Brein Clements, co-owner and head chef at Restaurant Omakase, has watched the same scene repeatedly since he opened the restaurant in downtown Riverside in July.

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Photo By Dan Elliott

Developer Alan Mruvka stands in front of one of the homes that will be removed to make room for a new downtown Riverside residential and office complex.

"People finish their meal, they go straight to their cars and drive off," said Clements, who operates the restaurant - a combination of Japanese and French cuisine - near The Mission Inn along with his wife Roryann. "They don't stay and walk around the city, because there really isn't that much to see. It gets frustrating."

But that may change: the City Council Feb. 20 approved a $50 million residential-retail project called m solè, pronounced "em-so-lay," which will be built by Los Angeles developer Alan Mruvka.

M solè - the m stands for Mruvka, solè means sun - will be built on 2.5 acres bounded by Market, First and Second streets and Fairmount Boulevard.

Mruvka envisions 91 condominiums, 18 live-work units with space for office or retail and nearly 7,000 square feet of retail space for ice cream stores, juice bars and dry cleaners. No retail tenants have been signed.

The homes will range from 750 to 2,800 square feet. Prices will begin at $350,000 and reach $780,000. The residential component will include a pool, fitness center, clubhouse, wine cellar, 24-hour concierge service and a 300-space parking garage.

Mruvka, who is building m solè with his own money, needs to raze several industrial buildings to make room for his project; some historical homes on the site will be restored and moved to other locations.

Construction began Feb. 22 on 10 of the live-work units. Work on the rest of the project, both residential and retail, is expected to start in about six months.

M solè will be finished during the summer of 2009.

"A lot of retailers don't like to go first, but this will show them what a strong market downtown Riverside is," Mruvka said. "Once the first one succeeds then a lot of retailers will want to come in."

A city-changing project

"This is the kind of project that will change all of downtown Riverside," Mruvka said. "The site is the entryway to downtown Riverside, and it's going to be a statement when people get off the freeway. I don't think you could do this anywhere else in the Inland Empire. Riverside is the only city out here with the kind of downtown where this would work."

"This is going to be a fantastic project for the city of Riverside," said Cindy Roth president of the Greater Riverside Chambers of Commerce. "You see this happening all over, and it should be happening in Riverside. The city has enough of a professional population to make it work."

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Photo By Dan Elliott

Alan Mruvka will remove abandoned offices to make room for a residential and office complex.

M solè should also act as a magnet, bringing more restaurants, retail and professional firms to downtown Riverside, Roth said.

But other cities are trying to bring residential-retail to their downtowns. Ontario, Rancho Cucamonga and San Bernardino are either building, or have announced plans to build, projects similar to M solè.

That approach has been common for years on the East Coast, but it's only been tried in the greater Los Angeles area during the past five years or so, notably at the Third Street Promenade development in Santa Monica and at Paseo Colorado in Pasadena.

Cities like residential-retail in their downtowns because it puts people close to work, which reduces traffic and boosts local business.

Developers like the concept because it appeals to a wide demographic, from young single professionals to young couples without children to empty nesters.

"If you have a lot of amenities in a downtown that people can walk to, then it has a chance of working," said Joel Kotkin, an author and lecturer who has written extensively on urban planning issues.

"But there isn't that much in downtown Riverside, except for the Mission Inn and a few stores, so I'm not sure. But there are a lot of ways you can spruce up downtown Riverside."

Cities should welcome projects like m solè if they believe such a development can succeed, said Kotkin, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, a non-partisan public policy institute in Washington, D.C.

Municipalities should be reluctant to subsidize them, he said.

"I'm all for a little bit of capitalist risk-taking," Kotkin said. "If a developer wants to spend his money, that's fine with me. Why not? Just don't spend any of my money."

Ideal locale

But Redlands economist John Husing believes some version of downtown residential-retail projects will work in just about any city.

"The basic idea is to put people downtown so that you secure the area's economic base," Husing said.

"That way your downtown has a market other than tourists. This is also a good way to deal with decaying cities."

Husing conducted a study for Riverside last year that recommended the city try to bring a major retail-residential project to the Mission Inn district.

"Riverside is probably the best place to do this of anywhere in the Inland Empire," he said.