The Anderson Hotel in downtown San Luis Obispo offers affordable housing to those who need it most.
At 100 years old, the building is currently under renovation for major improvements.
While the goal is positive, the construction hinders access to neighboring businesses.
“We know that the Anderson Hotel renovation is really important for that low-income housing that it provides downtown, but unfortunately, it’s going to cause some impacts on the street and on the businesses that are nearby,” said Bettina Swigger, Downtown SLO CEO.
For the past two decades, the Anderson Hotel has been serving as a low-income, affordable housing project.
Recent funding is allowing for much-needed improvements to happen including a major one: seismic retrofitting.
The Housing Authority of San Luis Obispo (HASLO) manages the affordable housing project. HASLO's Executive Director, Scott Collins, says the retrofitting aspect makes the construction area even larger.
“We have to extend out into the right of way, much further than a typical project, so we are losing parking on our street and the City of SLO has very specific regulations to maintain two-way traffic, so the other side of the street is also losing parking, which creates challenges for those businesses,” said Collins.
Challenges that some nearby businesses say they had no time to prepare for.
Natalie Risner owns Aproposat 1021 Morro St. in downtown San Luis Obispo. “About mid-May, we were notified that all of our parking was going to be removed from in front of our store to make room for the construction project across the street," said Risner. "We did not know anything about it until two days before they did it. We’ve seen an immediate impact from it.”
Risner says she is all for the renovation, however, she says she takes issue with the lack of timely communication.
“The building needs help — we are for that. We just feel like this whole construction project has been mishandled,” said Risner. “We weren’t notified properly and we didn’t know it was going to be a year-and-a-half, which is a really long time to impact a business.”
Collins says while they followed city requirements in notifying those affected by the work, they admit it would have been better to notify businesses earlier on in the permitting process so they were aware of the potential impacts to parking.
HASLO and Downtown SLO are now trying to get creative with a marketing campaign to keep the foot traffic — and business — flowing.
“We have been meeting with them to see how we can preserve what parking is in that area but also some kind of advertisements to help draw people to those businesses both on Morro and on Monterrey streets,” said Collins.
Downtown SLO hopes efforts like large street banners and social media will help offset the construction impacts.
“Downtown SLO is really trying to promote those businesses and make sure that the public understands that they are open during the construction project," said Swigger. "So, we’ve been working with each of the business owners at the street level to try to gather materials for them. Our team went in and shot some video and we are trying to promote them on our social media channels."
After the pandemic and winter storms, Risner says she just hopes her store can get past another huge hurdle. “We’re just small business mom-and-pop shops — and we just hope we can survive this next year,” she said.
Upon completion, the Anderson Hotel will have 66 total units and services on-site for issues concerning mental health or substance abuse.
The project is expected to be completed around August 2024.
