Hurray for Hollywood?
Two years after the block-long downtown of this community was rebuilt in the wake of the devastating 1994 Northridge earthquake, seven of its eight storefronts remain vacant.
And frustrated residents say the problem is that Hollywood cash has dazzled downtown Piru property owners who used state and federal funds to rebuild, dimming the town’s modest economic redevelopment efforts.
Jimmy Sanchez, who owns three of the empty stores, doesn’t argue the point. Renting the space to film production companies, he says, is more lucrative and less hassle than leasing to merchants.
With production companies ready to pay $1,000 a day to use the stores’ interiors and $500 a day for exterior shots, there are no more concerns about providing insurance for tenants or worrying about late rent payments.
“With the movie companies, I make more in a week than in two or three months with a tenant in there,” said the 48-year-old Sanchez. “There’s less headaches--that’s the whole thing.”
But what’s good for Sanchez and the handful of other downtown property owners isn’t necessarily good for most of the other 1,300 residents, critics say.
The vitality the community boasted before the earthquake has never returned, said Janet Bergamo, acting president of the five-member Piru Neighborhood Council.
For a while, some businesses that had occupied the stores remained in temporary trailers. But most never returned to their former locations.
Gone is the community’s lone bank, forcing residents to drive more than 10 miles to Fillmore or Santa Clarita to do their banking. The downtown video store vanished. So did a barber shop and a small grocery store.
“Instead of businesses reopening, things just stayed closed and it became apparent they were just movie sets,” Bergamo said. “We look like a ghost town and that’s bad for the town’s morale. One of the things you miss is a town that looks alive.”
Ventura County officials describe frozen-in-time downtown Piru as one of the most popular movie locations in the county. Three production companies are filming there this week alone.
“Piru offers a small-town Anywhere-USA type of atmosphere,” said Errol Reichow, location manager for an after-school special being filmed in the community this week. “It’s not very busy, for one. . . . It gives a basic canvas for filmmakers to paint their palette, so to speak.”
Although film permit fees help subsidize community events, some residents question whether the benefits from the influx of Hollywood money outweigh the drawbacks.
“We are sort of held hostage by the movie industry,” resident Ann Bennett said. “We need something for a kick-start. Something’s got to budge pretty soon.”
Perhaps most disturbing to residents--and county officials--is that Sanchez’s stores and those of such fellow property owners as Bettye Karpen, who owns two stores, were beneficiaries of state and federal funds in the aftermath of the earthquake.
About $580,000 from the state Office of Historic Preservation and federal funding poured into Piru, allowing the downtown to be rebuilt to its pre-earthquake condition.
“We’ve got public funds rehabbing buildings that are basically just private fund-raisers for a couple of building owners,” Bergamo said. “We’ve lined store owners’ pockets, but we’ve done nothing for the community.”
Piru native Sanchez, who also owns a small convenience store in the community, bristles at the notion that he is exploiting the community rather than assisting its post-earthquake economic recovery. As a major property owner, Sanchez maintains that he pays plenty in taxes, is the first to contribute to charitable events and is still repaying a $150,000 Federal Emergency Management Agency loan.
And he points to an abandoned county effort to build a small brick piazza on a section of former railroad right-of-way in the center of town as a more egregious example of the misuse of public funds. Trees that were planted have died, cleared vegetation is growing back, and locals are helping themselves to bricks still lying in a pile on the site.
In any event, state officials said, although Sanchez and his fellow property owners may not be observing the idea behind the money aimed at rebuilding Piru, they probably have not broken any laws.
As long as property owners honor a five-year commitment to maintain the buildings, little can be done, said agency staff member Dwight Dutschke.
“We never intended to make this a museum, but still a functioning town of some kind,” he said. “But as long as they are maintaining the building in some fashion, then the intent of the grant has been met.”
The extent to which the barren storefronts are harming Piru economically is debatable.
Lynn Jacobs, president of Ventura-based Affordable Communities, said more than 40 of 113 planned homes have been sold in the two years since the company began building Piru’s first subdivision in more than half a century.
More life in the downtown would certainly help sales, but most people purchasing the relatively inexpensive housing don’t work in the community anyway, she said.
Still, the reliance on the film industry has created a vicious economic cycle that county economic development officials said is difficult to break.
“What an intriguing dynamic,” said Marty Robinson, chief deputy administrative officer. “You invest this money and it’s in the landowner’s interest to keep it as a back lot rather than renting it out. . . . It’s not healthy in Piru’s case.”
