Can Long Beach Become Silicon Valley South?
Can Long Beach come out from under the shadow of the Los Angeles tech and innovation sector? f11photo / Shutterstock.com
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The mayor thinks so. But first, the Southern California city needs to emerge from the shadow of Los Angeles.
LOS ANGELES — First it was the City of Angels announcing plans to usurp its tech savvy northern neighbors. Now, the city of Long Beach is making bold proclamations about becoming the “Silicon Valley South,” a major hub for tech innovation outside the confines of Northern California.
"When I talk about the Silicon Valley concept, it's kind of a state of mind," Mayor Robert Garcia said in a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times. "It means Long Beach 3.0. It means being a city that embraces open data and embraces innovation."
Still, even as he seeks to compete with the nation’s second-largest city, Garcia can also take notes from L.A., where Mayor Eric Garcetti has been making major investments and fostering public-private partnerships in order to lure major tech companies such as Yahoo and Microsoft inside the city limits.
With the looming departure of Boeing and its signature technology standing belonging to a decidedly traditional company like Epson, it might be hard to see Long Beach on the cutting edge of start-up companies and innovation fueling both the corporate and government sectors.
However, Garcia, 37, has been in office less than a year but has already secured a $3 million Bloomberg innovation grant for Long Beach, the second-largest city in Los Angeles County after its eponymous neighbor. (Although downtown Los Angeles is about 25 miles north of Long Beach, L.A.’s San Pedro neighborhood and the Port of Los Angeles sit adjacent to the city of Long Beach.)
Garcia has made building up Long Beach’s tech credentials a cornerstone of his young mayorship. In March, his city hosted the Innovate SoCal conference. Garcia can also point to the recent success of Virgin Galactic, which recently decided to base its commercial space flight program in the city.
“There’s a lot or really exciting emerging opportunities, and we decided to tap into that market to build actually, a rocket, a launch vehicle,” Virgin Galactic President Steve Isakowitz said during a March press conference announcing the venture, according to The Press-Telegram.
“The idea of flying a spacecraft out of Long Beach Airport. I could get excited about that,” Garcia said at the time.
The Press-Telegram reported that two local start-ups had each won $50,000 no-interest loans as part of a new program supported by Innovation Fund SoCal. The group’s first round of investments went to a solar energy start up, a fitness innovation company and Revoterial, a new company innovating ways to remove toxic compounds from clothing.
Going forward, Garcia has his work cut out for him. But he also has the advantage of being in charge of a major city that hasn't already played its hand with potential major investors. Citing goals for major residential and commercial real estate expansions, Garcia notes that his city, with a population of approximately 470,000 people, is already larger than major urban centers like Miami or St. Louis.
"I've been in office eight months," he said. "It's not going to happen overnight," he told the Times.
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