The Fultonia

The Fultonia.com Blog

Okay, the cool part of Fresno is The Tower District. It's a little northwest of downtown, sandwiched between the older Lowell neighborhood (more on Lowell later) to the south and the historic Fresno High School neighborhood to the north. Lots of homes built in the 1920's and 1930's, and a real mix of small bungalows and estates. Even the older multi-family units feel like you're in an up-and-coming area, with a lot of energy. And why not? The historic Tower Theatre is there, along with a couple of smaller venues, a good percentage of the city's clubs are in this one neighborhood and while it lacks great dining there are plenty of good, comfortable restaurants there.

All true, if you stay north of Olive Avenue. The south part of the Tower has all of the architecture and most of the charm of its sister neighborhood to the north, but as you drive south, closer to Lowell and Belmont Avenue that divides the two areas, things get, well, dodgy. The commercial vitality found along Olive disappears and the number of vacancies swallows the number of occupied units. But along Fulton is a collection of great mid-century apartment buildings, including the Fultonia, a late moderne building with a neon tower of its own, 10 empty commercial units along the street and most of the 39 apartments sitting empty, stinky and rotting.

The debate early in the year was what to do with it. The City (maybe) wanted to buy it for the homeless program, the housing authority looked at it and one property owner finally bought it at auction: Terance Frazier. Later in the summer we at the RDA agreed to make a $600,000 loan for renovation and the work is underway.

I've been out there a few times, first before the deal was closed and a couple of times as we put the agreement, to get a handle on the scope of work. On the first trip, the entire complex smelled like wet, dirty dog. Dog. Ugh. So we put that in the scope -- clean out all of the feral animals, including the family of cats that had taken up residence in the hallway behind the commercial spaces.

On the second trip, we got to look into some of the units, a couple of which were still occupied. I'm not sure what was worse, the empty, trashed units or the ones that still had tenants. One of the things I've had to get used to working in Fresno is working in really, really poor areas. Palm Springs has a low median income and a fair amount of working poor, but the geographic scale of the poverty here is really daunting.

The follow up visits have been a lot better. The funk is gone, the water damaged plaster is gone, and the contractor is busy rebuilding the entire place. The next challenge is to figure out how to make the buildings on either side get dressed up.

So there's hope for SoTow. We need to clean up Belmont, and any progress we make in Lowell to the south will help, and we're buying foreclosed homes in that neighborhood, too. Sometimes you have to go right at the worst property on the block. It's the right thing to do.

There's a link to the property's website embedded in the title (click on the title) and below is an article on the deal.

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