(Above) Kettner Row, a 16-home project designed
and built by Jonathan Segal, is a good example of the
type of small infill residential development planners
say San Diego will need in larger quantities to satisfy
future housing demand. Opened last year, the project
is located Downtown on Kettner Boulevard between
Beech and Cedar streets.
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Architects will tell you that some of their best designs are the result of sites that come with tight constraints. As San Diego’s housing market bounces back, land for traditional new tracts is in short supply. With planners encouraging growth in existing urban areas instead of in the suburbs, developers are taking new interest in building new urban housing.
Marketwise, the numbers predict some major success stories in urban residential development as San Diego County's population swells from 2.7 million to nearly 4 million by the year 2020. Available land in suburbia will house only a portion of these folks, so San Diego is bound to implode, not explode.
"Momentum is picking up for urban infill, both from developers and buyers," confirms Pam Hamilton, executive vice president at the Centre City Development Corp., San Diego’s downtown redevelopment division. "There's also no question that suburban lifestyle is something most people align themselves with, but perhaps it’s more a cycle of life thing than going to the suburbs forever. In many urban areas in the U.S., people are coming to the mind-set that urban infill in a dense neighborhood environment is a good thing. Life is so much easier, there are more amenities, more things to do, it’s very energizing and sitting on the freeway is not a very rewarding way of life. In San Diego, we’re not going to have the luxury of building suburb after suburb."
Case Group Architects, best known as the designer of award-winning suburban projects for leading companies including Brookfield Homes and UDC Homes, is fielding an increasing number of inquiries from builders about doing urban housing designs, reports Roger Basinger, Case vice president.
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During the late 1980s, Case designed The Huntington, a high-rise condo project that would have been built on lower Broadway. Basinger wouldn't mind retooling the Huntington for another Downtown site, and says some of his best tract-building clients are coming around to the idea of doing urban housing.
Downtown has had the most visible successes with infill residential. Architect/builder Jonathan Segal is a walking, talking disciple for the kind of urban development long advocated by planners such as Jane Jacobs and neotraditional gurus like Peter Calthorpe. Segal's small- to medium-size projects consistently sell out quickly and win design awards. CCDC has become more flexible in its approach to Downtown housing. Just compare early projects such as the suburban-style Marina Park condos with current efforts including the LIND ("Little Italy Neighborhood Development"). LIND combines three adjacent and different housing projects designed by three leading San Diego architects: Segal, Rob Quigley and Smith & Others.
Meanwhile, other areas that possess some of Little Italy's urban verve also are getting fresh new housing. Developer Jeremy Cohen's Cable Building in Hillcrest, with its upscale spacious New York-style lofts, is proving popular not only with artistic types, but with doctors, lawyers and other professionals who might have bought in the 'burbs 10 years ago. Half of the 37 lofts in this restored brick building have sold, at prices from $150,000 to $500,000.
And up the coast, in Solana Beach, Carlsbad, and Oceanside, new projects being built or planned offer semi-urban density in mixed-use locations near mass transit, retail, recreation and essential services.
All of which means that home builders who once specialized in suburban tracts are becoming more open to urban sites, and are taking a closer look at what comparatively small fish like Segal and Galasso have been able to achieve with excellent urban designs that prove popular in the marketplace.
Sparking Interest
One sign of the new interest in urban housing is the buzz surrounding CCDC's request for qualifications to develop three residential sites south of Horton Plaza.
"We don’t have the official proposals yet, because the deadline is May 29, but the number of people (including some traditional suburban home builders) indicating they want to get their hands on this RFQ is big — we’ll print 600 of them," says Hamilton, who observes that this is the most interest in building urban housing she's ever seen in her many years at CCDC.
"And frankly, that’s in the context of construction defect litigation," she adds. "The state's taken some action, and the courts, and the Department of Real Estate, but it’s still something that concerns us." And also potential builders of attached urban housing. So the intense interest in the new Downtown sites is all the more impressive.
But urban projects still represent only a small fraction of San Diego’s new housing — under construction or planned. There is a major gap between an idealistic future described by urban planners and the real forces that drive the marketplace.
"When cities put local general plans together, they don’t deal with the need for urban residential development, at a density greater than one unit per acre," says Michael McLaughlin, planning director at San Diego Association of Governments, who spends much of his time pondering how to keep San Diego livable as it densifies. "The dilemma is, we know those 1.2 million people are going to come to the region over the next 20 years, but where are we going to put them? One of the solutions we’ve been advocating is this concept of the livable community focused around transit corridors.
"That does a couple things. It gets people close to mass transit, and hopefully encourages them to use it, which helps with congestion, air pollution and energy use. And it reduces pressure for sprawl and consumption of large amounts of undeveloped rural land, which is important in terms of protecting open space and natural resources."
But Sandag is a think tank with little power to implement its planning ideas.
"Sandag does not have land-use decision-making authority," McLaughlin says."We’re not a permitting or regulatory entity, so we have to rely in terms of land-use decisions on the collective wisdom of the 19 jurisdictions in the San Diego area, provide them with information and analysis that will help them make decisions at the local level that will also be good for the region."
The Kindness Of Strangers
In other words, Sandag is counting largely on the kindness of strangers, as Blanche Dubois might have said. And as everyone knows, strangers aren’t always that kind.
"In some respects, you have jurisdictions revising or updating their general plans with these concepts in place," McLaughlin says. "At the same time, you have decisions being made at the local level that reinforce low-density sprawl."
Europe has the advantage of years of pre-automobile development. People grew accustomed to walking as a way of life, and European cities are the evidence. In California, we have an ongoing obsession with our cars, a dominant force in post-World War II development patterns.
"I-15 is a classic example of the dilemma," McLaughlin says. "We’re not saying that the American dream of two acres and a house in the hinterlands should not be available. We’re saying 80 percent or 90 percent of the future population won’t be able to afford that dream.
"We think that with an appropriate urban design framework, these infill developments indeed are livable communities in attractive areas for a substantial portion of the population. Hillcrest is a good example of this type of density. We’re not talking Manhattan density. We’re talking 10 to 15 units per acre, not high-rises. Our needs can be met with two stories of housing over retail and other mixed uses, all within a quarter mile of mass transit."
But the difficulty of pushing major amounts of new housing in the urban direction is illustrated by plans for Otay Mesa, the huge hunk of land in Chula Vista where a significant number of the San Diego region's new homes will be built. Already, the planning is headed away from the urban-style, pedestrian- and transit-friendly models advocated by Sandag and the Calthorpians.
"Otay started out with some concepts that fit that livable concept and over time things got changed due to a series of considerations," McLaughlin says. "I’m not sure I'd use it as a whipping boy for what’s wrong, but it is symptomatic of the problems with those lower-density kinds of development, and of some of the institutional barriers in terms of providing infill."
And while big conservative home builders such as Pardee Construction are taking a longer look at urban housing, sometimes the numbers don’t add up.
"They tried to do higher-density housing in Mira Mesa, but the fee structure…," McLaughlin muses. Killed 'em, right? "Yeah. By the time they costed it out."
McLaughlin hopes that Segal and his urban pioneering peers eventually will inspire bigger builders.
"But San Diego’s a little behind the curve," McLaughlin says. Cities such as San Francisco and Seattle are light years ahead of us in building good new urban housing, he explains.
Hamilton sees one other sign of support for urban housing.
"If you look at what’s happening across the country, there's a return to neighborhood retailing, Main Street retailing," she says. "The Gaslamp Quarter as opposed to Horton Plaza. When you look at Adams Avenue and Park Boulevard and what’s been going on there, those are legitimate, dense urban neighborhoods. Those kinds of neighborhoods would strengthen Downtown."
"Obviously, we’re not going to fill everyone's housing needs in an urban environment like Downtown San Diego, but there have been recent examples where you've seen a variety of housing types at a variety of prices accepted by the marketplace," says Michael Galasso, partner in Barone Galasso & Associates, developer of the 37-unit Rob Quigley-designed rental portion of CCDC's Little Italy project, with more than 150 names on a waiting list before the project is even open.
Meanwhile, leading infiller Segal is looking for his next frontier. His 17-unit portion of the LIND project, 16 town homes priced from $190,000 to $260,000, sold out quickly last fall, shortly after hitting the market. He sees Centre City East as a land of opportunity for residential infill.
"Clearly," McLaughlin says, "the challenges will be on the front between the rural and the urban, the fringes where large amounts of land are still available. That's where the pressure will be for the next leapfrog development. Unfortunately, that next wave out is going to be at even lower density than the wave it replaces."
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