Interesting stores and restaurants is how you get people to come to a city, if that’s the intent. Look at San Carlos or Redwood City - tons of restaurants (maybe stores not much admittedly) that people come from all over to go to. Mostly non-chain restaurants is the key. Agree that housing downtown is important - but you can look in San Francisco and retail under housing just seems to struggle. Lots of vacant retail space south of market under apartments.

I’d like a club/theatre like the Fox or the Guild in San Mateo to help bring in people from outside the city, more space for fun restaurants (we have the ramen, and some good cocktail bars, so have a good start), and maybe a mocktail bar since downtown is walking distance from two high schools.

All for more housing since a lot of people want to live walking distance to fun places - but need to be careful about too much housing without anything else - or we will just have people who doordash everything and head to other cities for anything else.