Seaside's commercial vacancy report highlights challenges for entrepreneurs.

At its meeting Wednesday evening, the Seaside City Council heard a report from the city’s Economic Development Director Jose Bazua about vacant commercial spaces in the city. 

The report was requested in December 2025 by Seaside City Councilmember Alexis García-Arrazola, who is on a mission to fill the vacant commercial buildings in the city. 

At the meeting, Bazua explained that there are 26 vacant commercial properties in the city, mostly concentrated on Fremont Boulevard and Broadway Avenue, ranging in size, and nine of those spaces are vacant lots. He said that the factors contributing to the number of vacancies in those areas of the city include shifts in consumer buying behavior, high costs of tenant improvements and construction, water availability and infrastructure limitations and access to viable financing. 

To illustrate the challenges to new business owners, Bazua provided an example where a property owner wanted to change the use of a building, which led to more than $500,000 in tenant improvement costs and to fulfill other various code requirements such as the installation of a sprinkler system that took about 24 months to complete. 

“When you change the use of a building, it triggers certain costs, certain timelines,” Bazua said. “So, it requires capital and time for a business owner who wants to come in.” 

Seaside City Manager Greg McDanel then outlined efforts to address the vacancies, such as the use of AI software to aggregate data, which helps inform current and potential business owners, streamlining and coordinating planning, permitting, and water allocation and completing a draft of an economic development action plan, among other strategies. 

“That’s a five-year roadmap for city staff to meet the goals of the community that are adopted in chapter four of the general plan,” McDanel said. “Everything we’re doing in Economic Development aligns with the city’s strategic plan.” 

Bazua pointed to recent business openings such as the Underground Forrest, Monterey Clay Studios, America’s Tires, Congo Go, the Deja Blue Event Center and others. 

Following the presentation, councilmembers discussed the issue with Mayor Ian Oglesby, pointing out that there’s a chicken and egg problem with the city’s downtown.

“If there were more foot traffic downtown, somebody would open up but then people don’t open up because there’s no foot traffic,” Oglesby said. “And people say, there isn’t any foot traffic because there’s nothing down there to do. So, we can incentivize, talk about it and do a whole bunch of stuff, but we need to figure out how to encourage our residents to shop local, shop downtown, and people will follow those dollars downtown.”

At the end of the discussion, García-Arrazola requested that the council consider a commercial vacancy tax at its next meeting.