After the news that Target intended to open a store in October 2018 flashed around Santa Barbara last week, jubilation soon turned to questions: Why is it at the Galleria at State and La Cumbre and not downtown? Who told them it’d be finished so quickly? Where will the expected hordes park? It’s going to be how small?
Planning Commissioner Jay Higgins — also a former City Council candidate — is a planner, both professionally and voluntarily. He questioned why the city wasn’t being more transparent on whether they’d tried to entice Target to the empty Macy’s and why they were only hearing fourth-hand about Target’s qualms with downtown or La Cumbre’s Sears building. “What about shopping carts that stop?” he asked. “How do they have off-site parking?”
The stores in Target’s development portfolio currently range in size from 20,000 to 60,000 square feet in confined urban spaces from Los Angeles’ Koreatown to Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen. The Galleria spot is 34,000 square feet, tiny compared to the stores in Ventura and Oxnard, which have retail floors of 220,000 and 150,000 square feet, respectively. “In a location like Herald Square,” explained Erin Conroy, a spokesperson for the company, “a 120,000-square-foot store doesn’t make a lot of sense.” The company was interested in store growth and “reaching new guests,” said Conroy, expanding its presence rather than responding to the competition of online sales.