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> Not surprising, I see so many downtown areas still closed in the SJ area. It depends. The Mexican restaurants did really well. (They went to outside seatin
by anamax 5y ago
> Not surprising, I see so many downtown areas still closed in the SJ area.
It depends. The Mexican restaurants did really well. (They went to outside seating in tents that was much larger than what they had before and are packed.)
The Asian restaurants, not so much.
It might be a downtown thing more than an Asian/Mexican thing.
San Jose has spent hundreds of millions of dollars over the decades trying to create a downtown that is barely self-sustaining during the best of times. It was limping (which is about as good as it gets) before Covid and then, wham.
I suspect that downtown SJ redevelopment actually a pay-off to developers.
- happycube 5y agoYeah, I lived there in the 90's and visited occasionally after and it was struggling then - they opened up a big outdoor mall with a large movie theater... that failed. It was much easier to build a fake downtown a few miles out (Santana Row) than gentrify^Wdevelop the real one into something successful. And in the noughts it had a Borders while pretty much all that was left of the mall was office space and a Waldenbooks, IIRC...
- anamax 5y agoSan Jose's malls are far more successful than its downtown. (San Jose has a range of malls, from high-end to strip malls with actual strippers.) I don't know whether it's the business selection (a many of the customers will be San Jose state students), the crappy parking (which means that much of the rest of the customers are the relatively few not-students who live downtown and the lunch crowd, which are relatively few because there aren't that many jobs downtown), or what, but downtown SJ is never going to be what the redevelopment district has 100s of millions to try to make. However, I am confident that they'll spend even more in the decades to come.
- Apocryphon 5y agoFor whatever reason, it's one of the things that makes San Jose far more common to Los Angeles and general SoCal urban topography, compared to San Francisco.
- WWLink 5y agoI think going along the lines here: The rent prices for commercial properties are absurd. For business loan reasons, most real estate firms would rather leave lots of commercial property empty, than to rent it "below market value". I don't know that this video explains it all (no time to watch right now), but I did watch something similar in the past that did. https://www.reddit.com/r/Burryology/comments/oiiqif/videographer_louis_rossmann_documents_how_cmbs/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Burryology/comments/oiiqif/videogra... So if you want to start a small direct-to-consumer business, just getting a space to perform the business may be so expensive it's not profitable.