My thoughts on Retail on the Peninsula

There has been a lot of local feedback as to the current problems with retailers on the Peninsula. There are numerous vacancies in both the Peninsula Center as well as the Avenue of the Peninsula shopping mall. Developers have never understood that they should be targeting value oriented retailers, not high end stores on the Peninsula. When I first moved here from Manhattan Beach 28 years ago, I remember then people referring to the Peninsula as “hamburger hill”, meaning that the residents tended to be frugal, with many of them having bought their homes in the 1960’s or ’70’s when prices were reasonable. Although many local home buyers have paid very high prices for their homes in the last 20 years, they tend to stretch their budgets to buy in to the area and our excellent schools, and do not spend lavishly on clothing, etc.

The Palos Verdes Peninsula Chamber of Commerce has been leading a campaign to shop local, which I totally agree with. If we want good retailers to locate here, we need to support them. A lot of this responsibility, however, falls onto the owners of the local shopping centers and malls to recruit the right kinds of tenants who will be successful on the Hill.