'100 more years of life': These once vacant properties in Las Cruces are now cannabis shops
Michael McDevittLAS CRUCES - The husk of a former liquor store and pub. The rotting bones of a former service station. An Italian eatery left abandoned. A garage which used to house an auto repair shop.
Properties like these litter Las Cruces, and some have been empty for years, perpetuating blight across the city. However, with the onset of legal retail cannabis sales and other weed businesses, many of the city's vacant and underutilized properties have been or are being developed at a rapid rate in a short time.
Using publicly available information, the Sun-News has identified numerous of these structures in town where people have expressed an interest or are in the process of establishing cannabis businesses, either by applying to the state or city for a license or business registration or by fixing it up for the future.
Business owners told the Sun-News they selected vacant buildings for their ventures for all sorts of reasons — they need to have their premises in place before applying for a state license to do business, there's a shortage of space available since some landlords are hesitant to rent to cannabis shops, existing structures can already have water rights and the proper zoning and moving into them can reduce costs.
Sometimes, the space just provides everything a prospective cannabis business is looking for.
"We just got really lucky," said Diajesma Orozco, one of the partners for iCanna, a dispensary on North Valley Drive which plans to have a grow operation and consumption area on site.
iCanna opened in a garage that was an automobile repair shop until it recently closed. Customers who pull into the dispensary's parking lot need not look too hard to tell. Murals have been painted over two of the three garage doors so far.
The partners said it has enough space to accommodate everything they want to do with the business a "seed to sale" operation, as Orozco puts it.
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The search for a suitable location lasted around six months, partner Jose Zavala said. Finding a vacant location which fell outside required buffer distances from schools and residential areas, had existing water lines and had power to be able to run a grow operation didn't leave much choice.
A gift for Las Cruces
Irene Parra, a business development administrator with the City of Las Cruces, said cannabis legalization came at a great time for the city.
"I think this was sort of a gift for us in that we, for the longest time, we've had a number of vacant buildings," Parra said. "We've had these areas that have seen disinvestment over the last 30 years, and this new industry is starting to breathe life back into those communities, and we couldn't be more excited."
Parra, who has been attending weekly pre-application meetings in which she's learned the needs of cannabis business owners, said an existing vacant structure can sometimes be attractive because it can help reduce the cost of starting a business when owners may have limited capital. It might be cheaper to bring them up to code, she said, allowing owners to maximize their funds toward local and state licensing and permitting.
Along with the typical fees incurred by any new business, cannabis entrepreneurs have additional licensing fees specific to cannabis.
“When you can find a building that just needs a little bit of retrofitting, I think that's become the really attractive process,” Parra said. “I definitely think it's an advantage to have those buildings just kind of sitting there waiting to be dressed up.”
Elizabeth Teeters, the city’s economic development director, agreed, and said the trend in vacant building development lines up with the city’s own plans for the revitalization of blighted corridors. The El Paseo-South Solano corridor is one such area the city is hoping to spark reinvestment in, and the municipality may use a development tool such as a Metropolitan Redevelopment Area designation.
"They're basically helping us get the process started," Teeters said. "They're doing what we want to see happen in these corridors."
'You can feel it move again'
Just off El Paseo Road, Sol Cannabis opened on East Idaho Avenue in a building which used to be Si Italian Bistro, a bakery and restaurant. Si Bistro vacated the space in late 2016, and it had been vacant since. Sol Cannabis is a dispensary which plans to soon open a consumption lounge in one of the old dining areas.
The old bistro building was vacant for over half a decade when Sol owner Kwame Ponschock said he bought the property late last year. Ponschock said $800,000 was invested into refurbishing the building and parking lot. The interior is mostly new, though the building still has its old brick and tin ceilings, and most of the original wood has been resurfaced.
"It was a rundown property when we got here," Brett Burke, Ponschock's business partner in Sol, said. "I don't have any doubt that if we wouldn't have got this building, that it may very well have gotten demolished in the next five years."
"We gave this building 100 more years of life," Ponschock said. "It's had a lot of life. It's had a lot of history, but it indeed would have been destroyed, sitting as vacant as it was, and we gave it … its new life. Every single day, you come in here, and now this place is alive. You can feel it move again."
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But Ponschock said while Sol's current building is a prime location, with enough space for retail sales, consumption, office space, a drive-through for customers on the go and existing kitchen space that's now being used to make edibles, the business wasn't given much choice. The stigma against cannabis, he thinks, made some property owners hesitant to engage.
"There was a lot of pushback from, people that had owned property here in the city that were looking to lease it," Ponschock said. "Once they found out that they were about to lease to a cannabis entity, they shut either the meeting down, they would pull the paperwork from us … A lot of Realtors didn't want to work with us. A lot of building owners didn't want to sell or rent to us."
Ace in the hole
Husband and wife Jacquries and Nikki Williams, former owners of a Lubbock trucking company, are converting the old Celebrate liquor store on West Picacho Avenue into a cannabis dispensary with a unique twist. The Williams' business, named Jackpot Dispensary, will be casino-themed.
Jacquries said after visiting a lot of New Mexico dispensaries, the couple noticed they all lacked a distinct identity. With their dispensary, the Williams hope to stand out. They told the Sun-News about their plans to create display cases out of craps and poker tables, to offer loyal customers rewards points on scannable poker chips and about their planned slogan, "Go Dankrupt."
But before they could get to the fun stuff, they needed to secure a location for their business. Nikki said that a lot of the properties in town for lease, the couple found, were owned by companies who banked with federal institutions, making them hesitant to rent to cannabis businesses.
"A lot of (smaller cannabis businesses) are left leasing from private owners or the undeveloped or buildings that need some revamping," Nikki said.
Jacquries said the couple had seen the old liquor store numerous times on their search for a property but never knew it was available. They ended up inquiring about another property for lease which had the same ownership as the former Celebrate. The other property was too close to residences, it turned out, and the couple was steered toward the Picacho building.
"So once they finally directed us to that building, and then allowed us to go in and look at it, it was perfect," Jacquries said. "It already had a kind of a structure to it. So we didn't have to do a lot of knocking walls down and different things to make it what we were trying to do with it."
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Construction crews continue to transform the exterior of the old liquor store and pub. New walls are being erected inside. The dispensary will take up one of three commercial spaces in the renovated building.
Jacquries said the couple have not yet obtained a state or city license for their business, as that's pending the completion of various building renovations.
“The success of this industry isn't how many businesses get permits from the beginning,” Teeters said. “It's a year from now. Are they renewing their permits? What have we done to make sure they're successful?”
Michael McDevitt is a city and county government reporter for the Sun-News. He can be reached at 575-202-3205, mmcdevitt@lcsun-news.com or @MikeMcDTweets on Twitter.