Toyota’s exit from Torrance was taste of things to come for Long Beach

Long Beach’s loss of the long-time sponsor of its signature annual sporting event, the Toyota Grand Prix, was foreshadowed by the announcement in 2014 that the company intended to move its North American headquarters from Torrance to Texas by the end of 2017, taking about 3,000 highly paid jobs with it.

Yet while the exit of a multinational corporation’s national office was a blow to the city’s prestige, it has scarcely been noticed in Torrance and the South Bay.

Related: Toyota pulls its sponsorship of Long Beach Grand Prix

Eric Tsao, the city’s finance director, observed that sales taxes, hotel room taxes and other revenues have all grown since Toyota’s employees gradually left Southern California through last fall.

“To the city of Torrance, the revenue loss from Toyota’s departure wasn’t really material,” he said. “We would rather have them here than not – that’s just common sense – but, I do not think materially it has affected our revenue streams.

“The South Bay area is pretty economically diverse,” Tsao added, “so we’re not relying on any one company.”

Related: Search for new Grand Prix sponsor under way

That’s not to say there weren’t individual losers when Toyota pulled up stakes.

There were intangibles such as the loss of Toyota sponsorship of community events. But the company’s name remains on the state of the art Toyota Sports Complex, which has heavily used artificial soccer fields

At least two pricey Torrance restaurants that relied on business lunches, company banquets and the special occasion dinners for birthdays and other family celebrations Toyota employees marked, lost as much as a quarter of their annual revenues.

A long-time pre-school was forced to close its doors because many of its pupils were the children of Toyota employees.

And while Tsao said he heard, anecdotally, that some hotels lost business travelers, that was about it in terms of economic losses.

Torrance is not, after all, a city that relied on one major employer.

Toyota employees were scattered throughout Southern California – Torrance’s daytime weekday population swells significantly from the influx of commuters – so the economic loss to the city was tempered considerably.

In fact, it might be more instructive to look at what didn’t happen in the wake of Toyota’s exit.

The real estate market didn’t crash locally because former Torrance workers dumped their homes; prices kept steadily rising.

The unemployment rate didn’t suddenly peak with hordes of desperate workers seeking any job they could; jobless rates locally have been some of the lowest in years as they have across the nation.

And no restaurants closed their doors for good, while blaming the closure on the loss of Torrance workers.

In fact, sales tax revenues during fiscal year 2017-2018 rose by 5.8 percent driven by the openings of new stores at Del Amo Fashion Center. The massive mall, among the nation’s largest, received a long-overdue $300 million renovation that has completely changed its formerly dowdy character into a sleek, high-end fashion destination, led by a new state of the art Nordstrom the city poached from neighboring Redondo Beach.

Even during fiscal year 2016-2017, when Toyota workers were leaving in droves, sales tax revenues still rose with department store sales more than offsetting a decline in car sales, which itself was part of national trend that had nothing to do with Toyota.

In fact, some observers believed that in a sense Torrance’s exit translated into exactly the opposite for the community and rest of the South Bay.

“I don’t see it as being the downfall of the South Bay,” said Eric Lastition, executive vice president for commercial real estate firm Colliers International said in 2014, just after the Toyota announcement. “I look at it as an opportunity for new companies to come in and fill the void.”

Its sprawling 130-acre headquarters – Toyota’s national distribution staff with about 100 workers remains on the campus, incidentally – was sold last year giving companies starved of space a new option to do exactly as Lastition suggested.

The developer of the campus is the same firm that redeveloped the former McDonnell Douglas-Boeing site north of Long Beach Airport.

Now dubbed Douglas Park, the 250-acre business park is the new home of corporate headquarters, retail outlets and hotels.

“That’s the kind of model we like,” Peter Rooney, president of Sares-Regis’ commercial development division told the Southern California News Group. “We’re hoping to bring a lot of new jobs and companies to the (Torrance) site.

“Sares-Regis Group is excited about partnering with the city of Torrance to reposition this world-class property and bring new quality companies to Torrance,” he added. “This is an ideal location for businesses looking to expand or relocate to the South Bay.”