BAKERSFIELD, Calif. (KGET) – If the name City Lights has sort of an appealing familiarity to it, that’s because it’s the name of a famous silent movie and also a legendary San Francisco bookstore.
Now, it’s also the name of a new, $120 million commercial development that could turn what we once knew as East Hills Mall into the sort of place east Bakersfield has long needed.
Southern California developer-investors Michael Heslov and Stephen Zimmerman paid $7.2 million for the 36-acre property in June 2021 and over the next year scraped the land clean.
But they didn’t have a specific plan for it. Now they do. And Heslov is convinced it will be transformative.
“It’s going to enhance the area,” Heslov said. “It’s going to bring in more traffic to that northeast, sort of, central core area. We’ve acquired a couple other pieces in that northeast area because we’re really bullish on it. So, I think it’s going to regenerate the whole area.”
$11.9 million secured for revitalization of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Park in Bakersfield