Commercial development to follow housing along 7th Standard | News
The old saying in commercial real estate is coming true: Retail really is following rooftops in the northernmost reaches of northwest Bakersfield.
Plans are coming together for a new shopping center expected to open in phases starting in early 2024 at the southwest corner of 7th Standard Road and Calloway Drive.
Few details have been released as the 20-acre shopping center is being marketed to restaurants, grocers, service-suppliers and other potential tenants of property owned locally by the Etcheverry family, which is also developing housing to the east and west of the proposed retail center.
As it stands, the shopping center property is among few lots in that area not currently home to either nut orchards or new homes, notably including Lennar’s Gossamer Grove on the north side of 7th Standard in the city of Shafter.
The abundance of new housing in place or under development, combined with a general lack of neighborhood-serving retail within a couple of miles, makes the vacant land along Calloway a prime candidate for new stores.
“It’s kind of the natural rhythm,” Ward 4 Bakersfield City Councilman Bob Smith said Monday. “You have to get the rooftops before the commercial follows.”
Local retail broker Scott Underhill, a partner at ASU Commercial, the project’s joint-venture developer together with Pasadena-based Halferty Development Co., said the growing number of residents in that part of town still don’t have the most convenient access to stores serving their daily needs, such as a grocery store or banking.
“Now is the perfect time for this project to be coming out of the ground,” Underhill said Monday.
He said the retail site, like the home development still expanding on the other side of 7th Standard, offers strong benefits that make the project attractive. He was referring primarily to the ease of access to Interstate 5 and Highway 99.
“It is the ultimate of accessibility to different parts of the valley and to the coast,” Underhill said. “So, it’s no question why Lennar is having so much success at Gossamer Grove.”
A separate retail development is proposed on about 3.5 acres of similarly vacant land about a mile south of 7th Standard at Calloway and Snow Road. That project will feature an Arco filling station, an ampm convenience store, a Big Splash Car Wash, a 2,500-foot restaurant space and a 525-square-foot pad also being set aside for use as a restaurant, though no tenant has yet been identified. Work has begun on apartments immediately north of that site.
The northern project, at 160,000 square feet, is proposed to have a wider variety and larger number of tenants. Underhill said there will be eight pads, such as drive-thru restaurants, plus three major tenants and some smaller shop space.
While a grocery store makes sense there, he said, it may be too early to guess which specific restaurants might also go in at the site. But he said they likely will not be limited to drive-thrus.
Smith said it may be too early to judge what kind of restaurant the area is most suitable for.
“It’s up for grabs, in my opinion,” he said, adding that he does not see the new commercial developments as leading to a rush of new retail in the near term, mainly because of the limited density of the new home development in the area.