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12 From a district identity standpoint, there is no central business “activity center” for the districts – i.e. no "there" there, meaning an attractive focal sub-district or cluster where not only the aforementioned dining and lodging facilities would be readily found, but also professional and personal services such as a copy and shipping center, a dry cleaners, hair cutters and salons - and convenient after-work and socializing facilities such as exercise gyms, yoga studios, and brew pubs, sports bars, and the like. Adjacent well-recognized retail clusters or centers can often serve this role for industrial, mixed industrial or transformed industrial districts in other cities. For example, in Emeryville, the Public Market, Powell Street Plaza, Bay Street center and their adjacent hotels serve this role for nearby Novartis Labs and other biotech firms, Pixar Studios, Clif Bar & Company and other Hollis Street businesses (Fig. 23). In addition to providing services and a "sense of place," they can help generate a real estate and activity focus, and differentiation in an otherwise large area of single use and undifferentiated value pattern - and help stimulate investment. In San Leandro, however, there is no similar cluster match for the industrial areas. Marina Square does host a Starbucks and a FedEx center at a corner, but the rest of its outlet mall format does not draw in frequent local visits. Westgate's medium and big box anchors similarly do not readily serve these purposes (though Drake's Brewery does add interest). In both cases, both shopping centers are internally focused, are essentially walled off from their side and rear surroundings, and are not walkably well-connected to their neighborhoods. Meanwhile, downtown is too distant a trip except for the districts' easternmost businesses. 2.2.5. Weak Sense of Place/Regional Image. There is little distinguishing San Leandro's industrial districts from Oakland's industrial area east of Oakland Airport, which extends continuously across the Oakland/San Leandro border. Unfortunately, very few district buildings date from the prewar era of quaint brick warehouses so memorable and beloved of San Francisco's South of Market or Portland's Pearl District - or for that matter, West Berkeley and West Oakland (Figs. 7 & 8). Overall, the industrial districts' building fabric exhibits what could be called a "regular irregularity" of mostly repetitive, box-like, horizontal cement plaster-clad or tilt-up concrete buildings at various scales for miles in any direction, with blank beige, white and pastel walls dominating most views. Buildings and sites do not exhibit much directional hierarchy in terms of identifiable fronts, backs and sides (Fig. 19). Setbacks of buildings along any side are used as parking lots, loading yards, or occasional strips of lawn and tufts of shrubs with little predictable consistency . These combine with the superblock pattern and traffic-dominated through-streets to powerfully erode the sense of place and wayfinding in the district, especially for newcomers. Properties can often vary in quality along the same street frontage, from a manicured industrial park development next to a tattered chain-link fence around a trucking yard. This creates poor investment predictability - a higher quality development with good maintenance may be surrounded by haphazardly sited and poorly maintained buildings and properties of lower quality, such that the higher quality development can never achieve the real estate value that it could on a street of developments with consistent frontage orientations, landscaping, architectural expression, and maintenance. The Columbia Cosmetics Manufacturing Inc. facility on Timothy Drive has this condition, as does the well-landscaped complex in the cul-de-sac on Bigge Street .