Caught in an economic twilight zone between the COVID pandemic and the completion of several new big-box apartment blocks — not to mention the sky-high SoLa neighborhood envisioned by the city and its developers for south of Laurel Street — downtown Santa Cruz is suspended in an unpredictable historical space where much of its prime commercial real estate stands empty and the population boom promised by massive residential development has yet to materialize.

I like to think that the predicted influx of new people portends a cultural renaissance that may greatly enliven our little city, which, whatever happens, will never again be the small town some of us remember. But everything depends on whether all those apartments become occupied, and if so, by whom. With limited parking available, many residents of those buildings may have to do without automobiles, which presumably means they’ll do much of their shopping and hanging out downtown. And that presumes there’ll be shops downtown to accommodate them. Rents for storefronts on Pacific Avenue will no doubt be even more astronomical than they are now, so anyone who opens a store will have to be confident there’ll be enough foot traffic to provide the cash flow to keep them in business.

At present, downtown on most weekdays when I’ve been there, even during the holiday season, has been lively but not exactly swarming with shoppers. The many boutiques, gift and import shops, restaurants and cafés (by far the busiest venues) have a lot of competition, and I imagine their margins are pretty slim, if they turn a profit at all. The gaping vacancies in some prime locations do not inspire confidence.

Surely every landlord and lessee has their own story, but a partial inventory of currently or soon to be vacant spaces includes Logos, whose airy industrial architecture has been empty for seven years; New Leaf, which recently abandoned the historic Bank of Italy building for a larger footprint on River Street; Forever 21; O’Neill Surf Shop; Rip Curl; Alderwood Pacific; Palace Art in the Santa Cruz Cinema building, and the empty store next door to the north; the retail space on the ground floor of Anton Pacific, the monstrous building at Pacific and Laurel, less than half of which is currently occupied; and at the north end of Pacific, the ground floor of the mixed-use Nanda apartments, which has unused room for a restaurant. The success of whoever leases those spaces will depend on who inhabits all those new apartments.

In my most optimistic imaginings I envision a mixture of downsizing seniors from single-family homes, faculty and staff from UCSC, students whose parents can afford the rent, downtown workers and businesspeople, artists, writers, musicians, tech wizards and other young professionals — an eclectic range of individuals and families that can afford the assortment of “affordable” and unaffordable, low and medium and higher income homes. (I don’t see how any of this new housing will accommodate the broke and unhoused.) Those residents would be the main customers of the thriving businesses below, the shops and cafés and bars and restaurants and galleries that in urban environments make for a lively commercial and cultural ecology.

But nobody knows what plot twists history will take. Will tariffs and mass deportations wreck the economy and explode inflation as many experts predict? Will bird flu mutate, as epidemiologists expect, and jump from animals to humans, and then humans to humans in our next pandemic, with attendant economic consequences? Will climate roulette land on our unlucky number and smash our infrastructure with a devastating weather event? Will our timewarped, utopian, embubbled enclave prove impregnable by national and global forces conspiring to waste the planet, or will we too be infected with the contagions plaguing so many other places? Your guess is as good as mine.

Stephen Kessler’s column appears on Saturdays.