Laguna Beach mayor says parking rules are a key barrier to filling downtown vacancies

Mayor Alex Granaghi discussed parking regulations and their effect on the city’s vacant storefronts during a public conversation with small-business owner Zach Cornwell and city planner Anthony Viera.

“we recently did an economic study, and we found that in Laguna Beach, we have an 88.3% vacancy rate, which none of us want,” Mayor Alex Granaghi said, citing the city study and comparing Laguna Beach’s vacancy rate to lower rates in neighboring cities.

The discussion focused on how Laguna Beach’s parking requirements — originally adopted in 1958 and substantially rewritten in February 2007 — can make it difficult or impossible to reuse small, older commercial buildings in the city’s walkable downtown and Coast Highway commercial corridors. Anthony Viera, a city planner, said the problem is common for food-service uses, which the city’s regulations treat as producing higher parking demand than many retail or office uses.

Zach Cornwell, who owns WIGS sandwich shop on Pearl Street and Coast Highway, described the approvals for his 800-square-foot shop as “pretty terrible.” He said the process took about 27 months to get final approval from the city for building permits and roughly another year for build-out — “in all all in all, it took me 3 years to open up.” Cornwell said early in his application he was told that the combined buildings might require 27 parking spaces, a figure he said would have exceeded the site’s footprint; the requirement ultimately settled at 14 spaces before staff and incentive programs reduced the obligation.

Cornwell said he had to eliminate a planned 300-square-foot patio, add a bike rack and use the property’s nearly 100-year history to qualify for a reduction through the city’s historic-preservation pathway. He also said he paid for consultants and a historian to document the building’s status in order to persuade review bodies. “We had to make some cuts on my end,” he said, including removing the patio and hiring specialists to satisfy review panels.

Viera explained that Laguna Beach’s commercial lots are often small — he cited a median lot size of about 5,300 square feet in one commercial district — and that many buildings predate the city’s first parking requirements. “If someone wants to change a use … you start to run into these issues that Zach spoke about,” Viera said, noting the city sometimes combines tools such as grandfathered parking credits, sidewalk cafe credits and the historic-preservation parking reduction to bridge gaps.

Both guests and the mayor framed the issue as a trade-off between preserving Laguna Beach’s pedestrian-oriented, historic street edge and enabling new local-serving businesses to occupy small existing storefronts. Viera said that if current parking standards were enforced without flexibility, the city’s commercial corridors would likely be redeveloped in a way that favors larger lots or structured parking — developments that would set buildings back from sidewalks and alter the downtown character residents value.

Granaghi said the council will ultimately decide whether to change the regulations and signaled the issue will be part of forthcoming public conversations. No formal policy change or council vote occurred during the conversation.

The discussion included comparisons to neighboring jurisdictions: Granaghi cited study numbers showing much lower vacancy rates in Newport Beach (2.1 percent) and Dana Point (1.6 percent), with San Clemente “around that range” (not specified). Cornwell and Viera said the practical effect of current rules is that small local entrepreneurs face high costs, long timelines and uncertainty that can deter reuse of existing commercial buildings.

City staff and the mayor emphasized that planners use several discretionary and programmatic tools to resolve individual cases but said those tools are not available to all sites. Viera noted the multiple review steps for projects such as historic-preservation reviews, Planning Commission hearings and city council consideration, which add time to the approval timeline.

Granaghi closed by thanking Cornwell and Viera for sharing their perspectives and said that the city council — not the mayor alone — will determine changes to code and procedures. The conversation did not include any formal motions, votes or council directives.