Now’s the time for downtown Hollister
On Saturday, it will have been 18 years, one month since the
Loma Prieta Earthquake wrought an estimated $100 million in damage
in San Benito County.
Now’s the time for downtown Hollister
On Saturday, it will have been 18 years, one month since the Loma Prieta Earthquake wrought an estimated $100 million in damage in San Benito County.
And still, there are some prominent gaps in downtown Hollister’s shopworn smile. The most prominent among them is the site of a paper dream referred to as the “400 Block Project.” That’s the turfed over lot at Fourth and San Benito streets where the Farmers Market is held each summer.
It wasn’t actually the quake that finished the 400 block. But the quake was the impetus for taking a hard look at downtown Hollister. And the city, using the relatively new financing tool of its own redevelopment agency, elected to build the Briggs Building parking structure. That required razing the 400 block.
The few of us whose local history dates to 1989 may recall that the site once held a family stationer’s – a local institution – and a row of shops that had been converted into a rabbit’s warren of small spaces that played host to two dozen offices and small retailers.
Looking at Hollister today, large office spaces are going begging, with “for lease” signs sprouting in nearly every block. But small spaces are snapped up almost before they empty, as other budding entrepreneurs step in to try their hands at catching San Benito’s fancy – and its disposable income.
The Hollister City Council, sitting as the redevelopment agency, issued a request for proposals for the 400 block in 2004 and the successful proposer was Tod duBois, a dynamic local product who brought back to Hollister a vision for a new kind of development, one that didn’t sap public resources while offering an enhanced quality of life and new, more affordable options to people starved for housing they could actually hope to pay for.
duBois’ plan called for a hotel, linked to the RDA-financed parking garage that is the most prominent structure downtown, over office and commercial space.
But that was not the city’s first attempt at getting something to happen at Hollister’s busiest intersection. A 1997 proposal by a different developer was agreed upon, and eventually crashed.
duBois recently confronted council members with his opinion that key city staff are incompetent, and that his proposal will not work without a guarantee of a redevelopment subsidy.
At the time the city sought proposals, a hotel made sense. But time changes all things.
Even while San Juan Oaks Golf Club moves toward a stated goal of creating lodging at a destination resort and a proposal for a luxury hotel in Tres Pinos advances through the regulatory maze, a national hotel chain is studying Hollister. Ridgemark hopes to expand its complex of rental cottages as well.
The free marketplace appears to be addressing our once crying need for hotel space very well on its own. It’s just possible that duBois is right: a hotel does not pencil out.
But his suggestion to convert the space to a public plaza ringed by commercial space, as attractive as it may be, is not what the city asked developers to propose.
Common fairness and the law would require that a new direction require a new request for proposals. duBois appears justifiably reluctant to lose his place at the head of the line.
A generation of our children have grown up looking at a downtown pocked with vacant lots. Isn’t it time to move more aggressively toward progress? A sewer moratorium blanketing Hollister has helped hamstring duBois, but his revelation that the project cannot stand on its own financial merits reveals much.
We would suggest that the city enter into negotiations with duBois that lead to a feasible outcome for the 400 block, with or without duBois’ involvement.
At the same time, the eyesore at Seventh and San Benito that once held the State Theater also is long past attending to. The dusty patch has seen use as a Christmas tree lot and a gypsy T-shirt shop during the biker rally. For the other 47 weeks of the year, it sits vacant as a mute testament to spreading blight in downtown Hollister.
Its owner is reportedly happy to collect the money that it affords a few weeks a year.
As the city approaches taking back its downtown with the completion of a state highway bypass around San Benito Street, now seems a fortuitous time to move more boldly to embrace a better future. Hollister has been reluctant to exercise its right to eminent domain in the past. If that’s what it takes to bring progress to the State Theater site, now’s the time.
