Victorville moves forward with Old Town restoration

Victorville’s plans for reviving its Old Town are getting more ambitious.

Those plans now include reducing 7th Street from four lanes to two, one in each direction, and installing a roundabout at 7th Street and Forest Avenue, near the city’s Veterans Memorial.

Officials in the High Desert city hope both projects will improve traffic flow and make Old Town an easier place for people to park their cars, walk around, and shop, said Sue Jones, Victorville’s public information officer.

“We’re trying to change the entire look and feel of Old Town and make it a shopping destination,” Jones said. “We’re trying to make it a more walkable area, a place that’s more friendly to pedestrians. The way it is now people can’t walk it very easily.

“Traffic moves through there pretty quickly, so we’re trying to slow it down.”

Victorville has spent years trying to revive Old Town, a 250-acre business and commercial district bordered by Interstate 15 on the northwest, the Oro Grande Wash on the east, Highway 18 on the southeast and Mojave Drive and Verde Street on the district’s southern border.

Eliminating two lanes of 7th Street and replacing them with outdoor furnishings, upgraded crosswalks and better lighting and landscaping has been talked about for years, but none of those changes were part of the design plan until recently, Jones said.

Ultimately, the city council will decide what change will be made to Old Town and what it will look like. No construction schedule has been announced, and it’s not clear where the funding will come from or how much the city will have to spend.

Committees made up of staff members from different departments are studying how Old Town can be improved, starting with basic programs like more police and trash pickups.

“We’re still in the design phase,” Jones said. “There are a lot of plans in the works.”

Other recently launched Old Town initiatives, all of which were discussed at a special meeting and networking event April 9 at city hall, include:

* Providing financial assistance to Old Town businesses located along 7th and D streets. Eligible businesses may apply for a $100,000 loan they may use to improve their business’ exterior. The two-year loans are forgivable – meaning the balance of the loan can be waived if certain conations are met – and they carry no interest;

* Ten-thousand-dollar grants are available to Old Town businesses for various upgrades, including painting, minor repairs, graffiti removal, and security upgrades;

* City crews are now cleaning the sidewalks in Old Town twice a week, and quarterly cleanups are being conducted in the nearby Mojave Riverbed;

* Free junk removal services have been made available to more than 276 eligible property owners. Between June and August 2025, nearly 24,000 pounds of debris – about 12 tons – was removed from Old Town.

Victorville (pop. 143,700) owns 28 properties in Old Town that are zoned for mixed-use development, and city officials are trying to find developers who will help them get the maximum value out of those sites.

The city has taken major steps to eliminate its homeless problem, not only in Old Town but citywide.

Three years ago, it opened the Victorville Wellness Center, a 4.5-acre campus at 16902 1st St. in Old Town. The facility, developed on city-owned land with state funds, has graduated 228 people into permanent housing, Jones said.

Victorville’s unsheltered homeless population has been reduced by 57 percent since the center opened, according to Jones.

“There’s no question that a large homeless population is an impediment to restoring Old Town,” Jones said. “Getting the unsheltered population down that much shows we’re making progress, but we still have a lot of work to do to really fix the problem.”

One Old Town business owner agrees.

“It’s a huge improvement from two years ago, when the (homeless people) and the drug addiction was so rampant,” said Brendan O’Brien, co-owner of the California Route 66 Museum at 16825 D. St. “It’s been a 180-degree change since then, and I think the city deserve some credit for that.”

O’Brien called reviving Old Town “critical” to Victorville’s economic future, and he praised some of the infrastructure improvements done so far, in particular the lights installed along 7th Street.

“After COVID, and as recently as two years ago, it was literally a walking dead scenario in Old Town,” O’Brien said. “There’s s a long way to go, but I think they’ve done a great job improving the conditions in that part of the city. There was a massive number of drugs, and homeless and general decadence that made it difficult to do business there, but they’ve cleaned it up.”

Any city, regardless of its size, faces a daunting task when it tries to revive its downtown or its business district.

Besides being expensive, they usually have to deal with high vacancy rates, infrastructure, that needs to replaced, and complicated building retrofits and rezoning. Restoring historic structures, which sometimes comes into play, can also drive-up costs make the overall restoration process longer to complete.

The Old Town restoration hasn’t gone entirely smoothly, and that’s caused some concerns among merchants.

“There’s been some skepticism and some frustration, because this has been going for a long time,” O’Brien said. “But you have to understand what the city is up against. It’s a huge endeavor, and a lot of things have to happen for it work.”

Paying for the restoration is probably the most difficult problem to overcome, and it could get worse considering the state of the economy

“Funding is the one thing that really holds us back,” Jones said. “It used to be that the state had money available for these kinds of projects, but not anymore. We have to be creative and find other (revenue) sources.”