Getting the ‘Triangle’ all squared away

Regarding the Pilot’s question about what can be done to improve

business at Triangle Square, the short answer to the question is:

Nothing. At least that’s the case unless we get some leaders in this

city who understand demographics and retail design and a few other

factors, and who can think bigger thoughts than how to fix a pothole

here and there.

Triangle Square is an example of what happens when you have a

group of know-nothings and people with narrow agendas trying to

decide how to redevelop an area.

This is important to remember, because the city of Costa Mesa is

doing the same thing all over again with plans to fix the broken

Westside.

Here, in a nutshell, is what’s wrong with Triangle Square from a

retail standpoint and what can be done in a big-vision sense:

1. It is designed wrong. Supermarkets don’t work underground in

our climate, and people prefer not to park in a dark, dank,

underground, claustrophobic garage. Notwithstanding this, however, if

some major changes are made to the area outside Triangle Square,

these inherent flaws might be outweighed, and it might be saved as a

retail location.

2. Because the Costa Mesa (55) Freeway dumps massive beach-bound

traffic near Triangle Square, local customers try to avoid the area.

The solution to this problem is to dig the 55 trench all the way down

to 15th Street and dump the nonlocal traffic there. Then, cap over

the trench and make the whole downtown area a pedestrian-friendly

shopping/arts area with Triangle Square as the centerpiece. At

present, Triangle Square has a foreboding castle look and feel to it.

It needs to have an open and breezy look and feel to work with a

capped-over trench.

3. Move forward with building expensive homes to replace some of

the industrial buildings on the Westside bluffs. This will increase

the income demographic in the main trade area of Triangle Square and

will attract more merchants. This is also the reason that I, alone,

of most of the so-called Westside improvers, supported 1901 Newport.

It will bring people to the area who can walk to the stores.

If the above steps aren’t taken, Triangle Square will be doomed as

a retail location, and the city should seriously consider taking it

over and turning it into a new City Hall. As an alternative, Triangle

Square could be taken over by a college and turned into classrooms.

The same know-nothing planning that was behind the development of

Triangle Square was once again in play in the Community Redevelopment

Action Committee and Westside Revitalization Oversight Committee --

committees empowered by the city of Costa Mesa to come up with plans

to fix the Westside.

What came out of this dynamic is an oversight committee report

that is now in the hands of the Redevelopment Agency of the city (the

City Council wearing different hats) that is mostly about making some

minor changes to the Westside instead of finally correcting the major

problem, which is that there is simply too much industrial zoning to

ever allow the demographics to rise and make the area nice.

The city of Costa Mesa set out to design a horse by consensus and

ended up with a camel called Triangle Square, and it’s about to do

the same thing with the Westside.

Unless we have a sea change in the thinking in this city, a couple

of years from now, the Pilot will be asking what went wrong with the

plans to fix the Westside, just as it is now asking what went wrong

with Triangle Square.

M. H. MILLARD

Costa Mesa