CCDC Would Direct Downtown Project’s Profit to Housing

Among the strategies guiding downtown San Diego’s renewal is one called practicality--that is, money.

That means, for example, you don’t turn away a $200-million private development proposal in a dowdy section of lower Broadway because it doesn’t include enough housing.

What you do, if you’re Gerald Trimble, downtown development czar, is take the money generated from the development and use it to build housing elsewhere downtown.

“Residential doesn’t generate (higher) land values,” Trimble said Tuesday during a briefing with reporters in his office. “Office projects, if allowed to develop in moderate to high density . . . (will) generate more revenue than we have (paid for) in the land.”

The focus of Trimble’s comments is a sweeping proposal by a partnership of the Koll Co. and Shapell Housing Inc.-Goldrich Kest & Associates to build twin 20- to 25-story office towers, a 335-room hotel, a health club and other retail and commercial structures in a three-block area bounded by Broadway, Kettner Boulevard and E and State streets.

Before the site was bought for about $6.5 million in 1982 by the Centre City Development Corp. (CCDC), which Trimble heads, it was a haven for adult arcades, bookstores and other adult entertainment establishments, which still flourish across the street.

Now, CCDC is prepared to resell it to the partnership for between $10.4 million and $12.6 million, depending on the final development density. The CCDC board of directors endorsed the project in early December and is scheduled to have a final vote on it Friday.

Questions have been raised by some advocates of downtown housing that the proposal doesn’t include enough housing, in that no more than 35 units are expected.

The importance of housing is that one of CCDC’s goals is to make downtown a round-the-clock community. To ensure that vitality, CCDC has worked toward the goal of providing 4,000 housing units. So far, about 1,500 units have been built or are planned downtown.

Trimble, who is aware of the criticism, said that by allowing the $200-million project to proceed, CCDC will then be able to use the money it receives from the sale of land for its housing fund.

The fund will help subsidize housing developments in the Marina Redevelopment Area, where Trimble said housing is more appropriate and where CCDC is attempting, by policy and design criteria, to create a residential neighborhood around Market Street rather than Broadway.

As it is, the few housing units now included in the Broadway project will be built as row house-type apartments in the back of the project, facing the Columbia Tower complex for the elderly and the Park Row and Marina Park housing projects, which were downtown’s prototype market-housing developments.

But even the few units included in the Broadway project were only place there with some pressure, Trimble said. “Without our urging, they (development partnership) wouldn’t have done it,” said Trimble. “It (housing) doesn’t generate anything to the bottom line. In this project, it is more expensive to produce because there are so few units.”

There are also questions, Trimble said, about whether large-scale housing at this location would work anyway, mainly because of “what’s across the street,” two blocks of tattoo parlors, arcades and adult bookstores. Part of CCDC’s strategy is to use part of the money from the Broadway project to condemn those businesses, if necessary.

To hold out for a development that includes many residential units, Trimble said, risks the loss of not only a $200-million development and the advantages that provides, but also of the ability of CCDC to generate money to subsidize future residential projects.

“We’re putting offices there to generate money for the agency,” Trimble said. “That’s why we have to do prospecting like this.”