Redevelopment Agency Approves Downtown Apartment Complex : Housing: Compromise on parking, appearance wins unanimous support of CCDC board for $25-million project.

The seven-member board of the Centre City Development Corp., the agency in charge of downtown redevelopment, voted unanimously Friday to approve a $25-million, 387-unit apartment complex after a compromise was reached over its parking structure and the outside appearance of the building.

Before Friday’s vote, the board had expressed concern over the 500-car garage and the lack of street-level activity around the 4-story building. Board members had gone so far as to say that, as originally conceived, the structure (known as Seabridge) was drab and unexciting.

“We’ve done away with those blank walls and their little indentations,” said CCDC President John G. Davies, referring to how the outside of the building was originally designed. “We now have a more attractive streetscape. It’s also more accessible to pedestrians.”

“I’m real excited,” said board member Henri Lagatella. “I like the appearance of the building--it’s one of the best-designed buildings downtown--and I have to say the architect and developer worked very hard to meet our requirements, to answer concerns raised over the past few weeks. It goes to show what we can do if we listen to one another.”

Officials for San Diego’s largest property owners, the Santa Fe Pacific Realty Corp., and its development partner, JMB Realty, said they were meeting with CCDC officials as late as Thursday night to complete the compromise before Friday’s vote.

Board member Patrick Kruer said he and his colleagues had been “concerned about the effect of so much of the parking being above ground, especially when you’re a stone’s throw from the bay.

“So what we tried to do in the last two weeks,” Kruer said, “was sit down with the developer and the architect and work out a plan where the project would, in effect, create more interesting possibilities on the street level.”

Kruer said the compromise consisted of a row of brownstone-type entrances, through which residents would walk to their apartment units or to the parking garage.

“That way, you don’t get the impact of looking in and seeing parked cars,” he said. “It’ll be like something you would see back east, in, say, Boston or New York. The idea behind it is to give it that kind of feeling.”

Kruer said construction of the project, spread over 2 blocks across from the 13-story Embassy Suites Hotel, could begin as early as spring. As conceived, the project will be about 1,000 feet from the bay, the closest such residential development to the water downtown.

CCDC officials had praised the project for being the first residential project in the agency’s domain to be built without public subsidy.

“The project brings some much-needed rental units to the downtown area,” Kruer said.

As designed, Seabridge would cover about 2 acres bounded by G and F streets, Pacific Coast Highway and the railroad tracks. It consists of two buildings separated in the middle by California Street. But the street would be closed to motor traffic and left as a minimum 40-foot-wide pedestrian walkway, allowing people to stroll through the project.

The two buildings will be connected near the roof by a pedestrian bridge, a byway allowing tenants to reach facilities such as a rooftop swimming pool. Sizes of the mostly one-bedroom apartments would range from 515 square feet to 875 square feet and rent in the neighborhood of $630 a month, a modest enough rate to attract young singles working downtown, according to the developer.

In another matter, the board voted unanimously Friday, in what Davies said was “strictly a comment on land use, not the economics of the project,” to advise putting county courthouses in the old Walker-Scott department store on Broadway downtown. Others favor having the courthouse as a part of the El Cortez redevelopment project.

“We’re not presuming to tell the County Board of Supervisors how to do their job,” Davies said. “Ultimately, that’s their decision. The economics of the other site may be better. We’re just saying that, from a land-use perspective, we believe the Walker-Scott site to be better.”