Urban Stepchild : Centre City East Inherits the Destitute, Downtrodden and Devious

Call it the stepchild, call it the dumping ground, call it forgotten. For years that’s exactly what Centre City East has been. While a wave of new development has swept over much of downtown, it has caused but a small ripple here.

Roughly bounded by Interstate 5, B Street, 6th Avenue and the bay, it is home to a concentration of social service agencies, such as the Rescue Mission and the St. Vincent de Paul Joan Kroc Center for the homeless, a budding art district of high-ceilinged studios and a chic cafe, scattered warehouses, wrecking yards, parking lots, a bus yard, small manufacturing plants and the new police station.

It has few trees, even fewer parks and no elementary schools. It has many transients, derelicts and blocks and blocks of asphalt and concrete.

If it weren’t for the human misery--the destitute, the mentally wounded and their predators--it might be called eclectic.

It covers 203 acres and 150 blocks.

On Friday, a group of about 70 merchants, business owners, property owners, police, residents and one politician--brought together by San Diegans Inc., a downtown group concerned about revitalization--took its shot by sitting down and talking about “Centre City East: Problems and Opportunities.” This was one of the few times that discussions of the area haven’t been prodded by government officials and planners. This time, they mostly listened.

Although there was some discussion about opportunities, such as taking care to save and nurture the fledging art district, most of the focus was on solving or at least better managing existing problems, which will determine the district’s future.

Again and again the talk centered on the area’s human condition and the organizations working in the area to improve it. “There’s no question . . . Centre City East is the dumping ground for the rest of the city and county,” said Chris Mortenson, president of Lincoln Investments, a firm that has been in the forefront of helping build low-income housing downtown through the development of single-room occupancy hotels.

He and others described how the area is whipsawed not only by the homeless but by others with problems such as drug addiction and alcoholism who are attracted to Centre City East.

As a result, the area is plagued by more than its share of petty criminals, who police Capt. Ken Moller says the Police Department is unable to get off the streets and into jail because the jails are crowded with more serious offenders.

Mortenson said the people who live and work in Centre City East need to become more active in its planning and to put pressure on social agencies to become better neighbors by self-policing the grounds near their offices, where transients and others gather.

He said that, although he advocates the development of a day-care center for homeless men, “what about at night” after the proposed center closes? While the single-room-occupancy hotels he and his firm have developed provide shelter for those on the bottom rung, people who can afford to pay $200 or $240 a month for rent, what about

“the guy who can only pay $50 or $100 a month?” he said.

“I’m not a sociologist, I’m a businessman and it’s hurting my business,” Mortenson said.

Frank Landerville, director of the Regional Task Force on the Homeless, said that it’s clear to him that the best anyone can do in Centre City East is manage the problem. He told the gathering that any land-use plan for the area must acknowledge the neighborhood’s two “anchor tenants”: the St. Vincent de Paul Joan Kroc Center for the homeless and the San Diego Life Ministries Rescue Mission, which combined offer transients about 880 beds a night.

These two organizations have complexes with a life span of another 20 to 30 years, Landerville said. “We’re in Centre City East for the long haul,” he said. What is needed in the area, he said, are more effective drug and alcohol abuse programs, more employment training programs and more low-income housing.

Police Captain Moller said that Centre City East is home to about 3,500 people, and, although the crime rate for the last three years has remained relatively stable, it still is one of the busiest and most crime-ridden in the city. “A lot of people prey on those seeking help,” he said.

He and other police are particularly frustrated because of their inability to arrest petty criminals. Because of the crowding at the county jails, a problem he says won’t be solved until more jail space is built in three to five years, officers have no choice but to give tickets to those suspected of petty crimes. What commonly happens, he says, is that an officer will write a ticket for a petty crime and then have to respond to the same call involving the same suspect an hour or so later. “We just write him another ticket,” Moller said.

He estimated that 2,000 times a month the Police Department makes arrests for public drunkenness. Eighty percent of those arrests occur downtown and many of those happen in Centre City East. Most public drunks are taken to an alcohol detoxification center run by the Volunteers of America in Centre City East. They are released after they sober up.

“I didn’t mean to paint a bleak picture . . . but maybe it is bleak,” Moller said.

Police Presence Measured

Paul Chacon, partner in the real estate firm of Walsh & Chacon, said a survey taken by his company to measure the effect the new police headquarters has had on Centre City East showed that most businesses and property owners within a one-block radius of the station felt it had increased the value of their property.

But most of those only two blocks away said the new headquarters hasn’t increased the value of their property, and a majority of those three blocks away were uncertain as to the police station’s effects. This, Chacon concluded, means the much-touted presence of the new government building has made only a “ripple” in Centre City East.

Councilman Bob Filner, whose council district includes the neighborhood, said many key questions about Centre City East remained to be answered, such as whether the city’s redevelopment agency--Centre City Development Corp.--will be the vehicle for change and whether a new City Hall is built in the area. “We have to focus the issue more sharply,” he said. “We need a coherent, logical process.”

Filner said he intends within the next few weeks to ask the City Council to expand a so-called “brown bag” ordinance now in effect in the Gaslamp Quarter to Centre City East. The ordinance prohibits the sale of individual cans and bottles of beer and small bottles of wine and alcohol for off-site consumption during the day, and prohibits the sale of any such alcoholic beverages at night.

He also said he is working with the San Diego Community College District on the concept of the school district and the city joining in to build a replacement for the Municipal Gym--slated for relocation in the proposed Balboa Park Master Plan--and a large swimming pool, all part of a sports complex that could be built on the grounds of City College or the south end of Balboa Park.