and street improvements that would give Central Balboa a more genteel look.
“The Main Street improvement will provide an environment in which people want to linger. It will provide an atmosphere to see and be seen, that’s clean and attractive,” Delino said. “People will want to hang around. Then they’ll spend money.”
