City Took Away Housing That Would Have Supported CVS

Blighted CVS – Thank City Hall’s Leading Lights from Twenty Years Ago

By John Fricke

Once upon a time, there was a small town with a not so nice street.  To protect the innocent, let’s call this town, Pottersville.  

The not-so-nice street was called San Pablo Avenue, and on one of its blocks there were a number of contiguous properties that were occupied by a grimy Kentucky Fried Chicken, a greasy spoon called, Broom Bush Café, some residential units, and a moribund paint store.  The Best and the Brightest down at City Hall decided that this block of San Pablo Avenue needed to be destroyed to save it.  

Having designated virtually all of Pottersville as a redevelopment zone, City Hall’s big thinkers came up with a plan: they demanded that the private property owners sell their parcels of land to the city government (at a generous price).  The city government would consolidate the contiguous parcels, raze everything, and turn the whole thing over to a developer who would create something better: retail shops that fronted on San Pablo, surface parking, and townhouses in the back. 

To the neighbors living nearby, including this correspondent, the plan seemed like not a bad idea.  Who wouldn’t mind getting rid of the decades-old KFC with its rotating bucket on a pole (which had long since stopped rotating).  The Broom Brush Café had been there for some time, but the area needed more housing.  The paint store was bumping along, but who could argue with progress?  A profit-oriented developer was on the case.  What could go wrong?

City Hall’s alchemists held community meetings, displayed renderings of the future “Promenade”.  No longer would the parking spaces front on San Pablo, they said.  The new businesses would have entrances that would be right on the street, thereby ‘activating’ the street with pedestrians.  The nearby neighbors dreamed of neighborhood-serving retail that they could walk to.  City Hall’s bright lights said new retail space would feature tall ceilings, a smart facade, not another big-box retail monstrosity.  (Never mind that Pottersville’s big box nirvana was brought to you by the same usual suspects. ‘Meet the new boss . . .’)

The existing property owners took their payouts and left.  (Broom Bush Café relocated to Berkeley.)  But even before construction began, the promises started to go south.  The housing would not be built right away, first the retail, they said.  The Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise cut a separate deal with City Hall – it would reopen at a new location right down the street.  And the neighborhood-serving retail was merely a bait-and-switch.  Even though City Hall now owned the land, it made no demands on the developer in terms of what types of businesses would be selected as tenants.  

Then, the developer rolled out the hit parade of proposed future tenants: IHOP, Panda Express, Longs (which demanded a liquor license), Hawaiian BBQ, and Quizno’s Subs.  

Neighbors and I organized a full-throated opposition.  We attended numerous city council meetings, we wore stickers (“Mom and Pop, not IHOP”).  I argued that the city was within its legal right to exercise final approval over tenants.  The city attorney took a different legal position, namely, that the city council had given away the store to the developer, and needed to give away more.

The know-it-all experts in city hall tried to explain – while talking slowly and not using any big words – that the developer had incurred large costs in constructing the new retail space, and that he needed to charge high rents to recoup his investment – only the national fast-food chains were in a position to pay at that rate.  Translation: we should feel the developer’s pain.  

Had my second-grade teacher, Mrs. McGuinness, been on the scene, she would have asked all the miscreants down at city hall to get out a piece of paper and a pencil, and write, twenty times, First Do No Harm.  

Although we were unable to close the barn door on IHOP, over the course of several city council meetings, we pressured the city council to find neighborhood-serving retail for the remaining retail space that was slated for Panda Express.  When Arizmendi expressed initial interest, we organized a community meeting to court the Arizmendi people (mainly, Jacques Kaswan) who had reservations about San Pablo Avenue.  We then persuaded the city council to subsidize the rent for five years so that Arizmendi could get on its feet.  

And what about the townhouses? Pixar cast a roving eye across its vast sea of surface parking spaces, and fixed its gaze upon the land slated for the townhouses.  When Pixar came calling, City Hall quickly struck a deal to ditch the townhouses and sell the land to Pixar.  Was Pixar planning to use the land to house some of its employees?  Not.  Pixar paved it over and striped more surface parking spaces for its car commuters.  The Pixar superblock got even bigger.  

Why did CVS close last fall?  Was it done in by the pandemic?  By the steady stream of shoplifters?  By the ‘challenges’ associated with San Pablo Avenue?  

CVS’s demise was foreordained over twenty years ago when the rocket scientists down at City Hall napalmed the block and then caved to their handpicked developer and to Pixar.  The one success story, Arizmendi, arose despite city hall’s genuflection to the developer, Pixar, and fast food nation.  

So, dear reader, the next time you walk along the Promenade, averting your eyes from the blighted black hole that was once CVS, don’t reach into your pocket looking for Zuzu’s petals.  They disappeared over twenty years ago when the brainiacs down at City Hall decided that they knew best.  

John Fricke is a sometimes Tattler contributor, longtime Emeryville resident, father of three, husband, lawyer, and former member of the Emeryville City Council.  He is currently spending a year living in Berlin.

Emeryville's Development Policy in Spray Paint

Here's What Happens When City Hall Fails to Protect Resident's Interests

Emeryville residents living in the San Pablo Avenue corridor, dismayed at the deterioration of their neighborhood by vandals who have been targeting the abandoned CVS Pharmacy building are now being told the City of Emeryville is powerless to stop it.  Graffiti is festooning the facades, vegetation is collapsing down onto the sidewalk and plywood panels have been ripped down.  The debasement of the neighborhood comes despite all the taxpayer money spent to improve and beautify the San Pablo streetscape because of a lack of will to hold businesses and developers to account by the City of Emeryville.

CVS quit Emeryville and closed down the business last September, leaving the building unattended and the City of Emeryville has no legally binding agreement from the Rhode Island based corporation to keep the property in decent shape upon their departure.  Emeryville’s Community Development Director Charley Bryant told the Tattler in December he is aware of the blight conditions at CVS but he is powerless to stop it, “We’re working with them” he has repeated since then, apparently hoping the corporate pharmacy giant will feel sorry for us and voluntarily clean up their property.  

City Hall is powerless because there is no one there that would rise up to hold a developer to account when approval is being sought for a proposed development.  A legally binding contract with teeth would hold developers to keep their property up to community standards after a client or the development corporation itself abandons the building.  But that would be considered a government constraint on a developer, something this city has not been comfortable with. 

Eventually, the property will be sold and some new developer will probably tear down the blighted monstrosity but until then, Emeryville residents will have to get used to their neighborhood brought low by a City Hall that works in the interest of business more than residents.  It's shown in Emeryville's development policy written in spray paint.

Vegetation is collapsing onto the sidewalk: ADA violation.

A look inside Emeryville's CVS Pharmacy building  
Editorial: It's warm and dry in here while outside people without homes huddle in the wet and cold. If developers abandon buildings and refuse to keep them up, Emeryville should take them over by eminent domain and provide a safe warm dry place for people without homes.

Emeryville: Where a Door is Not a Door

Door  \ dȯr \   noun

1: A hinged or otherwise movable barrier that allows ingress into and egress from an enclosure.

Emeryville Door \ ˈem-rē vil  dȯr \  noun

1: A barrier resembling a door that blocks ingress into and egress from an enclosure.

News Analysis

There’s a corporate entity in Emeryville more powerful than the City of Emeryville and the Alameda County Fire Department combined.  This is a nation-wide corporation with a local Emeryville profit center address that has the power to redefine English words in order to retroactively make signed contracts work to their benefit.  They even have the power to unilaterally re-write the fire code to make it align with their desires to increase profits (for more than 72 fiscal quarters so far).  What corporation is this?  It's CVS Pharmacy, America's ubiquitous and seemingly innocuous strip mall chain fixture.  In the world of corporate malfeasance, CVS ranks with the best of them; from illegally peddling oxycontin, to bribery of elected officials, to wholesale customer medical record HIPAA violations, CVS is a classic corporate bad actor.  

Here at their Emeryville unit, the malfeasance is more pedestrian, so to speak.  Here, it’s all about their fire exit doors.  CVS doesn’t like the doors, so they’re not allowing it, regardless of their contractual agreement with the City of Emeryville’s Planning Department or the dictates of the California Fire Code and its enforcers at the Alameda County Fire Department.  Full stop.

Permanently Locked Fire Exit Doors
On one side, a sign says "Emergency Exit"
and the other side says "Bitch".
One was put up by the Alameda County Fire Department,
the other possibly by a graffiti artist.  Or maybe
both signs were placed by the Fire Department.  

Back in 2002, when the building at 4349 San Pablo Avenue was built, the previous owner, the now defunct Longs Drugs (subsumed by CVS in 2008), agreed to place doors on the sidewalk to assuage an Emeryville General Plan dictate that requires retail businesses on that street to follow an urban design guideline meant to activate the pedestrian sidewalks.  But Longs and the new masters, CVS, prefer a suburban strip mall model for their stores with a parking lot out front and doors there.  That model ran headlong into the General Plan with its urban model.  So the pharmacy simply signed the agreement and immediately proceeded to close off the doors, rendering them inoperable.  Customers use the parking lot doors, making the Emeryville unit in the style of their preferred strip mall suburban model despite initial objections from Emeryville.  

Complaints against the CVS doors over the years have gotten nowhere because the corporate giant simply ignores pleas from the City of Emeryville and orders from the Alameda County Fire Department.  Charlie Bryant, the Planning Director of the City of Emeryville has since given up asking CVS to honor their agreement and he now fully takes the position that the doors need not be operational for the corporation to be in compliance.  Mr Bryant has not seen fit to answer to the definition of the common English word “door” that is explicit in its insistence that a person be able to pass through one for it to qualify.  Resemblance to a door is good enough.

  

Over at the Alameda County Fire Department, they’re not so blatant in siding with CVS, rather they simply aren’t enforcing the ongoing fire code violation.  Citizen complaint driven rather than fire concern driven,  ACFD keeps issuing orders to keep the doors open but CVS keeps ignoring the orders.  Interestingly, a while back, the ACFD put up an “Emergency Exit” sign on the outside to keep homeless people from blocking the doors.  But inside, the exit is still blocked by CVS with merchandise and a permanently closed heavy steel roll down door.

These are just a couple of doors.  Why is our government so flummoxed by this?  Why can’t this easy problem just be taken care of?  Is our government really this hapless?  These doors, meant to enliven the San Pablo Avenue sidewalk and to keep people safe in the event of a fire, can be seen as a metaphor for the general state of societal dysfunction over the last couple of decades where governance over the public commons has increasingly played deference to private corporations that are untouchable in their monarchal power.  This corporation doesn’t want these doors so they’re not going to open them.  Eighteen years in, that’s obviously the end of the discussion.  Still, we like to imagine a bygone time when the Alameda County Fire Department worked to keep the public safe from fire and when the City of Emeryville, likewise burdened with the people’s business, were unconcerned with a private corporation’s pecuniary interests regardless how many billions in assets it might have.

The latest order from the Alameda County Fire Department.
Every so often the Emeryville CVS Pharmacy gets one of these orders. 
The corporation promptly puts them in 'File 13' and goes about its business.
Maybe the Fire Department thinks the scary red ink is helping.

Emeryville Bad Neighbor: CVS Pharmacy

At the Tattler's new feature, Emeryville Bad Neighbor, we'll focus on the corporate and business miscreants in our midst; be they greedsters, fraudsters or churlish philistines, who make our town just a little worse for everyone.

CVS Pharmacy: Bad Neighbor (again)

CVS makes the Tattler's Bad Neighbor list again.  The corporate giant spent yesterday morning telling customers that they were forced to close their doors on their San  Pablo Avenue store because of "systems failures".  The real reason turned out to be the Alameda County Department of Environmental Health forced them to shut down for a "severe violation" involving an infestation with rodents.
The store manager stood in front, blocking the red sign posted by the Health Department as he told customers to please return in the afternoon because the store was experiencing "systems failures".  When we asked about the nature of the systems failures, we were told again simply "systems failures" were responsible and everything is fine.

After it was discovered that Alameda County shut down the store, we again confronted the manager; why is he trying to deceive the public as to the nature of the closure we asked.  The manager told us, "We're trying not to unnecessarily scare our customers".

This is the second time CVS has received the Tattler's Emeryville Bad Neighbor distinction. Last summer it was disclosed that CVS was continually illegally blocking and locking their front door onto the San Pablo side walk, a serious fire safety violation.

CVS Pharmacy: Emeryville's Bad Neighbor of the Week

Here's the Real Reason for CVS's Closure:
Rodents
A red tag means "severe violations 
of codes".  According to
Alameda County, one or more 
major violations exist.

Oh Those Darn "Systems Failures"
Here's the sign attached to the front
door of CVS Pharmacy yesterday...
no need to worry, it's just
some systems failures.