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El Cajon's evolution: formation of business improvement district helps downtown's resurgence.

Article Excerpt
Anyone driving east on Main Street through downtown El Cajon for the first time probably wouldn't know that the city's core was once considered blighted.

On one side of the street, a Starbucks Coffee shop anchors a modern mixed-use retail and office development. It sports a handsome clock tower and shaded colonnades.

Farther east, older buildings bear fresh coats of paint. New retail enterprises and quaint restaurants have filled once-vacant storefronts. A condominium project has sprouted up in the heart of the city on Douglas Avenue and more are under way on Park Avenue.

But clues of the past lie in some weed-ridden vacant lots, such as one surrounded by a chain-link fence at the corner of Magnolia Avenue and Main.

Referred to as "brown fields," they reflect a municipal redevelopment strategy that initially focused on razing abandoned and condemned buildings in the hope that a developer would surface to clean up and reclaim them, according to Cole Davis.

Davis heads El Cajon-based G. Cole Davis & Associates, a public relations consultant for the El Cajon Community Development Corp.

Much remains to...

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