Seaside remade the streetscape and legalized cannabis dispensaries – and got a whole new neighborhood.

In 2015, Seaside City Manager Craig Malin scoped Seaside’s downtown, located at the bottom of the hill on Broadway Avenue (also known as Obama Way), searching for a place to live. “I thought, what would it take to turn the lights on in one of these buildings?” he recalls.

Malin is a do-it-yourselfer, and when he saw the empty shell of a shuttered furniture refinishing store at 600 Broadway Ave., he thought it would be perfect as a living space, and could double as a spot where he’d create handmade baseball bats and have a small batting cage.

Then he got into the minor use permit process and submitted a plan to the city. It was a 95-page proposal for a business/home plan he dubbed “Thwack Factory.” (For the section where he proposed to live, he marked “current use” as “mouse graveyard.”)

His plan was rejected. But Malin applied that same outside-the-box thinking to revitalizing Broadway in general.

“When I was first hired on, there wasn’t an economic development professional and that’s pretty important for a city like Seaside,” Malin says. “A city like Seaside needs so much. It needs horsepower.” So they didn’t just hire one economic development expert, they hired two: Gloria Stearns and Kurt Overmeyer.

This duo is in large part responsible for what looks like a sudden uptick of business. “We wanted to create a place that works for both tourists and the people who live here,” Overmeyer says.

Then came the money. With about $7 million from the Federal Transportation Administration, Broadway was revamped in 2017. It went from a one-way thoroughfare to a two-way street with wide sidewalks, bike lanes, foliage and more pedestrian-friendly infrastructure. In 2018, the city itself opened an auxiliary office in a Broadway storefront.

In 2016, California voters passed Prop. 64, legalizing recreational cannabis statewide. Within months of Seaside City Council passing cannabis ordinances, the city received 17 applications for cannabis businesses. The city also agreed to suspend fees for two years.

With a new look in place and new policies allowing and incentivizing dispensaries, Broadway started booming. “Investors want to know that the community cares. If downtown looks nice, that’s a signal for investors,” Malin says.

Downtown Seaside used to have an industrial feel to it, like Malin’s beloved 600 Broadway. Businesses that have been around since pre-revitalization, like Kim’s Korean Market and Peninsula Vacuum, are still standing. (Those that didn’t survive the revitalization include a thrift store and a restaurant.)

Then there are newcomers mixing in. Counterpoint Coffee and Other Brother Beer Co. (with Ad Astra Bread Co. inside) opened last year; nightclub Deja Blue opened Feb. 22 where The Dunes used to be.

New businesses can be a sign of gentrification, pushing old-timers out. But as Asia Smith – a Seaside native and owner of The Hem Nutrition on Broadway – points out, the new businesses on her block are all from Seaside. “[Downtown] feels like a place for the community,” she says. “We have more places to come together now.”

According to census data, the majority of Seaside’s population is between 25 and 34 years old, and 28 percent are foreign-born – the highest percentage on the Peninsula. Malin sees that represented in the business community. “Seaside is a young, diverse and creative city,” he says. “What is happening downtown is authentic to Seaside.”

So far, Seaside’s transition is going well. Cannabis businesses are bringing in $800,000 annually in revenue, more than had been originally projected, even as the cannabis industry is still settling in and some dispensaries have not met targets.

Yet the biggest sales tax generators for Seaside remain businesses outside of downtown: car dealers in an auto mall and big box stores like Staples and Home Depot, all separate from downtown.

As for Malin’s Thwack Factory spot? It’s slated to become a new – and locally owned – restaurant this year.