103 Units : New Downtown Condo Project OKd by CCDC
The Centre City Development Corp., the agency in charge of downtown redevelopment, on Friday approved a contract with a private partnership for the construction of 103 condominiums in the waterfront Marina area.
The condominiums, when ready for occupancy in the fall of 1988, will be the first for-sale units since the construction of the now fully occupied Marina Park and Park Row condominium projects, which were considered pioneering efforts at bringing housing downtown.
The new project is directly across G Street from the Marina Park complex. Specifically, the complex will be built on a 44,600-square-foot site bounded by Martin Luther King Way and Columbia, State and G streets. The block is home to the old Cracker Factory, which will remain.
Joint Venture
The developer is a joint venture partnership consisting of Odmark Development Co. and Great American Development Co., two firms with extensive residential construction experience in building more than 4,000 housing units in the San Diego area.
The nearly $10-million project will consist of a four-story building linked by two inner courtyards. The one- to two-bedroom condominiums, which will have bay windows and individual balconies, are expected to cost in the range of $90,000 to $140,000, according to developer Ted Odmark.
When negotiations for the complex began last September, the idea was that the project would open as rental apartments until the downtown market was healthy enough to support the sale of condominiums.
But Odmark said his partnership decided to bypass that stage and begin directly with sales because of what he called the “positive” mood about the downtown housing market. He said, for example, that when his complex is ready for occupancy, two other nearby apartment projects--Marina Palms and Market Street Square, with a total of about 400 units--will have been open for a year.
‘Smart’ Buy
“With growth controls happening all over the county . . . it’s reducing the amount of new units all over the area,” Odmark told reporters. Earlier, he told the CCDC board that new housing downtown will “establish in people’s mind that downtown is a smart place to buy, and that it’s not just an exciting place to live.”
He said one of the major factors helping propel the downtown housing market is the recent opening of the Irvine Ranch Farmers Market in Horton Plaza, thereby providing downtown dwellers a supermarket.
CCDC has budgeted about $4 million to help subsidize the development, mainly through acquiring land on the block, making various public improvements to curb, gutters, street landscaping and moving of utility lines and relocating current tenants.
In return, Odmark/Great American will pay the agency between $862,000 to $1.8 million under an arrangement that calls for the developers to pay CCDC a percentage of its gross sales.
Construction is expected to begin late this summer.
