Want to know what is stopping Manteca from getting the downtown everyone says they want?
Go down and take a look at 108 Sycamore Avenue.
Would you invest money in open a business a few doors down from this building? Some might. But here’s the clincher: Do you think families would want their kids hanging around such a place?
I get it. The fire approaching 18 months ago was not the property owner’s fault. The homeless and others had broken into the two-story boarded up complex with stores on the bottom floor and efficiency apartments on the second floor and turned it into a flophouse while they trashed the place.
Fortunately the fire was detected soon enough and the Manteca Fire Department’s quick professional response prevented a block’s worth of urban renewal via flame. In case no one besides the fire department hasn’t noticed, the buildings in the 100 and 200 blocks of West Yosemite Avenue abut each other and were built in eras when fire wall standards were lagging.
And if we haven’t figured out what tends to happen to vacant buildings — four empty buildings on Moffat, the old Sunnyvalley Meats plant, and the former car sales lot office on Yosmeite at Lincoln — the homeless break into them and have a nasty tendency to start fires.
But it’s not the fire danger that’s the challenge for downtown. It’s what else happens to vacant buildings that aren’t maintained. The building at 108 Sycamore Avenue is a prime example. It is a magnet for the homeless with the added touch of the boarded windows and doors that apparently were once secured according to city code but the homeless have since modified to make them look trashy.
They do such nice things such as scrawl “smoke crack” on windows they remove the boards from as well as to spread joy with scrawlings such as “f--- you.”
This is inexcusable anywhere. But what makes it worse is it is within two blocks of Yosemite Avenue and Main Street — the heart of The Family City.
It’s time for a family intervention.
One has to be in complete denial to believe the boarded up and fire damaged building at 108 Sycamore Avenue s going to be repaired and remodeled this century.
Let’s spell it out for our four city fathers and mother on the City Council.
u1. City rules that they adopted have taken away the ability for the second floor to be reopened as a boarding house. That’s not a bad thing but it does mean the owners can’t invest money into the second floor and expect to secure rents from efficiency apartments. That leaves creating office space. Renting second floor office space is challenging enough but try doing it without an elevator and in a town where there is not exactly a tight rental market for commercial and office property.
u2. The odds of the owners being able to rent out the bottom floors to generate enough revenue to cover the cost of repairing fire damage and upgrading to current standards is about as likely as the NFL reversing their decision to allow the Raiders to move to Las Vegas.
So why is this a concern for the City Council?
u1. They will be tying up more and more city resources to try and keep the lid on problems that such an attractive nuisance in the downtown will create when it comes to homeless trashing property as well as those looking for a place to crash while they get high.
u2. No one in their right mind is going to spend big bucks on upgrading their nearby property as long as 108 Sycamore Avenue is in its present condition.
What we have at 108 Sycamore Avenue is El Rey Theatre 2.0. For 20 years the burned out shell of the El Rey was a cancerous sore on the city’s heart. In the mid-1990s when the city finally started to approach the issue to tear it down as it created the same issues as 108 Sycamore but on a smaller scale that was better hidden from the passing public, the owner floated the idea of replacing it with a two-story office building that went nowhere.
One of the reasons the city was open to the $220,000 infusion of redevelopment agency money to construct a brewery and restaurant within the building shell that was repaid by increasing sales taxes to reach a specific mark was because it would have cost the city twice that much to go through legal steps and pay to have the El Rey razed
Such an endeavor won’t work at 108 Sycamore because the remaining structure isn’t that unique.
There is only one real answer — raze the building.
With all due respect to the property owners, it takes an incredible amount of blindness and optimism to think that the current building can be salvaged economically into something other than its current drain on the downtown.
Manteca needs to work with the property owners if they’ve got a viable solution. But they also need to set a deadline for things to get moving or else they need to do whatever they can legally to have the building razed and a lien placed against the property to recoup the cost.
Property upkeep and the removal of cancerous blight is a clear required prerequisite to making progress in the 100, 200 and 300 blocks of Yosemite Avenue that constitute Manteca’s historic downtown.
That said the city needs a clear policy with defined adopted steps to deal with problematic property regardless of where it is located in Manteca.
 
Disclaimr


This column is the opinion of executive editor, Dennis Wyatt, and does not necessarily represent the opinion of The Bulletin or Morris Newspaper Corp. of CA.  He can be contacted at dwyatt@mantecabulletin.com or 209.249.3519.