Tagged eyesore near Fig Garden Village has Fresno residents fed up. Here’s the backstory
A long-empty building on a major Fresno thoroughfare has become an eyesore now covered in graffiti — and local neighbors say they want answers.
Located at 695 W. Shaw Ave., the building sticks out in the upscale neighborhood across the street from Fig Garden Village, with its unkempt grass and walls covered in graffiti tags.
It sits parallel to the busy shopping complex and directly across Shaw from Habit Burger Grill, squeezed between a charter school and professional offices with the home of Christmas Tree Lane to its back.
“I don’t like it. It’s terrible to have to work next to something like that,” neighbor Cynthia Williams said. “It’s a security issue. A lot of women work here in the evenings and weekends.”
Williams has run her business from an office in the next building over from the blighted building on Shaw Avenue for about 15 years. She estimates the old office building has been empty for at least the last eight years.
The unkempt, dilapidated building draws random people throughout the day who hang around, get into shouting matches and act suspiciously, Williams said. “We don’t know what they’re capable of.”
Though it’s centrally located in the city, it’s in a county island, according to officials. The building was also the location of a significant fire in May, according to the Fresno Fire Department. As a result, the building still smells like burnt wood.
Fresno County spokesperson Sonja Dosti said the county’s code enforcement met Wednesday with representatives of the owner to hash out the building’s future.
“Our code enforcement had a productive meeting with the representatives of that property, and they are engaged to remediate it in the next couple of weeks,” she said. Code enforcement gave the representatives constructive feedback on how best to move forward with improvements on the property.”
Public records show the property was owned by Fresno resident Shirley Nakamura, who died in April. Fresno County probate court appointed the estate to Barton Ashida, a Fresno resident and distant cousin of Nakamura, according to attorney Steven Salazar.
He said the cleanup of the building has been delayed by COVID-19 and a lengthy process in probate court, but now the owner has come up with a plan.
The ultimate fate of the building — whether that be to sell it, demolish it or something else — is not clear but the owner does have plans for some abatement, Salazar said on Thursday.
“Right now we’re taking steps to affirmatively take care of the building,” he said. “We’ll take care of the graffiti and the grass in the next couple of weeks.”
The county’s code enforcement team has worked with fire officials to try to prevent any further fires in the eyesore, Dosti said. Officials are confident the owners will take care of the property without officers having to take action, she said.
Code enforcement officers have to follow a process to try to clean up buildings and that sometimes can need outside authorities, like a court, to get involved, she noted.
“People tend to think we can solve it overnight,” she said. “We don’t necessarily have that power. So we try to work with people.”
Officers can write citations if an owner in not willing to cooperate but that process takes time, she said. “Every circumstance is different and unique,” she said. “Our code enforcement department is always willing to work with an owner if they’re responsive.”
A sign on the office building warns of asbestos inside, but code enforcement officers did not put it up and it’s unclear who did, Dosti said.
The Fig Garden county island falls into the district of Supervisor Steve Brandau, who said the outlook for that blighted building looks good for the first time in many months. The process to appoint someone to the estate has been long.
“We’ve been on it behind the scenes but we’ve been limited on what we could do until we had somebody to deal with,” he said.
Now that the court has identified a new owner, the county has asked them for a reasonable plan for cleaning up the site, he said. The death of the owner complicated that particular building’s abatement, but others in the district could benefit from updated code enforcement policies, he said.
Brandau noted the county has a small code enforcement department to cover the county’s 6,000 square miles. He said the board is about two months away from potentially looking at new code enforcement policies, which could speed up cleaning up blight.
“We have to do more, put more teeth in our policies,” he said.
This story was originally published January 27, 2022 at 11:41 AM.
