 |
|
Email this page
Print this page
del.icio.us
diggEl Cajon Redux?
You know it’s an urban crisis when you can drive the entire length of Main Street and not see one single place to buy a latte until you reach Washington Avenue on the east end of town.
El Cajon’s city fathers know it’s a crisis, too. After all, the hillsides around the valley are crowded with well-to-do folks with money to burn. Alas, few of them ever venture to the valley floor to cruise
El Cajon’s rag-tag old main drag. There’s nothing there they need—nothing they want to spend their money on.
Yet.
What’s happening now in the old heart of El Cajon is surgery—the installation of a pacemaker to try to bring that heartbeat up to speed. A business management district formed nearly four years ago is the chief surgeon, in partnership with the city of El Cajon, and the patient seems to be making some real progress after decades as a semi-invalid.
The idea, first pushed by the East County Regional Chamber of Commerce, is to create a cultural and entertainment zone for El Cajon, mixed with some commercial and new residential, to bring some of that money from the hills back down into town. And they think they have enough good stuff to get everybody’s attention.
First, there’s an increasingly busy East County Performing Arts Center nearby. Then there are two existing museums and two new museums in the works (including the reopening planned for famed Western artist Olaf Wieghorst’s home, now moved to Rea Street). There is also a successful cultural event called the Friendship Festival.
Based on those potential draws, it was simple logic for the 124 property owners to agree to tax themselves to try to create something good. They figure to breathe ever more life into the patient.
“Basic urban planning tells you to go with your strengths,” says Claire Carpenter, executive director of Downtown El Cajon Inc., the organization that manages the business improvement district with $366,000 a year collected from those 124 property owners. The El Cajon downtown management district includes 153 parcels of land on 25 city blocks between Interstate 8 on the north, Lexington on the south and along Main Street from El Cajon Boulevard east to Avocado—about three-quarters of a mile.
A majority of the property owners petitioned the city to assess themselves anywhere from $250 to $23,000 a year, based on a complicated formula of square footage and Main Street frontage. (Only two large property owners pay the highest amount; the highest the others pay is $6,000.) The money is to help pay for whatever it takes to make the district come alive again.
And coming alive it is.
Approval for two development projects for the northwest and southwest corners of Magnolia Avenue and Main Street should be through the city council before December. One is a retail space on Main Street with offices upstairs. The other is a street-level coffee shop (somebody else was looking for latte, too), with offices upstairs, and 28 single-family row homes at the rear of the property that will face Douglas Avenue.
Along the length of the district, a lot of the old businesses have already moved out to make way for new tenants. Property owners who fix up their buildings can get matching funds of up to $12,000 for the improvements—in other words, get some of their money back.
The city also is spending nearly $625,000 of public money to jazz up Main Street itself. Four lanes are in the process of becoming two as fancy new corners and planters are installed at the intersections. Parking along Main Street will become diagonal. That’s to make room for more pedestrians to stroll among the small shops, the nightclubs and (it is hoped) at least one high-end restaurant to replace the empty storefronts.
If you’re thinking It’s about time, El Cajon city manager Bill Garrett agrees. “A lot of people think this has been going on for years,” he says. “It hasn’t. There never has been any concerted effort to do anything with the businesses along Main Street. And these things don’t happen without the private-public partnership we have now.”
You get no argument about that from the owner of Kozak’s—the family-owned restaurant that’s stood in all its Sixties splendor on West Main since 1964, virtually unchanged. Tom Kozak—whose dad and mom opened the place—says the biggest bonus from the business improvement district so far is security. He knows a large chunk of the $6,000 a year he puts into the money pool goes for private guards who have helped reduce the panhandling, drug deals and prostitution that used to drive him and his late father to city hall to complain—frequently. He’s had less reason to complain these days.
“It’s important for people to know how much has changed here,” he says, as he sits at the counter in the restaurant that’s an institution in
El Cajon. “I’m not naive enough to think they’re going to get rid of every hooker and crack dealer, but it’s much safer now for people to be on the streets at night—and people are coming back,” he says. It’s also helped that the old plasma center, a methadone clinic and a crisis center have moved to other parts of town.
Kozak looks forward to more restaurants and clubs to keep new visitors around Main Street longer. He thinks it’ll be worth the wait. “This is an investment, and I’m not looking for a fast return,” he says. The big new Albertsons center across the street has helped some, but it’s going to be up to a lot of other developers to maintain the momentum.
Ross Nicholson is one enthusiastic newcomer to the reinvention of downtown El Cajon. The longtime San Diego developer, like a lot of others, had taken a break when the economy went south a decade ago. (He still owns a number of properties all over the county.) But the La Mesa resident is back in the development business now. Nicholson has bought two pieces of property on East Main and has an option with the city on a third—as a location for a high-end restaurant next to the East County Performing Arts Center.
“The timing is just right,” he says. “The rest of the county is too hot— the prices are too high; here, the price is right. And the people are doing a great job of making this happen. All you have to do is see the lines out the door at the Por Favor [restaurant] on Main on a Friday or Saturday night to know there’s a demand that’s not being met.”
The reason the Main Street folks think jazz is in their future is because of the East County Performing Arts Center. Jazz artists have been the most successful draws for the venue in the last couple of years. David Benoit’s annual Thanksgiving shows have been sell-outs. Boosters think the more adult “jazz crowd” hanging around Main on a Friday night will bring exactly the kind of people they want to downtown El Cajon—to make it a living, breathing place again.
The Friendship Festival is another reason for the push to make culture a centerpiece of Main Street. The annual city-funded festival in September drew 80,000 people over a weekend. Its backers say there’s an untapped market begging to be invited back downtown.
But what about the thousands of decidedly unwealthy residents who live in the hundreds of nearby apartments that crowd the valley floor? El Cajon has the highest concentration of rentals in the county.
“We’ve had an eye-opening experience going through this,” says Downtown El Cajon Inc.’s Carpenter. “It was really clear to us that if we just looked at commercial, it wasn’t enough.”
One plan for a huge 50-acre development fell apart because of a developer’s financial problems, but city hall also had heard loud protests from some of the 560 families that would have had to move from their rented homes and apartments.
Carpenter says the need to include the people who live near Main Street in the redevelopment process is so great that Downtown El Cajon Inc. (originally formed solely to run the business improvement district) is moving toward changing its nonprofit status to enable it to become involved in community development efforts like housing and job training. An added benefit: It would give property owners a more direct voice in addressing the neighborhood crime and housing issues that marketing efforts alone will not be able to disguise.
The project’s biggest boosters have no desire to attract any big retailers for Main Street. As in cities everywhere, the old downtown hit the skids when Ernie Hahn opened Parkway Plaza nearly 30 years ago. Today, the city and property owners here will let what is now Westfield’s Parkway Plaza continue to attract the “big boxes.” The center’s relatively new owners say Office Depot, Borders and Best Buy are building new stores at the mall.
Westfield has done a makeover on the place and is marketing to the teenage crowd. And that has increased sales. Sales taxes to the city are up 8 percent this quarter and nearly 10 percent for the year. Most of the city’s sales taxes come from Westfield’s tenants and car dealers around town—and sales taxes make up nearly half of the city’s $27 million general revenue funds. So the numbers are important.
More important right now to the people trying to defibrillate the old heart of El Cajon is this picture they see in their heads of an East Main Street that resonates with cool sounds, cool people and cool cash.
Not to mention the smell of espresso in the air.
Newsletter
Subscribe to our email newsletters to get updates on local news, events and opportunities in San Diego. Please enter your email address below: