Hawaiian Gardens, the tiny city of 15,000 that long has been dependent on the success of the card club bearing its name, is trying to bring new players to the table.
With more than a third of the $22.8 million operating budget generated by taxes levied on the Hawaiian Gardens Casino, city officials want to broaden the commercial base.
“We’ve been dependent on the casino, and we’re trying to develop more ways of getting sales tax,” said Joseph Colombo, director of the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency.
To that end, the city is using casino-generated revenues to spruce up its tiny commercial corridor as it seeks to attract national retail chains to a community dominated by mom-and-pop stores, restaurants and auto service shops.
Over the summer, a business rehabilitation program was started that allots $25,000 each to about 300 businesses citywide to spruce up facades and storefronts. It also initiated a co-funding program to provide homeowners with new white picket fences.
“The projects were initiated in 1993, but because of a lack of funding, it was shelved,” said George Donato, a housing technician for the city. “Now because we have more money from the casino, we revived it.”
The biggest commercial project in the offing is the new home of the Hawaiian Gardens Casino: a $40 million, 200,000-square-foot building set to break ground next year. It should take three years to complete.
The new facility will solidify the card club’s place as the leading revenue generator for the city. Even now, despite being housed in temporary structures, the club fills city coffers by grossing about $6.5 million a month, and paying 12.5 percent in taxes as part of its development deal.
Not all the new development is tied to the casino.
Decron Properties Corp. is planning to renovate the shuttered 85,000-square-foot former Home Base store, once the city’s largest retailer. The Van Nuys-based company will develop a shopping mall dubbed the Hawaiian Gardens Renaissance Center and anchored by a Walgreens and a gas station.
“Hawaiian Gardens has a lot going for it, namely density,” said David Nagel, Decron’s president. “We see it as a drastically underserved market. The community has been unjustly overlooked by retailers.”
The effort is complicated by the city’s size at less than a square mile, there’s just not much to develop.
Kitschy start
The city owes its name to the Hawaiian Gardens Fruit Stand, set up on the then-rural corner of Norwalk Boulevard and Carson Street in 1929. The push to incorporate came in the early 1960s after the county told the local Lion’s Club it couldn’t build a lodge on land it owned because it was zoned for sheep grazing.
The fruit stand was long gone by the 1964 incorporation. But faced with a choice between calling the municipality El Dorado and Hawaiian Gardens, residents chose the latter.
By the 1980s, Hawaiian Gardens was running a deficit and in jeopardy of returning to its unincorporated status within the county when several councilmembers approached Irving I. Moskowitz, a physician and owner of the city’s Tri-City Regional Medical Center, to take over an existing bingo hall.
A 1995 ordinance allowed Moskowitz to build on the bingo traffic and develop the card club. Two years later, it consisted of five tables and a snack bar on 18.5 acres of land purchased by the city and then sold to Moskowitz. By 2000, the club had moved into larger temporary structures, which are expected to be replaced by the new facility.
Moskowitz has become a controversial figure. While his foundation contributed $375,000 for the Hawaiian Gardens Food Bank, $31,500 to the United Community Group and $25,000 to local children’s sports leagues last year, it also gave $100,000 to Hebron Fund Inc., which helps settlers move into Palestinian areas of the West Bank.
While Carson Street and Norwalk Boulevard are dotted with vacant storefronts, other development activity is on the way. HBI Construction Inc. broke ground in the fall on a 117,323-square-foot self-storage facility on a 3.8-acre site on Carson, just east of Norwalk.
