Going To Bat For Downtown
By Gary Shaw
All right. So the editor wants to put the governor on the cover. Fine, make it so. And Pete Davis complains that the private-sector guys — Hahn, Manchester, Nordstrom, Pritzker, Marriott, Sarver, John Moores, to paraphrase a column — get all the credit in the press, while guys who toil in the public sector, "like Pete Wilson and Dean Dunphy" don’t get any credit, just the grief. Well, this is a business publication, and Davis' generalization is just not accurate.
Davis doesn’t mention himself, but you know what he's driving at. Davis toils in the private sector, sure, but his real missionary work, his hours-turned-into-years of "giving back to the community" are done in the public sector as chairman of the Centre City Development Corp., which is after all a government agency, the public sector, and so you'd never want to give him too much credit in a business publication.
OK, so we write about public-sector business, too. But you have to admit, with two-thirds of the economy in the hands of the private sector, we’ve got our priorities straight, though the general press may not.
Davis has served on the CCDC board longer than anyone, two terms from the late '70s to the mid-'80s, and now he's completing his second term of the '90s. He out-lasted Gerald Trimble many years ago, and he engineered the hiring of Peter Hall in 1995. He's had a hand in nudging along some $4 billion of development in an inner city that, prior to his involvement, had been neglected so long that city fathers — Mayor Pete Wilson chief among them — officially declared the downtown "blighted."
Gil Johnson, the old Pac Tel executive, got Pete Davis appointed originally in 1977. Remember?
So we’ve got Pete Wilson and Peter Q. Davis. Davis makes Peter Hall, the president of CCDC, do all the hard work, and all have had a heavy hand in Downtown San Diego. So why not? Three Petes, $6 billion of Downtown development since Wilson started the ball rolling in the mid-1970s, with more than another $1 billion on the drawing boards, much of it depending on the outcome of the Nov. 3 vote for the Padres ballpark.
CCDC Chairman Peter Q. Davis (left) and President Peter Hall.
Wilson doesn’t have an official, on-the-record position on Prop. C. "It’s a local issue," he says, with his press secretary reminding an interviewer that the governor at the moment has 800 bills requiring signature or veto. Busy guy. But there is no doubt this man set the Centre City in motion with enough momentum to get San Diegans this far. To San Diegans, "downtown redevelopment" and "growth management" were phrases nearly coined by Wilson. While his efforts to slow down suburban sprawl may be viewed in retrospect as expensive and unsuccessful, his effort to make the inner-city more attractive and useful is probably the best thing anyone could have done to stall even more sprawl.
Nonetheless, had the Golden Triangle not been opened up to millions of square feet of office space under the allure of "scientific research" zones where only scrub brush and vernal pools existed 16 years ago, there would be no need to apply public funds to remove the blighted conditions in Centre City East. A square foot of office space across from UTC is forever a square foot not built downtown. (A hospital or doctor's office in the Golden Triangle is often an abandonment of Hillcrest.) The results: In 16 years of rapid commercial growth in and near University City, slowed first by the last recession and now by lack of space, the Golden Triangle is gridlocked for hours everyday, while Downtown San Diego is still underutilized and crying out for additional occupancy.
(Downtown’s lack of traffic congestion has a lot to do with the street grid system and proximity of highways and transportation alternatives.)
But better late than never. High-tech companies, and even a few biotech executives, will catch a wind now and then that something is happening Downtown. As they may appreciate upon reading these pages further, space is available in Downtown and and less expensively than in the Golden Triangle. The rallying cry among San Diego’s emerging techs "to be close to UCSD" sounds hollow when it takes 40 minutes to move from Eastgate Mall to the UCSD campus, or 30 minutes anytime to move from Carlsbad's Immune Response Corp. to UCSD, and only 15 minutes to get from Downtown to UCSD when traffic is slow. (Not that many people need to get from their offices or labs to UCSD very often; the rallying cry has always been more image than reality.)
To the commuters who do find themselves shuttling 15 minutes between the Golden Triangle and Downtown, cruising 65 mph through Rose Canyon, past Mission Bay and into the city with the airport and the bay, it’s one of the great parkway views in urban America, no?
Besides, a Downtown site is closer to the airport and the bayfront resorts, which make life more hospitable for venture capitalists and other visitors from New York, Boston or San Francisco, and we do like to keep our visitors happy in San Diego; it’s a side business, remember?
Moving mountains doesn’t happen overnight and no one expects a wholesale migration of San Diego’s North City technology companies to Downtown. But if Bill Rastetter thinks San Antonio is superior to a Centre City San Diego location for Idec Pharmaceuticals' manufacturing — Centre City East being adjacent to the Gaslamp Quarter, as few as three blocks from Nordstrom, bounded on the south by San Diego Bay, right on the San Diego Trolley line, at the convergence of three freeways, and eligible for state and federal assistance being within an Enterprise Zone then he either has not fully explored the local possibilities or he has a notion that biotechnology has no business being in a high-density neighborhood no matter how many millionaires work in Symphony Towers.
(Idec intends to build 400,000 square feet of space on 30 acres, which would be akin to spreading the Comerica Bank Building over 22 city blocks. If that’s what the FDA intended when it requires clean rooms with separated HVAC equipment — as though they had to be in separate buildings instead of separate floors with separate ducting — then we may have an urban land-use problem being created in Washington, D.C. We’ve always been curious about McGraw-Baldwin Architects' defense of the suburban sprawl of its biotech clients, but always appreciated these architects' professional preference by having their own offices Downtown.)
CCDC President Peter Hall says he's never talked with Rastetter, didn’t know he needed manufacturing space, which may seem odd since the Economic Development Corp. has been aware forever of Idec's needs. In fact, there is no CCDC or Downtown San Diego Partnership representation on EDC's board, EDC has never relocated a corporation to the inner city — only the suburbs — and EDC and CCDC don’t talk much.
At last report, Idec is still considering sites on Otay Mesa and in San Antonio, and most San Diego biotechs don’t require 22 city blocks.
EDC Vice President Steve Weathers, who does occasionally attend meetings of the Downtown San Diego Partnership, says he's talking with two or three companies interested in relocating to the proposed ballpark district near the Gaslamp Quarter.
A CCDC executive recently suggested to an EDC newcomer that the former should sit on the latter's board, only to be advised there was no room on the EDC board. That was just a few weeks before EDC announced a new slew of board appointments — Dick Farman, Ed Guiles, David Nichols, Richard Sulpizio and Ted Waitt — none of whom are known to be experienced at advocating the economic revival of the Central Business District (nor known to care), although Farman, the new chairman and CEO of the new Sempra Energy, did agree to allow San Diego’s largest corporation, the successor to Enova Corp., to remain Downtown, a pretty persuasive act of inner-city faith. (It may also be the only justifiable act of urban flight; Farman moved from downtown Los Angeles. Concurrently, headquarters of Sempra's SDG&E subsidiary have been moving from Downtown San Diego to Kearny Mesa.)
"You cannot have healthy extremities without a healthy heart," former Mayor Pete Wilson used to say when attempting to persuade the business community to embrace Downtown San Diego.
Downtown can expect more success in persuading San Diego’s software, computer and telecommunications companies to choose the Centre City since these businesses are not FDA-required to sprawl. Downtown San Diego hosts more fiber optics than any neighborhood in the world. Mayor Golding is trying to get Ted Waitt together with John Moores in the ballpark district. Moores says he’ll probably move his Peregrine Systems Inc. to Downtown if Prop. C passes. The inner city already hosts some pretty high-tech uses, not the least of which are the United States Navy, SPAWAR, Lockheed Martin's International Launch Services, Nicholas Applegate's entire trading operation and hundreds of other high-tech, aerospace or heavily tech-dependent firms.
And Downtown still hosts many of the professional services that support North City and North County businesses Ð the lawyers (some of whom are abandoning) and accountants (who are hanging in there because they understand good value) — and most of the municipal, county, state and federal governments that regulate them. The Centre City still enjoys the region's tightest concentration of banks, financiers and asset managers, and the region's largest and most convenient concentration of transportation — air, ground and sea. The Centre City of San Diego hosts more museums than any similarly sized neighborhood south of San Francisco, and the San Diego Bayfront attracts more visitors than Mission Bay.
It would be a shame if more biocommercial and converging electronic digital technologies did not establish a much greater presence in San Diego’s Centre City. Consider the case of Nutrasweet Kelco, whose former Barrio Logan plant manager, Rebecca Peterson, is quoted below, and whose successor, Greg Kurdys, is interviewed in a story starting on Page 34: Nutrasweet Kelco runs some of the biggest sterile wet labs in San Diego near the Coronado Bridge, a pilot plant of 8,000 square feet, a quality lab of 5,000 square feet, another pilot plant of 1,000, and sterile production facilities of 200 and 100 square feet.
"We have production lab facilities, plus wet lab facilities for our research," explained Peterson. "We use a fermentation process in our production. It’s biotechnology, but it’s not genetic engineering. We’re not doing any changes to the genes. You have your culture and you grow it in a sterile media and you have air and a carbon source for it to grow, the same as many other biotechs are doing on a much, much smaller scale. We have our cultures in a very, very sterile environment.
"We have like 400 employees.
"I don’t see any difference operating where we operate versus any other place in San Diego. It’s very convenient to public transportation; the trolley comes right by. My office looks out on the bay. I come to work every day through Barrio Logan and have never seen or felt any problems. The shipyards are doing a lot of business and there are a lot of people coming in."
Not that we’re advocating Barrio Logan locations as enthusiastically as One America Plaza.
Hey, relocate to Downtown San Diego if you can. If you can, then you have a responsibility to do so because your productive presence is the best antidote to the neglect some corners of Downtown have suffered for decades. You participate by being there. If you need a personal tour or data to examine space or development opportunities in Downtown, call the non-profit Downtown San Diego Partnership, CCDC or one of the brokers represented in this edition.
If you can’t relocate to Downtown, you'll still enjoy using your Downtown for dining, the arts, recreation, business meetings, lodging, regulation and transportation. Downtown people appreciate your patronage.
The least you can do, please, is vote "yes" on Prop. C to finance the ballpark, about 600,000 square feet of office, plus hotels, retail and parking, some $600 million of development. It’s a good deal, with the Padres and the private sector putting up twice the investment as the public sector (even though the public sector is getting its share from the tourist tax, which San Diegans love because the tourists are big private-sector spenders). Centre City East needs all the help it can get and Prop. C is an effective, painless way of financing improvements.
Thank you for reading and thinking about it. If you haven't been Downtown lately, sorry. Take a suite in the bayfront Hyatt Regency and walk (or take a Cinderella Carriage or pedicab) to the Gaslamp Quarter. You'll be thrilled.
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