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.
What happened?
Philip Neuman, a member of the building’s ownership group, told The Fresno Bee that he and his partners ran into a financing gap for infrastructure construction that they were unable to fill.
“If we had the additional cash, we would build this thing in a heartbeat,” he said.
The problem Neuman described has been endemic in the downtown area, where officials have said rent prices often do not justify the cost of construction. Multiple large projects have stalled as developers have failed to obtain the lending they need, leaving historic buildings vacant and vulnerable to break-ins and fires.
The city in recent years has tried to reduce developers’ costs by using state dollars to install the infrastructure needed to support a housing boom in downtown’s core. In recent months, the city also began using state money to help developers in the area close their financing gap with short-term loans.
But the Bixler building, located on Broadway Street where the Lowell neighborhood begins, is too far north of downtown’s core to benefit from the new infrastructure or qualify for the loans.
The building’s condition has worried the owner of the Juicy Burger restaurant next door, who told The Bee that unhoused people have started fires multiple times in a small unit on a parcel that’s attached to the Bixler property, just steps from the eatery.
Neuman said the area will change once the Bixler building is redeveloped.
“When you fix them up, you have people living in them, the space around them becomes more desirable,” he said of buildings. “Everyone will win in that situation.”
Fresno’s Bixler Vapor Dry Cleaning Company Building, an official historic building, is seen vacant and boarded up Tuesday, March 24, 2026. ERIK GALICIA egalicia@fresnobee.com Ownership once included failed Bitwise CEO
The Bixler property is owned by 2049 Broadway Partners LLC, which today includes an investment company run by Neuman, and Andrew Young and Jeffrey Krueger, both from Fresno-based AYC Construction. Young and Krueger did not respond to The Bee’s request for comment for this story.
Fresno County property records show Soberal, co-founder of Fresno’s fallen Bitwise Industries was once a part of that ownership group. Neuman told The Bee that Soberal gave up his stake in the Bixler building’s ownership “a long time ago.”
Soberal and his partner, Irma Olguin, were convicted in 2024 of defrauding Bitwise investors and have been in prison since last year. Before the demise of Bitwise, Soberal helped expedite the Bixler building plans’ sluggish application review in the city’s public works department by directly contacting city manager Georgeanne White in 2022, The Bee previously reported.
At the time, the plans for the Bixler building included 18 residential units above ground-level retail. By 2024, the city’s Housing Element, a long-term housing plan, listed the project as a four-story building with 26 units of market-rate housing above retail and office space.
It was named The Hardison, after the family that previously owned the Bixler building.
Fresno’s Housing Element in December 2024 described The Hardison, a project planned to be constructed in the historic Bixler building on 2049 Broadway St. CITY OF FRESNO Building is registered as historic in Fresno. Does it still have potential?
A member of the group that owns the Bixler building today is a Hardison family member who inherited it, said Veronica Stumpf, the real estate broker handling its sale.
“It’s a historic building that has seen many, many lives,” she said.
The building was built in 1920 by the Bixler Vapor Dry Cleaning Company, which operated in the structure until about 1956, according to state records. It then went vacant until the Broadway Fair Appliance and Furniture Company started using it in 1969. The following decade, it was purchased by the Hardison family, which in the late 1970s began operating a printing business called Mid-Cal Publishers in the building.
Stumpf said its interior has been demolished, so the groundwork has been laid to turn it into a mixed-use building with micro-apartments above. She pointed to the success of building rehabilitation projects in downtown’s Mural District, which is immediately south of the Bixler building.
“There is demand for it,” she said.
Neuman said the business model of housing-above-retail still makes sense for the area. He noted some affordable housing developers have found ways to finance housing through a combination of government programs. Some other downtown developers, including Reza Assemi, have been able to revive historic buildings with popular new housing, he added.
“The challenge of transforming older buildings into housing — it’s difficult,” Neuman said. “But that’s the kind of renaissance that downtowns require. I’ve seen it happen across the U.S., and we can do it too. “
Fresno’s Bixler Vapor Dry Cleaning Company Building, an official historic building, is seen vacant and boarded up Tuesday, March 24, 2026. ERIK GALICIA egalicia@fresnobee.com 
Fresno’s Bixler Vapor Dry Cleaning Company Building, an official historic building, is seen vacant and boarded up Tuesday, March 24, 2026. ERIK GALICIA egalicia@fresnobee.com
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Erik is a graduate of the Missouri School of Journalism, where he helped launch an effort to better meet the news needs of Spanish-speaking immigrants. Before that, he served as editor-in-chief of his community college student newspaper, Riverside City College Viewpoints, where he covered the impacts of the Salton Sea’s decline on its adjacent farm worker communities in the Southern California desert. Erik’s work is supported through the California Local News Fellowship program.