What’s at stake?
As a program aimed at holding the owners of vacant commercial properties in the Tower District hits the one-year mark, city officials and residents are reflecting on what the program has — and hasn’t — done to improve blight in the Fresno neighborhood.
Steve Wilburn studied theoretical physics in college. They don’t teach you in theoretical physics programs how to revitalize buildings in your Fresno neighborhood that have sat vacant for decades. But he tried anyway.
Wilburn had been working remotely for a tech company from his home in Fresno’s Tower District when he started dreaming of putting in the hours on something that would benefit his neighbors instead of a company far away.
That dream became — and still is — Tower Food Works. The vision was to open a nonprofit commercial kitchen, following the model of the Clovis Culinary Center. And the venue he had his heart set on was one of the neighborhood’s most stubborn vacancies: the property off of Fern and Maroa Avenues next to Livingstone’s and Strummer’s, parts of which have been vacant for at least close to 30 years.
So when the Fresno City Council passed a one-two punch of pilot programs last year aimed at tackling chronic commercial vacancies, it felt like the stars had aligned.
But after a year of efforts — and pouring in approximately $6,000 of his own money — Wilburn’s no closer to transforming the building on Fern into something habitable.
The Fern property is far from the only problematic vacancy that’s still languishing without a tenant after the year-long pilot ended this summer.
The pilot built on existing requirements of the city’s Blighted Vacant Building Ordinance specifically for commercial properties in the Tower District — for instance, by requiring the owner of any boarded-up building to make their property ready for occupancy within four months of when it’s first boarded up.
Among the goals were to motivate owners to rehabilitate their properties in a more timely manner — a change from what some real estate experts see as owners holding onto their vacant buildings until after something extreme like a fire happens.
Between 50 and 60 properties were added to a registry of vacant buildings created under the pilot program — and eight among those have proven “more challenging” cases for code enforcement, according to information that Assistant City Attorney Christina Roberson presented at a recent committee meeting.
But the Fern property is the only one that’s been slapped with any fines under the program as of June 5, according to a Public Records Act request Wilburn shared with Fresnoland.
That citation, issued in January, was in the amount of $1,000. It followed months of correspondence between code enforcement and the owners of the building regarding serious issues with the property, including a damaged electrical panel “literally dangling and held in place by wires” that went unrepaired for at least five months.
These records leave people like Wilburn disappointed the pilot program fell short of motivating property owners to repair the degraded interiors of long-standing vacancies.
“The goal is not to get this rehabilitated, the goal is to avoid fines,” Wilburn said of the message the program seemed to send to property owners, “by cutting the weeds and boarding the doors.”
But not everyone agrees on solutions — or even where the blame for the issue truly lies.
Zara Landrum, a member of the family that owns the property on Fern, said she believes the fault for the state of the building rests largely with the City of Fresno for inadequate patrolling to prevent break-ins from unhoused people that frequent the area.
“It’s kind of a catch-22,” said Landrum, who lives outside the Fresno area and serves on the Morro Bay City Council. “Obviously, we’d love to get it rented. We are working on getting a contractor in there. But how do you do that? How do you have a contractor come and set up all their tools for several days and they’re all at risk? Their tools are at risk. Everything’s at risk. Those people, they climb on the roof. It’s just crazy what they do.”
One of the champions of last year’s initiatives to tackle chronic vacancies in the Tower is now on a tight timeline to turn it around before she leaves office.
Councilmember Annalisa Perea, who co-sponsored the pilot program, said if the vacant building pilot accomplished one thing, it’s that it pushed property owners to do more to secure their buildings and prevent break-ins from the homeless.
“Is that enough? No,” she added.
“The number one goal that I had with the program was to see more of these underutilized spaces reactivated and reignited with new life. And I think that’s the main part that we have yet to see realized.”
Perea, who will leave the council after just one term as she vies for a seat in the California State Assembly this November, said her office is pushing to evaluate what could work better so she can bring back a revised version of the program before her term is up.
“We’re going to continue to improve this pilot program because we owe it to the other businesses in the Tower District,” she said, “that have invested so much of their time and energy to do their part to improve the Tower District. We need to make sure that everyone else in our area is doing their part as well.”
A year’s worth of inspections, complaints
The city’s response to the Public Records Act request reveals nearly a full year’s worth of correspondence, inspection records and complaints relayed between code enforcement staff and the owners of the building on Fern — all of which culminated in one documented fine of $1,000 as of early June.
Emails and a case history log show building owners were regularly informed of issues with overgrown weeds, illegal dumping and unhoused people setting up camp nearby and breaking into the property.
In August 2025, code enforcement staffer Joe Garcia first told the owners over email that an electrical box had been ripped partially away from the building, posing a danger for people walking by.
“It is literally dangling and held in place by wires,” he wrote in a follow-up one month later, “and subjects you to liability if someone gets hurt.”
But despite multiple reminders, come January, that was one of several issues that went unaddressed with the Fern property.
Following the property’s second quarterly inspection on Jan. 2, code enforcement issued the building owners a $1,000 fine. Records show the property owners paid the fine Feb. 20.
By the time of the property’s next inspection three months later, however, the building — or at least its exterior — started to turn a corner, according to the code enforcement reports.
A Jan. 19 email shows the building owners submitted an updated nuisance form to the Fresno Police Department — something Garcia told the property owners in a previous email Jan. 9 would be needed to be resubmitted annually in order for PD to enforce the property’s “no trespassing” signs and issue citations.
Regarding a follow-up inspection Feb. 25, Garcia noted that most of the entry points into the building were securely boarded-up, other than one board “loosened on the south side,” and that the “weeds/grass were trimmed down.”
Then in an April 6 email following his third quarterly inspection, Garcia wrote of additional signs of progress: “the building was secure, tall weeds removed, and no one on the property.”
Following that inspection, the building was designated “in compliance” with the pilot program, according to a code enforcement report.
This came as a shock to Wilburn, however, who for about a month this spring filled out required inspection logs on behalf of the building owners since they don’t live nearby.
On his visits to the property, he saw conditions inside the building remain stagnant, despite the pilot program’s requirement that vacant property owners in the Tower make their buildings ready for occupancy within 120 days of when they get boarded up.
Wilburn believes some of that has to do with weaknesses written into the law itself. Specifically, the law allows property owners who blow past the 120-day deadline to still be considered compliant if the code enforcement team determines their property is not a “nuisance.”
Wilburn called that clause a “get-out-of-jail-free card.”
“The idea of a community coming together to say that they want better things, and they’re tired of paying for the maintenance of derelict buildings — that makes total sense,” he said. “I wish we were actually doing that.”
But it’s also unclear how long the property owners held onto “compliance” status.
Code enforcement records show that at the end of April, Garcia discovered a notice from PG&E on one of the doors during a follow-up inspection. The case history report for that inspection shows the building was marked back to being “in violation.”
“On the north side, the electrical panel was damaged,” Garcia noted in an April 30 report, “and there are tubes/pipes along the ground on the north side that were detached from the building.”
One final inspection under the pilot program was scheduled for July 2, according to city records.
Fresnoland reached out to the City Attorney’s Office to inquire whether any additional fines resulted after the latest inspection but did not hear back in time for publication.
‘Demolition by neglect’
Experts have pointed to both proverbial “carrots” and “sticks” being valuable when it comes to taking on chronic vacancies, depending partly on market conditions in a given neighborhood or city.
While the pilot program functioned as a stick, Perea also sponsored and passed an incentive program last December. It promised small local businesses rebates of up to 50% for what they pay the city in sales tax for two years if they become tenants of a vacant property.
But after about seven months, just one group has qualified for that incentive: the South Tower Community Land Trust, which just opened up a new space in a formerly vacant property on Fulton Street, just north of the 180 freeway.
Kiel Lopez-Schmidt, executive director of the nonprofit, said his organization doesn’t really collect much sales tax — only a limited amount through a California seller’s permit — or expect to benefit extensively from the incentive. They applied to the program more to learn the process and help other neighborhood businesses navigate the incentive program in the future.
“South Tower businesses, especially along the Belmont corridor, often don’t get to take advantage of some of these programs in the same way that a business along Fulton or Van Ness or Olive might get to take advantage,” he said, “so we wanted to make sure that people in the south part of the neighborhood are aware of these programs and encouraged to apply for them.”
Perea said she wants to double down on promoting the incentive program to attract more beneficiaries — and possibly extend it for another year or so before she leaves the council.
She also hopes to make improvements and reintroduce the pilot program in the fall, though she didn’t commit to any specific amendments to the pilot yet.
“We want to help them be successful,” she said of the owners of vacant buildings, “so whether it’s structuring new minimum requirements that they need to adhere to, or whether it’s structuring new incentive programs to help them attract tenants to their buildings, we want the building owners to know that we want to be their partner in this.”
One avenue that was discussed at a July 16 meeting of the Tower District Specific Plan Implementation Committee was receivership.
Wilburn asked about the option during public comment. Roberson, the assistant city attorney, responded that it’s a “last-case scenario remedy” since receivership cases have to meet a very high standard in court. She said the City Attorney’s Office has primarily leveraged that tool with residential properties creating health and safety concerns in the past.
“A receivership means that basically the city is asking for the court to appoint a third party to maintain the property, and ultimately those properties get sold to somebody else,” she said, “which is a great thing.
“It’s basically like doing eminent domain without actually paying the person anything. They lose the property for no value, and so it’s a very high bar,” she added. “It’s something we can look into for these properties, but … based on the case histories that I’ve seen, these properties are not rising to that level.”
The committee chair, Chris Johnson, said he was supportive of looking at “all the options,” including the viability of receivership with commercial properties.
“As an architect, I can tell you it’s a significant health and safety issue,” he said of the longest-standing vacancies in Tower. “Probably the roof has been deteriorating — we call that demolition by neglect.”
What’s next for the building on Fern?
As for the future of the property on Fern specifically, Landrum said she’s been told by a tenant of one of her family’s Fresno properties that “the best thing to do would be to tear everything down and turn it into a parking lot.”
“A paid parking lot,” she added, “because people feel unsafe even parking their cars. That’s an entertainment district in the evening, and people feel unsafe parking their cars at night.”
Her family isn’t actively considering that path right now.
Landrum said she thinks they would also be open to possibly selling it.
“But it’s sort of like, maybe it would be nice to not have it to this level. Again, when you’re trying to rent something and/or sell it, and the city has let it become, you know, what it currently is,” she said, “it lowers the value.”
Wilburn isn’t giving up on his dream of Tower Food Works in the meantime — but just isn’t sure if it will still take root in the property on Fern.
He’s officially been granted 501(c)(3) status with the IRS as of February. He helped develop a floor plan for a commissary kitchen. He’s still working on fundraising and connecting with partners — but now may have to restart the quest for the right venue.
“This is a thing that I will get done, and I will do here,” he said. “But I wish I had more support.”
