Fresno’s Bixler Vapor Dry Cleaning Company Building — a blighted building on the northern outskirts of downtown — was full of promise just a few years ago.
The Fresno City Council in 2019 voted to officially designate it as historic. Disgraced Bitwise CEO Jake Soberal helped move redevelopment plans through city departments in the years that followed. The city touted the project in a 2024 housing document as an example of the market-rate apartments-above-retail plans that could be accomplished in the area.
But today the Bixler building remains empty. Its ground-level windows are barred and boarded up. It has been on the commercial real estate market for over a year, and an online listing as of Tuesday priced it at $650,000 — a “major price reduction,” the listing describes…