Hotel Proposal Worries Marina Area Residents

When Bill Sauls and 500 others like him took the bold step a few years ago of buying downtown San Diego’s first condominiums, it wasn’t a decision made in haste.

“We were pioneers . . . but we took the financial risk because the city made a promise to make this a residential neighborhood,” Sauls, who lives in the Marina Park complex near the waterfront, said Wednesday.

Now Sauls and others are wondering whether that promise consists of nothing more than empty words.

The object of their worry is a proposal by Santa Fe Pacific Realty Corp. to build a 335-room hotel across the street from the police station at Pacific Highway and Market Street.

And there is concern that if the Santa Fe hotel is allowed to proceed, it will trigger a rash of similar proposals from other hotel developers, who want to meet the anticipated demand from the convention center now under construction.

It is a scenario, Sauls says, that would significantly weaken, if not destroy, the promise behind the Marina Redevelopment Project area.

Since 1976, the Marina area--approximately 20 blocks that lie south of Horton Plaza and F Street and stretch to the bay--has been designated as downtown’s housing enclave, where the majority of the 4,000 housing units slated for downtown are to be built.

But there is a problem with that housing designation. While redevelopment documents and the city’s community plan reflected the Marina-housing connection, zoning in the area--characterized by warehouses and parking lots--did not.

That never mattered much before because most redevelopment efforts were focused elsewhere downtown, such as on Horton Plaza.

But the decision to locate the $125-million convention center in the Marina Project changed the equation. Now under construction across Harbor Drive from 5th Avenue, the convention center, due to open in late summer, 1988, has created a demand for 6,000 hotel rooms.

The sleepy area between Horton Plaza and the convention center has become hot property, attracting various development proposals, such as Santa Fe’s hotel, that don’t mesh with the Marina’s housing designation but are compatible with the area’s zoning.

“We should have changed the land-use designation then (in 1976), but we weren’t under a lot of pressure,” said Gerry Trimble, executive vice president of the Centre City Development Corp.

CCDC, which handles downtown redevelopment, took on the task of matching the housing designation with the zoning, a process that may take a year. While that rezoning goes forward, however, CCDC wants to make sure there are temporary controls in place.

So, a year ago, CCDC proposed an interim ordinance to protect the area for housing. On Tuesday, that interim measure was presented to the City Council, which postponed any action for two weeks after hearing about Santa Fe’s hotel proposal, among others.

Santa Fe, the largest private landowner in the Marina redevelopment area, wants the City Council to exempt its hotel from any building constraints that may be imposed by the interim ordinance.

But Sauls and Trimble, among others, are fearful that Santa Fe is trying to shirk its commitment to build 600 housing units on the hotel site, as outlined in a development agreement approved by the city two years ago. And they fear the potential precedent-setting nature of the hotel.

“Clearly, the Marina is for residential,” said Trimble, whose own agency has been criticized for not pushing hard enough for more housing in the huge $200-million Koll Co. project on south Broadway. “If the City Council interprets the redevelopment plan to say that the hotel is OK, then we’ve opened the floodgates to others.

“If they (the City Council) think the pressure is on now, just wait.”

Santa Fe representative Ed Levine was out of town Wednesday and unavailable for comment. Santa Fe’s attorney on the hotel matter, John Thelan of San Diego, did not return phone calls.

“We don’t think we need a confrontation,” Trimble said, noting that the issue will be brought up at Friday’s CCDC board meeting. “Building the hotel is fine as long as they build the housing too. There’s a lot we need from them, and there’s a lot they need from us.”

Mike Stepner, assistant San Diego planning director, said Wednesday that “our concern has been that while the hotel may be an appropriate use, the Marina is clearly an adopted residential enclave.”

“As you begin to chip away at that, you weaken that enclave so that it can’t become a residential neighborhood,” he said. “And if it’s not going to be there, then where is it going to be?”

Stepner is among those worried that construction of the Santa Fe hotel could establish a precedent that means “losing everything you’ve got.”

For people such as Sauls, the Marina Park resident and head of the complex’s homeowners group, the hotel issue is much more personal.

“We are the ones who have risked our finances downtown. We were the ones promised a substantial residential enclave,” said Sauls, a San Diego lawyer. “The Marina was promised as our neighborhood, a residential neighborhood. That’s what the whole concept of a 24-hour downtown was about.”

Sauls said a succession of high-rise hotels on the waterfront would destroy bay-view corridors and place more intense housing density pressure on the Marina’s remaining undeveloped blocks.

“We haven’t seen Santa Fe make any effort to pursue housing, and, frankly, we’re worried the City Council may not be sensitive to the issues here. I think they are ambivalent,” Sauls said. “It seems to me that you can’t single out Santa Fe and . . . give them preferential treatment without giving the same thing to other landowners.”