CCDC Aims to Cover Most of Downtown : Harbor View Community Is Worried About Redevelopment Agency’s Designs

San Diego’s redevelopment agency took preliminary steps Friday to encompass nearly all of the city’s core in its domain, a move that would eventually allow it to mold the appearance of tomorrow’s downtown.

Centre City Development Corp., the agency responsible for downtown redevelopment, voted unanimously Friday to begin studying the possibility of such an expansion.

The plans are in their infancy, CCDC leaders say, but already visions of a land-hungry redevelopment agency have alerted community leaders who fear that their own improvement plans will be discarded.

Downtown ‘A Single Unit’

“With all the blight still remaining in downtown, developing this area is a difficult task,” CCDC President John Davies said. “In order to facilitate that task, we need to have a development plan that treats downtown and its surrounding area as a single unit.”

If the expansion is approved by the City Council, CCDC’s domain will grow to 1,200 acres--including land west of Interstate 5 from Laurel Street on the north to Harbor Drive on the south. The agency now covers 325 acres designated for redevelopment.

Increasing the agency’s domain will allow it to eliminate dilapidated properties through condemnation, which, its proponents say, will carry many benefits: a rise in property values, an opportunity to build more low- and moderate-income housing, and an enhanced city image to lure developers.

Pamela Hamilton, acting executive vice president of CCDC, said the agency has only begun to evaluate the feasibility of expansion, and said a final proposal is about two years away.

“I would like to emphasize that this is only the beginning of a very long process,” Hamilton said. “There will be plenty of opportunity for public input before the process is over. We don’t mean to alarm anybody.”

Harbor View Panel Worried

Such words were hardly soothing to V. Frank Asaro, chairman of the Harbor View Revitalization Committee. Harbor View--the neighborhood bounded by Pacific Highway, Interstate 5, Ash Street and Laurel Street--has been targeted before by redevelopment leaders.

“Before giving approval to any expansion plan,” Asaro said, “the Harbor View community wants to make sure that it has a very strong voice in any plan that will determine our destiny.”

Asaro’s committee, established in 1982, has been working independently to obtain federal grants through the city to improve the Harbor View area, particularly along India Street.

“The people in my community are adamantly afraid of condemnation,” Asaro said. “They’re worried that under a comprehensive plan, the CCDC will come in, condemn smaller parcels and then hand them out to big developers.”

Asaro said the Harbor View committee will consider giving consent to an expansion proposal if it meets three criteria: that the

committee have representation on CCDC; that CCDC adopt Harbor View’s own redevelopment plan into its comprehensive proposal, and that specific restraints be placed on condemnations.

City redevelopment leaders insist that individual community redevelopment plans will not be ignored. “The new overall plan will not overrun individual neighborhoods,” said Lawrence Monserrate of the city Planning Department.

Monserrate is the principal planner for the Centre City Planning Commission, a group responsible for updating improvement plans in the existing redevelopment zone. The commission, the city Planning Department and CCDC are working together to develop an expansion plan.

“They will certainly have some autonomy and will be able to design some projects for themselves,” Monserrate said.

He said the expansion proposal is not a muscle-flexing move by CCDC, but rather a return to the city’s original redevelopment efforts; a 1976 community plan identified all of downtown and its surrounding area as redevelopment territory.

City leaders “retreated from that plan back then because, to a point, they were concerned about how much they can chew off in one bite,” Monserrate said. “But now that it’s been proven that redevelopment is successful, I think it’s important to coordinate our plans.”

Redevelopment leaders claim incorporation into a comprehensive plan has several advantages, primarily as a source of income to finance community redevelopment projects. Once an area is designated as redevelopment property, state law allows special tax incentives, said CCDC chief Hamilton.

For example, Hamilton said, property taxes generated by a vacant lot are “frozen” at the current rate--say, $100 a year. Regardless of what improvements are made on that property, government agencies such as the city and county continue to receive $100 in taxes.

When the vacant lot is enhanced by a new project, the property’s value increases. If the taxes rise to $1,000 a year, the $900 difference between the old tax amount and the new tax amount--called a tax increment--is placed into a redevelopment agency fund for use in other improvement projects.

“You can only use tax increments to finance projects in a designated redevelopment area,” Hamilton said. “Right now we don’t have the jurisdiction to work on problems in other areas. But, if all the surrounding area is designated as a redevelopment area, we can use the money to fund those projects as well.”

Hamilton said state law requires that 20% of tax increment funds be set aside for low- and moderate-income housing.

Such housing can benefit certain depressed areas that, under the proposal, would be annexed into the redevelopment domain--areas designated by CCDC as Centre City East, Bayside, Cortez and the Harbor View neighborhood.

Existing redevelopment project areas include the Centre City, Columbia and Marina neighborhoods.