Enhancing retail in Oakland California

Like DC, Oakland is also working on a retail enhancement strategy for the city. See "Oakland mulls retail for the 'row'," from the East Bay Business Times. From the article:

The nearby downtown area once boasted a myriad of retail tenants, including Emporium, I. Magnin, Liberty House, Grodin's, Roos Atkins and others. Those stores have disappeared for a variety of reasons as the city's retail fortunes declined following the deterioration of downtown from the 1970s through the mid-1990s.

City officials hope a revitalized downtown business and residential core will attract today's major retail players. The Upper Broadway Strategy portion of the Oakland Retail Enhancement Strategy offers several retail development scenarios city officials could pursue for the 10-block stretch of Broadway between Grand Avenue and Interstate 580.

Two of them call for mixed-used development combining major "comparison goods" retailers - those selling such items as clothing, toys, home merchandise and sporting goods - on the ground level with residential and/or office components on upper floors. The proposed space devoted to retail for these options ranges from 312,000 square feet to 1.1 million square feet.

Looking over the city's website, they have a bunch of interesting initiatives, including support for developing business improvement districts (DC does that too, having assisted the creation of the Adams Morgan BID, where the bigger BIDs, such as Downtown or Georgetown, did this on their own). They have focused assistance for Merchant Organizations and provide support to the Oakland Merchants Leadership Forum. With regard to the latter, they jointly published the Merchants Tool Kit, with tips and training for merchants.

Also see the city's "Retail Hot News" publication and their list of Commercial District Incentives.