A week ago, Paleto Boulevard was a quiet main street at the top of the state: a bank, a diner, a few bars and a lot of people passing through on their way somewhere else. This weekend it looks like a different town.
Businesses that used to trade in Los Santos are moving north in numbers. Empty shopfronts that had stood dark for years have new owners, new stock and their lights on. Buildings that were plastered with “bank owned” notices are open again. On one short stretch of the boulevard, Weazel News counted a new florist, a new bar and diner and a nightclub reopening under new ownership, all within walking distance of each other.
The reason is simple. The customers are here. Tens of thousands of evacuees are living in Paleto Bay’s motels, spare rooms and car parks, and as Weazel News revealed this morning, the people rebuilding Los Santos believe it will take at least a year before the city is back on its feet. For a business owner with rent to pay and staff to keep, a year is a long time to sit and wait.
Flowers on the bakery corner
On the corner where the faded “Golden Buns Bakery” lettering still runs across the wall, there are flowers again. Krokus Flowers has taken over the old corner shop, and its awning is now lined end to end with window boxes of orange, pink and white blooms. The planters under the windows match.
It is a strange sight in a town full of people who lost their homes, and that is rather the point, one regular passer-by told us. “Everybody up here is living out of a bag,” said a woman who has been staying in a motel on the Great Ocean Highway since Friday. “You walk past that corner and it looks like somebody decided things were going to be alright. I didn’t know I needed that.”
Florists have not been short of work. There are birthdays and anniversaries that did not stop because of an earthquake, and, with the Los Santos Fire Department confirming at least 700 dead, there are funerals too.
A diner next to the hospital
Further along the boulevard, the old Bay Bar building, with its big painted sign and red neon, has a new name on the door: The Dispatch Bar & Diner.
Its position could hardly be better. Paleto Medical Center is next door, and since the evacuation the medical centre has been carrying far more than a small town’s share of patients, families and staff. Nurses coming off long shifts, relatives waiting for news and ambulance crews between calls all need somewhere to sit down, eat and drink that is not a motel room.
“There was nowhere to go,” said a nurse from the medical centre, who asked not to be named because staff have been told not to speak to the press. “You finish a twelve-hour shift and it’s a vending machine or a drive. Now it’s thirty seconds away. That matters more than people think.”
Nightlife moves north, curfew and all
At 1782 Paleto Blvd, the Hen House, the town’s bar and nightclub, has a new owner and its doors open again. The foreclosure posters are still peeling off the timber wall outside, the only sign of how long the building sat empty.
Los Santos nightlife has always been about Vinewood and Del Perro. With both behind checkpoints, Paleto Bay is suddenly the only real night out in the north of the state, and club owners who used to fight over the same few blocks in the city are now looking at shopfronts on the same main street.
They are working around one very large problem. The State’s 22:00 to 06:00 curfew still applies in Paleto Bay, which means last orders come early and the dancing starts when it is still light. Bar staff told Weazel News that evenings are shifting earlier: after-work drinks at five, the busiest hours between seven and nine, and everybody out of the door and heading home before the curfew starts at ten.
Why they are not waiting for Los Santos
The Preservation Teams have said residents may be able to return to parts of Los Santos from Thursday, with free buses leaving Paleto Bay at 10am. But reopening is not rebuilding. Weazel News’ investigation found that thousands of buildings in the city are unsafe to enter, that the power, water and gas in the east will take months to restore, and that the State has frozen all disaster aid until at least the second quarter of next year.
“If your shop is in La Mesa or Mirror Park, you are not trading in October. You may not be trading next summer,” said Desmond Fairweather, who prices building projects across Los Santos and spoke to Weazel News for that investigation. “A business can survive a bad month. It cannot survive a year with no customers. The ones who move early get the good premises. The ones who wait get what is left.”
For businesses on the west side and Downtown, the calculation is different. Many expect to go back. But even they are opening a second front in Paleto Bay, because this is where their customers are living right now, and nobody knows how many of those customers will ever go back.
Good news for Paleto, mostly
Not everybody who has lived in Paleto Bay for decades is celebrating. Parking on the boulevard is gone, the queue at the bank is out of the door and the motels are full. The newcomers, at least, seem to be settling in: in yesterday’s Weazel News poll asking whether life in Paleto is “actually that bad”, eight in ten readers who voted said Paleto is home now and they are staying.
“I’ve lived on this street thirty-one years,” said one resident, sitting outside the post office. “Quiet was the whole reason. Now there’s a nightclub at the end of the road and a queue for coffee. I’m not complaining. Well, I’m complaining a bit.” He laughed. “The kids have got jobs, though. My grandson’s working behind a bar. That didn’t happen before.”
Letting agents say empty commercial units on and around the boulevard are being snapped up within days, often by owners who have never set foot in them, and that rents are climbing with them. Paleto’s own small businesses, from the gas stations to the diner and the hardware store, report the busiest week anybody can remember.
What happens when Los Santos comes back
The big question is whether any of this lasts. When Los Santos does come back, some of these businesses will go home. Others may decide that a town with lower rents, a captive crowd and a sea view is not a bad place to stay.
For now, on a sunny afternoon on Paleto Boulevard, there are flowers on the bakery corner, food and drink next to the hospital and music behind the Hen House doors. For a town that spent a week absorbing a city’s worth of grief, it is the first thing in a while that looks like life going on.
Weazel News will keep following Paleto Bay’s new businesses. If you have opened, moved or reopened a business in the north, send us a tip.
