[travis bickle]

Well, lousy news on all fronts for our beloved downtown. As I may have mentioned in the past, the problem here is Westfield's vision of and for the two areas. Roseville is the beautiful, rich young maiden and downtown is the decaying old dowager. The problem is that Westfield is determined to keep them that way.

Make no mistake, every new destination store that moves to the Galleria is one that will not move downtown. There will never be two Neiman-Marcus' or two Bloomingdales or two Tiffany & Co. in the Sacramento region.

Although there is no overriding need for suburbanites to come downtown for almost any reason - that's why they call it destination retail. You must build it before they can come. But residential usually precedes successful retail and if you can get help from tourists - so much the better. There is absolutely no reason for tourists to see Roseville, but obviously, tourism alone can't sustain the kind of retail we're talking about - but it undoubtedly helps.

That's what makes high-end residential downtown so essential - and what makes any failure so crushing. Downtown Sacramento is the only real tourist anchor in the region and if we can combine that with high-end housing we can expect success for concomitant retail.

But Westfield doesn't see it that way. The city needs to force Westfield's hand and soon. Westfield needs to be replaced with a firm with the right vision for downtown as the regional hub for culture and commerce. Until Westfield's out, we'll see no real improvement to DTP and continued destination retail to Roseville alone.