As Ventura’s City Council prepares for a final vote on whether to keep Main Street closed to cars or reopen it, business owners and residents remain deeply divided. Some credit the pandemic-era “Main Street Moves” closure with creating a lively, family-friendly downtown, while others say it’s driven customers away and hurt businesses.

Michael Manville, professor and chair of urban planning at UCLA Luskin, commented in an article published by the Ventura County Star against drawing direct conclusions about the closure’s impact. He notes that downtown retail across the country has faced long-term challenges, from e-commerce to competition with big box stores, making it hard to isolate the effect of Ventura’s street closure.

Manville frames the debate as less about hard data and more about perception.

“Downtowns and businesses in downtowns have good and bad periods for all sorts of reasons,” Manville said. “Isolating the amount of good or bad luck that you can attribute to the street closure is difficult. If someone owns a business and the business is flagging a little bit and there happens to be a street closure, it makes sense to blame the street closure and see if changing it up can change your fortunes.”