It’s possible to walk for an hour in the afternoon along the calm dead-ends lined with industrial warehouses – roofing parts, auto repair, stone design – that comprise Sand City’s West End without encountering a single person. From this neighborhood, there’s no indication that the tiny city’s population contracts and expands dramatically every day, from 350 residents to more than 40,000.
These throngs of visitors are lured to Sand City not for its modest bay-view homes and 1.5-mile stretch of beachfront, but for its two big-box shopping centers along Highway 1 and Del Monte Boulevard. It’s there that Mayor David Pendergrass identifies the small city’s “core downtown.”
The Sand Dollar shopping center, anchored by Costco, introduced big boxes to the city in 1989. The Edgewater center followed a few years later. Before it was completed in 1995, the site was the county dump, and the developer, The Orosco Group, cleaned up the diesel, tires and concrete contamination stretching as far as 35 feet below ground.
Pendergrass, who was first elected in 1978 and has shepherded both malls through the planning process, has no doubt the controversial Monterey Bay Shores Ecoresort, which has dragged through litigation for more than a decade, will eventually break ground on the dunes. Revenue-generating projects like these are the lifeblood of Sand City, he says.
Indeed, the spending habits of thousands of out-of-town consumers help fuel a city of 350. Sales tax revenue from the two shopping centers exceeded $100,000 last quarter; combined with redevelopment property tax incentives, the malls are expected to generate $40 million for the city over 40 years. While malls have gained notoriety for draining the vitality of mom-and-pop shops, Pendergrass says Sand City exists in no small part because of these big-box centers: “The entire city is a redevelopment project.”
Patrick Orosco, a principal in The Orosco Group and former president of the Seaside-Sand City Chamber of Commerce, sees Sand City as a unique, albeit unfinished, story of redevelopment success. “Sand City did what a lot of other communities failed at,” he says. “They set up a logical set of priorities. The first was to clean up the most blighted conditions; the second was to derive a long-term revenue source from their efforts.”
Now Orosco, 35, considers himself a “steward of the community” responsible for creating a new downtown hub, an especially glaring need since the 2009 shutdown of the once-thriving Ol’Factory Cafe on Contra Costa Avenue. Orosco’s development company bought the four-story design center on Ortiz Avenue for $6 million, and he plans to invest at least that much in a redesign and rebrand as The Independent. Post No Bills, a craft beer hall that opened there last month, has already made the building and outdoor plaza into the downtown, in Orosco’s estimation.
Orosco is optimistic that even as the recession lingers, The Independent has a bright future. Two Carmel businesspeople are competing for a retail space to open a wine bar or cafe, and a number of gallery owners have expressed interest, he says.
Pedestrian traffic is already up, according to business owners in the area. But at Gil’s Gourmet Gallery across the street from Post No Bills, manager Dylan Tortolani does a thriving wholesale olive business with only the occasional retail customer.
“If we did rely on walk-in retail customers,” he says, “we’d be out of business.”