Vacant Lots Dot Downtown as Many Firms Fail to Reopen : 5 Years After Quake, Coalinga’s Recovery Remains on Shaky Ground

Coalinga’s downtown business district isn’t what it used to be, and feelings are mixed on whether that is good or bad.

In one terrifying moment five years ago, the town’s turn-of-the-century stores buckled under the force of California’s strongest earthquake in more than a decade.

The 6.7-magnitude earthquake that tore through this town 200 miles southeast of San Francisco on May 2, 1983, dealt its heaviest toll to two blocks that housed most of the community’s retail stores.

Some crumpled; all were damaged so severely that they had to be razed.

Today on the same land, modern one-story buildings house the merchants who stayed during the hard times after the quake.

Vacant Lots

But vacant lots also dot much of downtown, raising concern that there are too few retail shops left to attract enough customers to be profitable.

“If there were other businesses, things would be working tremendously; there are too many empty lots,” said Marjorie Kerr, who moved all the clothes from her dress shop to her less-damaged home after the earthquake until she could get back in business, first in a gymnasium, then in a house trailer and now in the rejuvenated downtown.

Retail businesses downtown include two dress shops, two banks, two drugstores, a furniture store, a combination bicycle-computer shop and a Sears mail-order store. Other downtown offices house a weekly newspaper, a lawyer, an accountant and a real estate agent.

“There are no coffee shops, so people don’t come downtown as much,” Kerr said. “We need more retail in these two blocks, not offices.”

The city government, which aggressively secured a variety of financing to recover from the quake, owns the rebuilt stores and is trying to find more financing and more businesses to fill the empty lots.

“We have in the works four projects that will take care of a good part of that problem,” said Councilman Glen Adams who is a Chamber of Commerce director. “Businesses that either will expand or come into town will fill in part of those areas.”

Increase in Rents

The city subsidizes rents, charging about 34 cents a square foot, Adams said. But he admitted that is a sharp increase from the 10 to 20 cents per square foot that merchants paid for space in the ancient structures wiped out by the quake.

And those increases make financial survival difficult for store owners who were just making it under the old rents. Kerr said owners of a jewelry store decided to retire after the earthquake, a television store closed, and one business owner died of stress while struggling to keep going in a house trailer.

Barry Littler, operator of Foothill Cycle and Sport, stayed in business but has his combination bicycle store-Radio Shack outlet for sale.

“These were federally funded buildings or we wouldn’t be in business now,” Littler said. “Even then it’s close.”

His rent is double the amount he paid before the earthquake, which Littler said is difficult for a small merchant.

“Businesses knocked out by the earthquake were based in low-rent buildings; they were businesses that didn’t require half a dozen employees, bookkeepers, etc.,” Littler said. “Without low rents, the only ones that can go in are huge businesses.”

Not all downtown merchants have had such a hard struggle. The operators of Service Pharmacy owned their building and it was fully insured, enabling them to rebuild large enough for their needs and still allow space to rent offices to Pacific Gas & Electric, an accountant and a real estate broker.

“We were one of the fortunate ones,” said pharmacy owner Mabel Watanabe. “We’re real thankful things have turned out. It’s a terrible way to get a new building.”

McMahan’s, a chain furniture store, was able to expand after the earthquake, keeping its old building and adding retail floor space on the lot next door.

‘Makes the Difference’

“We have a bigger store and thus more furniture to pick from,” said manager Harold Gee. “That makes the difference.”

Sales taxes, an indicator of how much retail business a community is doing, have not climbed back to pre-earthquake levels. Sales tax receipts from Coalinga businesses totaled $470,172 in the 1982-83 fiscal year that ended two months after the earthquake. Sales taxes totaled $391,284 in 1986-87 and are projected at about $445,000 this fiscal year, said Alan Jacobsen, city public works director.

Jacobsen has played a key role in finding funds and spurring reconstruction and repairs during the last five years. Because of the experience he gained in seeking disaster funds from federal and state agencies, Jacobsen was retained as a part-time consultant by Alhambra after a 5.9-magnitude earthquake hit that Southern California area Oct. 1.

Jacobsen noted that Coalinga managed to get much of its infrastructure rebuilt after the 1983 temblor--including a natural gas system, some sewer lines, a fire station, bus terminal, day-care center, senior citizens center, fitness center and community swimming pool.

The earthquake caused an estimated $31-million damage, but 2,873 building permits have been issued in the five years since for $41 million worth of new construction or rehabilitation.

“That’s about one permit per building in town,” Jacobsen pointed out.

There has been a net gain of 384 dwellings in Coalinga since the earthquake, and the population has increased from 7,000 to 8,000, Jacobsen said. No one died in the earthquake, but 47 people were injured.

Despite the personal and financial trauma with which the town’s residents had to struggle, Jacobsen said the earthquake “was a real positive thing in making us clean up some problems we had in buildings--safety and that type of thing.”