Outside Help for Downtown Plan

A little more than a decade ago, San Diego’s downtown was dying. Buffeted by suburban sprawl, physical decay, economic abandonment and political neglect, center city’s future seemed bleak.

Awakened to the impending loss, the city’s political hierarchy marshaled its resources and embarked on a course of downtown revitalization and rehabilitation. As a result, in the past 10 years, downtown has undergone a dramatic transformation as a new generation of stores, apartments, hotels and office high-rises have taken hold.

Today, however, downtown is at another crossroads. The momentum unleashed by the recent changes is causing still more development, more proposals for building and more prospects of vitality. There is, however, a feeling among those most closely involved in downtown planning that the rules governing growth are outdated, leading to conflicts about the direction for the urban core. There is the feeling that something more cohesive is now required.

“The great miracle has occurred,” Bill Rick, a member of the San Diego Unified Port District’s board, said in discussing downtown’s resurgence. “The question is, ‘What do we do now, coach?’ ”

Answering that question will take nothing less than a rewrite of downtown’s Community Plan, a process that is expected to begin this year and take a year or longer to complete. But the first step is to be taken Monday, when 11 people from across the nation begin an intensive weeklong study of downtown.

They are members of the Urban Land Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit organization devoted since the late 1930s to improving land planning. They represent a cross-section of developers, building and real estate consultants, academicians and government planners.

All are without ties to San Diego--some have never even been here--and they are being counted on to provide fresh, objective, no-holds-barred insights into downtown’s growth, to identify what the various groups responsible for its development are doing right or wrong, and to suggest changes.

Doing something this ambitious in a single week is not a simple task, but it’s something the ULI has become expert in, using a blitzkrieg approach that in San Diego will include interviews with no fewer than 80 people, tours, 12-hour days or longer, the hiring of several temporary secretaries to keep things straight, late-night brainstorming sessions and, finally, an oral report set for presentation Friday morning. This is to be followed by a written report several months later.

“They can’t give us all the answers or raise all the questions,” said Ron Roberts, chairman of the city Planning Commission. “What they can do that is significant is to inspire us to push a little harder.”

“I look at this as sort of the kickoff . . . or keynote address that will lead us to what we have to do,” Roberts added. “What has really happened is that the community plan is sorely out of date . . . and we need a plan that pulls together people to work in concert.”

The reputation of the ULI and the type of panel studies they conduct is such that 11 San Diego groups are paying the $100,000 cost--the panel members themselves are volunteers--of sponsoring this week’s study. The organizations range from the city Planning Department and the Centre City Development Corp. to the Port District and the Gaslamp Quarter Assn., and from the Hahn Corp. and San Diegans Inc. to the Navy and the county.

Many of these groups are motivated by self-interest; they have various development proposals in the works. The focus of the ULI panel is to determine how these plans, as well as others by groups such as the Metropolitan Transit Development Board and Santa Fe Pacific Realty Corp., can best fit into a coordinated vision for downtown.

“This is not just another consultant,” emphasized Gerald Trimble, executive vice president of CCDC. “This is an outside organization with a lot of credibility with the development community; they are without an ax to grind. This is an opportunity for outsiders to give us an unrestricted view of where we are and where we’re going.

“Sometimes, a city, a community, can get too provincial and take a posture it doesn’t want outsiders to come in and say, ‘You messed up at this and that.’ ”

Although the idea of having a ULI study had surfaced about two or three years ago, it didn’t really take hold until former City Manager Sylvester Murray took his post in the fall of 1985. As officials outlined to Murray, who came from Cincinnati, the various private and governmental components involved in downtown’s development, it became apparent that the center city’s future growth needed coherence, with everyone using the same development road map, according to Rick.

In approving the Planning Department’s current budget, the City Council also authorized the ULI study as a prelude to updating downtown’s Community Plan.

Over the past several months, the city manager’s office has held workshops with the Planning Department and various downtown groups, both public and private, to establish a “work program” for the panel. The panel, however, while using the program as a guide, is free to delve into any matter it wants.

Overall, the work program is divided into the following four major areas, each of which is divided into smaller subsections: downtown’s land use elements, its marketing strategy, coordination and implementation of the various development plans proposed by private groups and public agencies, and an overview to assess what has happened downtown in the past decade.

Analysis of downtowns, both in small cities such as Raleigh, N.C., and large ones such as Los Angeles and Chicago, is nothing new for ULI. To that extent, the San Diego study won’t be unusual.

“The problems in San Diego appear very similar to elsewhere,” said Jim Van Zee, a senior ULI staff member in Washington who is accompanying the panel here. “It appears San Diego is a city with competing demands. While there is an effort at creating a strong center, there are other regions in the city that are competing for similar attention and resources.”

What the panel will want to do, Van Zee said, is to gauge as outsiders “where things are moving” downtown. “In the case of San Diego, it’s a product and a process question,” he said, defining product as the physical bricks-and-mortar part of downtown and process as the planning elements in need of coordination.

As with any study, no matter who does it, the key is whether the political power structure in a community is willing to adhere, or at minimum seriously consider, the recommendations and suggestions contained in it.

So far, the ULI study appears to have such political support. Mayor Maureen O’Connor has strongly endorsed it.

She and the City Council have sent out formal invitations asking people to attend the panel’s presentation of findings during a three-hour session Friday in the lobby of Golden Hall, and a special meeting of the council has been tentatively scheduled to coincide with the presentation, but the mayor won’t be there. She’ll be in Washington on city business.