‘Burbs of a Feather : Long Beach Drives Its Recovery by Stressing Interconnectedness

Long Beach Mayor Beverly O’Neill and top officials of her city are mounting a marketing campaign these days to declare that their city is back from recession and from decades of drift and decline.

And they have a good story to tell. Long Beach has recovered just about all of the 50,000 jobs that disappeared in the early 1990s downturn of defense and aerospace, when the city of 425,000 lost its naval base and shipyard amid other cutbacks.

Long Beach’s downtown shopping districts and waterfront areas had declined long before that. An amusement park went from pleasant diversion to raucous hangout to dangerous slum before being torn down in 1991--having never adapted to the family-friendly innovations of Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm in nearby Orange County.

But today the Long Beach picture is different. Construction goes forward on an aquarium that is to open in summer 1998 as anchor of a waterfront park with retail stores and restaurants.

Expansion of the Port of Long Beach, the nation’s busiest, continues. A public hearing tonight will deal with plans for the newest $200-million terminal.

And communications satellite projects by Boeing and Hughes Communications are swelling industrial and technical employment, partly making up for years of job declines at the city’s huge McDonnell Douglas aircraft plant.

Yet the most significant lessons in Long Beach’s recovery lie not in those details, welcome as they are, but in the strategic plan the city is using for its renewal and in its interconnectedness with all the other cities in Southern California.

The plan stems from the realization that “a city today has to create its own economic base,” explains Chris Pook, co-chairman of the city’s marketing effort and chairman of the Long Beach Grand Prix Assn., a private company that puts on the city’s annual road race. Pook means that Long Beach officials realized the city was no longer a suburb and that, in general, the classic suburb is no more.

Like communities all over Southern California, Long Beach once thought of itself mostly as a place that working people came home to. But with changes in local tax structures, such suburban communities can no longer deliver services that residents and employers demand. So small cities as well as large need a vibrant urban economy, including retail and entertainment amenities.

In Long Beach’s case, efforts to attract employers began with work on downtown renewal to encourage stores and restaurants, creating “a pleasant place to work,” says Pook. In that light, the fact that 35,000 of Long Beach’s new jobs have been created by retail establishments is not a weakness but a strength.

The retail stores are part of the support structure for Long Beach’s big economic engines--the Port of Long Beach, the McDonnell Douglas plant, the new satellite firms, Cal State Long Beach and others.

A pleasant place to work must be safe, which is why Long Beach has increased its budget for police by 20% in the last two years.

If the Long Beach pattern seems simple, even familiar, it’s because other cities have pioneered such development.

“The plan is plagiarism at its worst,” quips Pook. Or at its best. Pook studied Indianapolis, which only 15 years ago had a derelict downtown full of carved stone buildings that had once been handsome but had turned grimy and menacing. Indianapolis put in a sports arena, attracted stores and restaurants and encouraged new business. Today Indianapolis is prosperous, and St. Louis is copying its moves.

And so are Los Angeles and Anaheim, with plans for retail and restaurant complexes adjacent to existing or planned sports arenas.

Long Beach plans to market the fact that it lies between Los Angeles and Orange County.

“We can draw employees from both places, and employees who move here can find homes in our town or nearby,” says Mayor O’Neill.

Which brings up the most important lesson of Long Beach’s renewal: Its officials recognize that their city is not isolated but part of the Southern California whole. Long Beach has worked hand in hand with Los Angeles to obtain funding for the Alameda Corridor, which will enable the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles to move even more freight early in the next century.

And Long Beach participates in the New Los Angeles Marketing Partnership and other regional promotion efforts.

By such activities, Long Beach recognizes that its Port gets 97 million tons of cargo a year, up 65% in the last decade, because it is in the middle of Southern California’s enormous population complex and market. Ships load as well as unload here, taking machinery and electronics as well as cotton and beef from California and neighboring states to Asia.

But Long Beach’s economy is not out of the woods just yet. McDonnell Douglas’ merger with Boeing, which could be completed by August, will either mean that new aircraft work will come to Long Beach or that the plant will be reduced. Boeing isn’t talking about its plans, and Long Beach officials aren’t asking, for fear of disturbing the deal--which, they feel, will give the Douglas plant a firm lease on life.

And tonight’s hearing on the planned terminal, which was supposed to be a somewhat routine answering of public questions on environmental matters, could turn into a donnybrook, with protests over Port of Long Beach plans to lease the terminal to the China Ocean Shipping Co. (Cosco), a Chinese state-owned enterprise.

The protest grows out of political confusion concerning China and the Clinton administration and sheer ignorance that China has been a major shipper here for 15 years and is now the second-largest shipper, after Japan, through the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles.

Let’s hope the $750,000 that Long Beach has allocated for its marketing program over the next three years can dispel the ignorance as well as attract job-creating inquiries from the national business community.

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Revitalizing Long Beach

Long Beach officials hope a revitalization plan designed to bolster the city’s retail, trade, tourism and technology industries will help the community recover from Defense Department cutbacks and the recent recession. Some highlights of the plan:

* Trade: The Port of Long Beach spent $1.3 billion on capital projects, including the $250-million Hanjin Shipping Terminal. Officials are planning to build a new terminal on former naval base acreage and are awaiting construction of the Alameda Corridor.

* Tourism: Officials spent $111 million to expand the city’s convention center and initiated the $650-million Queensway Bay Project, which features an aquarium, a retail center and an events park. The project is expected to open next year.

* Technology: Many businesses plan to expand their facilities, including Boeing, which is building a commercial-satellite assembly plant, and Mercedes-Benz, which plans to build a 20,000-square-foot automotive testing center.

* Retail: Officials worked to renovate Los Altos Market Center, Marina Pacifica Mall and Shoreline Village and are planning to build Long Beach Towne Center and Willow Junction Center and to expand Office Depot.

Source: Long Beach Strategic Marketing Inc.