San Carlos focuses on retail, downtown activation

Strengthening retail business in the downtown core could be a positive for the city, Councilmember John Dugan said.

“What I fear most downtown is losing all retail. Our goal is a vibrant downtown. One-hundred percent restaurants isn’t fully vibrant, in my view,” he said. “Anything we can do to support mom-and-pop retail, I would support, but I don’t want to lose all retail. I think what’s happening now, we could lose all retail. I do support loosening this.”

As the city moves forward, it’s important to keep local businesses looped into the conversation and stay true to its small-town roots, others said.

“I don’t think any of us want to see a big chain coming in here,” Vice Mayor Pranita Venkatesh said.

The city also has the option to potentially relax standards on personal service businesses — like nail and hair salons and barbershops — which can currently only move into locations where another personal service business previously stood.

Those restrictions are intentionally designed to encourage a variety of downtown businesses, Mayor Sara McDowell argued.

“I really don’t want to encourage the proliferation of nail and hair salons,” she said. “I think we have plenty of nail and hair salons downtown. I again question what we’re solving for. I get it’s constrained — I think it’s constrained for a reason.”

Councilmembers also weighed the possibility of instating parking maximums for off-street parking associated with new development. While the maximums could make San Carlos more attractive for transit-oriented grant funding from the Metropolitan Transportation Commission — which has set up standards for transit-oriented communities — the city won’t be moving forward without more concrete information on how those standards could specifically impact their funding.

The goal of those maximums would be to reduce the traffic that will accompany new multifamily residential and nonresidential development in the growing city and encourage individuals to use public transit or walk, staff said.

Dugan expressed concern that the city’s existing mass transit options aren’t robust enough to make parking limitations a feasible option for developers.

“The trouble there, of course, is we don’t have a good mass transit system here in San Carlos,” he said. “This is one thing I’m struggling with — we’re visiting this in the midst of our update to our downtown specific plan.”

The downside of parking maximums is that they could discourage developers, staff acknowledged, but developers building under state density bonus laws would still be able to override city-instituted parking regulations.

Still, San Carlos isn’t an inherently walkable city for community members in residential areas who need to come into town for basic necessities like groceries, councilmembers worried.

“I think this works in an urban environment like San Francisco,” Venkatesh said. “It’s hard in our city, it’s hard to walk to something convenient.”

Councilmembers also engaged in a lengthy conversation around standards for outdoor dining and retail display areas, which may be set to replace parklets put into place during the pandemic.

That could include allowing businesses to have live music with city approval, having portable heating devices, paneling to divide outdoor dining and instituting color standards for outdoor umbrellas, among a plethora of other standards.

“Our business owners want and deserve certainty. Uncertainty kills businesses,” McDowell said. “I think what we’re trying to do with this plan and suggestion is to provide more certainty to really move this forward.”