What’s at stake?
It’s no easy feat tackling renovations for Fresno’s aging buildings. One family has poured hundreds of thousands into doing just that — and have some ideas of what city leaders could do to help other families like theirs working on sought-after infill development in the future.
A couple dozen bands have put on memorable shows in the first year-and-change since Christian Honetschlager and his wife, Natalie Jahanbani, opened The Belmont in Fresno’s Tower District.
But the performance Honetschlager remembers most fondly was from his not-yet-2-year-old son.
It was 30 minutes before doors opened for the venue’s Aug. 6 show. The couple and their son, Desmond, met up early with some of the band members playing that evening. Desmond had been watching Brian Bakalian of Fats LaBell warm up on the drums, when the musician passed the baton — or in this case, the drumsticks — to the toddler.
“This is the first time he’s ever held drumsticks in his life,” Honetschlager said.
Desmond gave the drumset several times his size a test drive, while his mom and dad watched (and took pictures and videos, of course).
“In that moment was everything I talked about for the building,” Honetschlager said, “for our family, and the same thing I want other people’s families to experience, right?
“The opportunity for my son to see what real community is, and how people gather, and what they gather for, and the love that’s shared around these events,” he added. “It’s dead for the most part in our society today. I’ll do anything I can to remind people that’s what’s important.”
It’s not uncommon for Honetschlager to wax poetic about the couple’s ambitions for the place — which are to someday turn it into a cooperatively-owned daytime cafe, nighttime “beer, wine and entertainment.” He’s the optimistic one in the relationship, Jahanbani says, while she’s more risk-averse — “a good balance,” she calls it.
The decision to purchase the building on Belmont Avenue was, for her, “a scary leap,” even if it’s since paid off each time they get an opportunity to bring the community together.
But neither of them sugarcoat what the process of breathing new life into the property has been like, either.
It’s no easy feat tackling renovations for Fresno’s aging buildings. And although recent pilot programs from the Fresno City Council have tried to spur redevelopment in Tower specifically, they have yet to make a difference for folks like Honetschlager, Jahanbani and others trying to revitalize struggling business corridors in the neighborhood.
Between the purchase price of the building and the roughly $70,000 in upgrades to aspects like the HVAC system and ceiling, Honetschlager and Jahanbani have poured more than $300,000 of their own assets and savings into the property, including by leveraging their home to take out a loan.
“We call it the shop that trauma bought,” Honetschlager said, “because our house burned down, and some other really terrible things happened in our lives that ended up in some settlements. We don’t have families with money. We don’t have any of that.”
They’re eyeing additional improvements that would set them back tens of thousands of dollars more — like installing indoor sprinklers, which Honetschlager expects to cost about $85,000 — but before that, they’ve had to pivot.
The costly renovations have drained their savings, so now, they’re switching gears to look for a tenant. Ideally, they want something in there that’s also regularly open to the customers, rather than something like office space that may not be open to the public.
The space is well suited for something like a barber shop or a tattoo parlor, Honetschlager says. They’ve set the rent between $1.10 and $1.25 per square foot — the former for tenants renting the whole building, the latter if they’re just renting the large space in the front.
“We’re at a point where we can’t do it alone,” Honetschlager said. “We either need funding or we need to lease the building to somebody who already has funding and a vision.”
The experience has also given Honetschlager a better idea of what kinds of city investments could better help families like his, who are delivering the infill development that Fresno officials regularly say the city needs a lot more of — from loan programs to subsidizing architecture expenses.
“If you want infill, and you want foot traffic, and you want these businesses, but it’s unaffordable unless you’re a large developer to provide the necessary infrastructure upgrades to do it,” he said of city leaders, “when do when do you decide to to fund it yourself, or support it in a fiscal way?”
From a bakery to The Belmont
Before the couple landed on the building at 741 E. Belmont Ave., they’d actually been searching for a different kind of property.
For years, Jahanbani operated the popular Palo Verde Bakery, selling baked goods at farmers markets and cafes around town.
Before she shut down Palo Verde just over two years ago, she’d been looking for a brick-and-mortar location to open up in.
At one point, the couple had signed a lease for a space in downtown Fresno’s Sun Stereo Warehouse.
But the price of retrofitting a kitchen into the space was even steeper than what renovating The Belmont has cost them.
“The build-out for that would have cost more than this building,” Honetschlager said, “on somebody else’s property. That’s kind of a hard pill to swallow. We lost some money there, but I think we made the right decision.”
Jahanbani said she still hopes to revive her baking business someday — maybe even at The Belmont in a cafe setup.
But even though the event venue may not be what she’d always had in mind, Jahanbani said it’s been gratifying to bring the Tower community together for the events they’ve put on.
“I’m working, and then I have a little kid. So bedtime’s at seven,” she laughs. “But that’s part of what I love about having this space, too. … I can pop down here, get to still be a part of something, and see what’s going on and say hi to people that I don’t get to cross paths with all the time.”
‘It’s hard to change people’s perception of Belmont’
Sitting on the corner of Belmont and Yosemite avenues and just a few blocks down from the entrance to 180 freeway, the venue is nestled against houses and apartment buildings to the north.
But it also neighbors strips of partially vacant properties and churches that rarely open their doors to the east and west along Belmont Ave.
The Tower District struggles with absentee property owners hanging onto their buildings even after they’ve become vacant. But it was important to Tim Ferrigan, the previous owner of the Belmont property and a friend of Honetschlager’s, not to abandon it when he decided to relocate to Texas — or hand it over to out-of-town developers.
He’d been repeatedly approached through the years by investors from Los Angeles looking to scoop up the “hard-to-get” small warehouse space, where Ferrigan had operated a mobile x-ray company. But he appreciated Honetschlager’s dream for the building’s next chapter.
“Christian, he’s got a good vision. He’s a craftsman as well. He does design and construction so, you know,” Ferrigan said, “we have that common background.”
Ferrigan — who also owned Tower’s Detention Billiards before selling that at the end of last year, too — attributes the neighborhood’s ongoing struggle with chronically vacant properties partly to the unhoused population concentrated there.
“People have problems, but when it’s concentrated in one area like that, it’s tough to run a business,” he said, “especially if you’re dealing with the public.
“Picking up needles, and going out and saying, ‘It’s time to go, boys,’” he added, “it was just part of the daily routine.”
But Honetschlager’s relationship with unhoused folks outside his building has been more symbiotic.
“I bring them food and water whenever I can, and they watch my building for me,” he said. “They’ll give me updates in the morning sometimes: ‘Some new guys were over there. I told them to clean up their trash and move on.’ I’m like, ‘I appreciate you.’”
It was important to the couple to ensure they weren’t “coming in and invading people’s spaces” when they took over The Belmont, Jahanbani said.
“If we’re here, I want them to not feel like: ‘Oh great, another expensive business is opening,’” she said. “I want it to be somewhere that also gives back in some way.”
Their aspirations to turn The Belmont into a cooperatively-owned business also come from a place of wanting to improve the health of the greater Belmont corridor.
The vision, Honetschlager said, is to have a membership that people can buy into by either putting in shifts at the cafe-slash-event-space or financial contributions. The business’ profits would then go toward upgrades to the property, as well as financial distributions for members.
The hope would be to drive some foot traffic into the part of town near The Belmont, which often feels pretty dead.
“It’s hard to change people’s perception of Belmont,” Honetschlager said. “But if you’re a co-op member and you’ve paid a couple hundred dollars — not saying that’s what it would be, but as an example — you benefit the most by getting more people to participate in events and things going on in the space.”
As the couple has fought to bring their dream to life without any outside investment, it’s also got Honetschlager thinking about what kinds of city programs could’ve actually helped them along the way.
Some unexpectedly high costs, like architects’ fees, for example, have caught them off guard.
“Are there city architects? Can we subsidize the architecture cost?” Honetschlager said. “Because that’s another 10 to 15 grand.”
He hopes investments like this could take the kind of infill projects that only large developers can afford and make them doable for families and small businesses that want to change their neighborhoods for the better.
“If you really want to bring something back, or you really want to enhance the city, a long-term loan for a business like us, or even grant funding for a business like us,” he said, “should take some precedent.
“And not make it full of red tape.”
‘Everyone kept singing’
The Belmont has hosted about 20 shows so far, from outdoor concerts during Tower’s annual Porchfest to ArtHop shows.
Honetschlager hopes that whoever ends up renting the building won’t mind if they continue hosting shows every now and then in the 3,800-square-foot-lot outside the venue after business hours.
Other than his son’s impromptu performance on the drums, another favorite memory of his in the first year-or-so of The Belmont’s story was the (literal) showstopper put on by local band Blazed.
“They actually blew the power,” Honetschlager said, “and I had to reset the breaker twice during their set.”
The March show was the release party for Blazed’s debut LP, “high speed rail project.” The four-person band formed when the members were all still at Bullard High School.
Atticus Seng, the band’s vocalist and bass player, said it’s been difficult for their young band — with each member being 22 or younger — to find the right venues to book in Fresno.
“First of all, there’s not a lot of places to play,” he said. “Second of all, the places that there are to play won’t book us for whatever reason — sometimes it’s that they’re a greedy bar who only wants to sell drinks, and they know that our audience is younger.
“Or sometimes it’s that we’re too loud,” he added. “Or sometimes it’s that it’s too small of a space or too big of a place — well, rarely too big of a space.”
For The Belmont show, the alternative rock band’s young fanbase turned out in numbers.
Between 250 and 300 people showed up that night — and kept the music going even when the power cut out.
“I think that probably was my favorite moment because when the power went out, everyone kept singing,” Seng said. It was awesome.”
“Nobody left or was bummed out. Everybody was just ready for it to start again,” he added. “It was dope.”
Most of The Belmont’s shows haven’t turned a profit for Honetschlager. Even after the well-attended Blazed show, he just barely broke even.
But there’s another reason he has kept doing them, even if they’re not the backbone of a “sustainable business model” in the long run.
“We have all-ages shows here. … Those don’t make any money. It’s a bunch of kids drinking water. Which is great,” he said with a laugh. “I grew up going to places that hosted all-ages shows and didn’t make any money off of me. I’m happy to give back in that capacity.”
It also makes him think of his younger days in a different light.
“I never played instruments, but I was always the roadie. I had a truck, and I hauled everybody’s gear, and I helped set it up. Now, at almost 40, looking back at that — like the patience and the will to host kids like that, when you know you’re probably not going to make any money, but you still provide a safe space for people — that’s a special feeling,” he said. “You don’t get to do that very often.”
