Downtown Living : Urban Lifestyle: Developers, backed by Los Angeles and San Diego city officials, are building residential units in ‘commuter downtowns.’

In Europe and in cities such as Chicago, New York and Boston, there are long traditions of urban living. It’s taken for granted that those who want to can find homes, work, restaurants and shops all close together in densely developed urban centers.

That’s not the case in Southern California, though, where it has taken years for redevelopment agencies to create residential neighborhoods in downtown Los Angeles and San Diego, and where the migration to the suburbs during the 1950s and 1960s resulted in commuter downtowns, deserted at night.

In San Diego, Ted Odmark and partner John Thelan are among a new generation of developers who see downtown as a land of residential opportunity.

Their first downtown effort was Columbia Place, a 103-unit condominium project at Columbia and G streets. The condos, from 775 to 1,107 square feet in size and priced from $90,000 to $175,000, sold out by the time of its grand opening in 1988.

Odmark and Thelan built the project with assistance from the Centre City Development Corp., the city’s redevelopment arm, which assembled land at a cost of $55 a square foot and sold it to the partners for $30, a subsidy of $1.5 million.

Through a development agreement under which CCDC received a pay-back based on sales, CCDC received $1.2 million--more than expected--when the project sold faster than predicted and at higher prices.

“Our mission with CCDC was that they knew I knew how to produce and sell attached housing,” Odmark said. “We set out on a course of four projects downtown. Columbia Place was, in effect, the starter kit. To get to where a home run is standard might take three or four projects.”

Or maybe only two.

Odmark and Thelan’s second project, the $28-million Watermark, at India and G streets, is being done without government assistance. One-, two- and three-bedroom condominiums, 1,056 to 1,800 square feet, are expected to sell for $200,000 to $500,000.

Now under construction, the project is scheduled to hit the market next March, but already the developers have more than 500 names on an interest list.

CCDC was created in 1977 to redevelop 360 acres in the heart of downtown San Diego. Thirteen years later, the city’s nonprofit redevelopment arm has achieved many of its goals:

The Horton Plaza shopping mall, the centerpiece of the new downtown, opened in 1985. There was a decade-long boom in office towers and hotels. A new 254,000-square-foot waterfront convention center was christened last year, and a Victorian-era historic district known as the Gaslamp Quarter has made steady progress.

All of these goals were crucial to the success of housing. Initially, the CCDC hoped to spur the construction of 3,000 to 4,000 dwelling units. Nearly 2,000 units are finished, and another 2,344 are in various stages of development, including 700 scheduled to break ground this year.

“We could have 6,000 units downtown by 1997,” predicted Pam Hamilton, CCDC’s executive vice president.

Developers are finding a whole range of opportunities, from several single-room-occupancy hotels (SROs) to low-rise and high-rise condominiums and apartments.

Compared to San Diego, Los Angeles has had a longer, harder battle to spur successful residential developments downtown.

Gerald Trimble--who as president of the USC Real Estate Development Corp., a subsidiary of the university, supervises the development of properties USC owns in Los Angeles redevelopment areas--thinks San Diego may have an edge.

“Residential takes a while to work,” he said. “Los Angeles is different. It doesn’t have the same waterfront view potential as San Diego. San Diego has a little better handle on downtown residential.

“But the thing that still plagues San Diego is that people aren’t compelled to live downtown by traffic congestion. They can still commute in reasonable time.”

That’s not the case in Los Angeles, where redevelopment efforts encompass 19 project areas and 7,000 acres, including 1,549 in the Central Business District alone.

“Bunker Hill was one of the first urban renewal projects in the state and reflected the policies of the ‘60s,” said John McGuire, deputy administrator of housing services at the L.A.’s Community Redevelopment Agency.

The “total clear” process left 1960s downtown, including Bunker Hill, looking like “battle zones,” McGuire said.

“In a way, it was self-defeating. There was so much vacant land, it was difficult to get developers. Today, we’re assembling much smaller parcels--20 blocks in Bunker Hill versus three-quarter block in South Park.”

Since the redevelopment of Bunker Hill’s 133 acres began in the early 1960s, about 3,000 housing units have been completed, including market-rate apartments and condominiums and 1,300 units of low- and moderate-income housing.

San Diego CCDC’s decision to focus its housing efforts between Broadway and the waterfront in a 125-acre area known as the Marina seems to be paying off.

With the Horton Plaza center serving the area with movies, plays, shopping and several restaurants, and with the waterfront as a giant back yard, the combination of urban living in a natural setting is hard to beat.

But when redevelopment began, CCDC had a hard time persuading developers and politicians that housing was the best use for this area.

“Residential was a real question mark for a long time,” recalled Trimble, who served as the CCDC’s top executive from 1977 to 1987.

By today’s standards, the first San Diego downtown housing projects built under redevelopment--the Park Row and Marina Park condominiums--seem outdated and oddly suburban for their urban settings. But Trimble recalls what a task it was to entice builders, most of whom had no experience doing urban housing projects.

“You have to walk before you can run. There was just no way they were going to go in with high-density, high-rise projects. You have to remember where downtown was. Even today, you’d have to prove to me that high-rise really works from an income standpoint.”

So far, the only test of the high-rise housing market has been developer Walt Smyk’s Meridian, a 172-unit, 27-story luxury condo tower where prices ranged from under $300,000 to more than $1 million when the project opened in 1985. Five years later, Smyk indicated that the project is in the black.

“We’re about 86% sold,” he said. “We paid off our loan around the first of the year.”

Several more high-rise residential projects in San Diego are in the works:

--One Harbor Drive, twin 41-story condo towers across from the Convention Center, with units ranging from $271,000 to $2.6 million, is scheduled for June ground breaking and completion in early 1992. Already, 150 of 202 units are in escrow, the sales office claims.

--The Huntington is a high-rise condominium tower proposed for a site on Broadway.

--Two apartment high-rises planned for corners at Front and G streets have been delayed by underground toxic waste.

--Roger Morris Plaza is a 50-story apartment/hotel tower planned on Harbor Drive, across from the convention center.

While the architecture of the new generation of downtown residential towers is a mix of fairly polished styles, the architecture of low-rise housing in downtown San Diego has come a long way since the earliest CCDC-seeded projects.

“My initial reaction to those first projects was they were too suburban, too large, too much of the same thing,” said Pam Hamilton, Trimble’s successor as executive vice president at the CCDC.

“I understand what the rationale was. If you were going to ask San Diegans to live in different locations, perhaps it would be best at first to give them a product they were familiar with. But those projects did strike me as very suburban, not having the best relationship to the street.”

Columbia Place and other newer projects are denser and have more sidewalk entrances, like classic New York brownstones.

Developer/architect Jonathan Segal has gone all-out for this urban atmosphere at his 7 On Kettner townhomes, built on a small wedge of land next to the railroad tracks. Homes have sidewalk entrances, with parking hidden in back. Segal sold six of his seven homes, priced from $290,000 to $500,000, before the project was completed.

Now he is working on a larger--45 units--but still human-scaled project on Market Street, scheduled to break ground this summer.

He wonders how much luxury high-rise housing the market can absorb.

“I personally don’t understand where all the people are coming from to purchase those homes. If it took all that time to sell the Meridian, why would buyers come out of the woodwork for other projects?”

Smyk agrees that the market for luxury high-rise living in downtown San Diego is limited.

In Los Angeles’ central business district, more than 3,100 housing units have been finished since redevelopment began in 1977, a CRA spokesman said. Efforts have focused on low- and moderate-income housing, including rehabilitated SROs and new apartment projects.

At South Park, 80 downtown Los Angeles acres bounded by 8th and Main streets and the Santa Monica and Harbor freeways, the CRA is putting to use the planning knowledge it has gained from earlier projects, insisting on mixed-use projects with ground-level commercial and retail to create a neighborhood atmosphere.

Grand Hope Park, a planned $6-million, 2.5-acre park designed by landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, is seen as the inviting public space that will knit the community together.

But even in South Park, where the CRA hopes eventually to spur the creation of 8,000 to 12,000 housing units, residential development has taken time to come of age.

Los Angeles city planners began discussing a village of high-rise apartments and condos in 1972, but rising land costs and weak federal funding support put plans on hold.

In 1980, the CRA and developer Forrest City Dillion agreed on a two-phase, 412-unit condominium project, and Skyline I, the 200-unit first phase, opened in 1983.

“They thought they could market them for a much higher price than was feasible,” McGuire said. “They didn’t go broke, but they had to extend their sellout time by more than a year.”

For its second project, Forrest City Dillion switched to apartments, The Metropolitan, 270 apartments, opened last year and is 80% occupied, a CRA spokesman said. The 192-unit Del Prado apartment tower is due to open next year. In addition, the CRA has also supervised the rehabilitation of 700 residential hotel units and 300 units in the Embassy Hotel to serve students at USC.

Although both San Diego and Los Angeles have a mix of housing types in their downtowns, the CRA is charting a different direction for residential development in South Park.

“We’ve moved away from condominiums toward apartments,” McGuire said. “We decided the downtown condo market wasn’t there for that neighborhood, or even for Southern California.”