A decade after his death, the late Ernie Hahn’s legacy remains ingrained in the San Diego fabric, captured in shopping centers like Horton Plaza, Fashion Valley and North County Fair, and a mini-downtown, University City. Yet in the final years of his life Hahn dedicated himself to a more thankless task, riding herd on a incredibly diverse group of land owners, consultants, lobbyists and government officials in drafting a sweeping master plan for Downtown San Diego.

When the efforts of his Centre City Planning Committee were approved by the City Council in 1992 — the same year Hahn lost his battle with cancer — the redevelopment area was expanded from 325 acres to 1,500 acres.

The 10 years since have proven a mixed bag, with most of the progress clumped into recent years and focused almost solely on housing.

By the numbers the decade saw $292 million in public seeding spur $1.5 billion in private investment, boosting annual taxes to the city by $31 million. In that time 3,215 housing units were built with 1,900 of them restricted for occupants at low- and moderate-income levels. Hotel rooms grew by 859, the 92101 job count grew by 10,000 and 443,000 square feet of office hit the market.

Yet the largest and most prestigious projects took place in the older redevelopment areas administered by the Centre City Development Corp. The severe recession that unloaded on the region in the early 1990s sent urban land values tumbling, checking CCDC’s financial ability to move aggressively into the most blighted areas, especially what today is called East Village but which then was Centre City East.

Faring best are Cortez Hill, anchored by the subsidized renovation and conversion of the El Cortez Hotel into apartments, and Little Italy, where developers seem to be trying to outdo each other with inviting and welcoming architecture.

What CCDC most certainly has accomplished in that 10 years was laying the groundwork for today’s, and tomorrow’s, primarily residential boom. And its ingenuity and ability to find fresh funds likely staved off a city decision to pull the plug on the ballpark.

In many ways, the agency’s ability to step in to help move the ballpark forward illustrate both the power, and the limitations, of redevelopment.

Pete Davis is in his third and likely final appointment on the CCDC. He first joined the agency in 1977, six months after its creation by then-Mayor Pete Wilson. Successes like Horton Plaza led to unrealistic expectations.

“One of the presumptions was that the areas around the redevelopment district would develop on their own from the synergism of redevelopment,” Davis says. “But that didn’t happen.”

Even when redevelopment came to Centre City East, successes were few. Efforts to get federal Housing and Urban Development funds or Navy support to build housing in East Village proved futile. Zoning requirements that mandated projects be 80 percent residential greatly restricted new development.

The Hahn plan did call for a sports arena in the vicinity. With that not likely to happen soon, the city persuaded Padres owner John Moores to not only move the club Downtown, but to abandon his preferred location on the waterfront behind the Santa Fe Depot.

“If we hadn’t put the ballpark in (East Village), we would have been dead in the water,” Davis says. And while the agency had to greatly extend itself to help fund the effort, Davis is confident that in five years property values in the area will soar, boosting to nearly $50 million annually the tax increment dollars used to finance redevelopment.

Seemingly, it now is East Village’s turn in the sun.

“The next 10 years is going to be all about the East Village,” says Leslie Wade, a government relations consultant who works for the 70-member East Village Association. “It is really going to be about the 300 acres east of Sixth Avenue, those 100 city blocks.”

Intimately familiar with that area is Kevin DeFreitas, a partner in Tomaszewski + DeFreitas Architects Inc. He and his wife moved to the area in 1993, living in the Ratner Building at 12th Avenue and F Street. The couple had two children while DeFreitas led efforts to build two row home projects on F Street.

In his nearly 10 years of observing Downtown, DeFreitas says redevelopment has created housing for the ultra rich and poor, with the units for the poor mostly going into his neighborhood, along with new social services.

Yet this urban pioneer is a huge urban optimist, convinced that as Downtown gains residents, those individuals will become vested in its growth and work to ensure it matures properly. “The future is really kind of up in the air and this is really our shot to do something exceptional,” he says.

One of those vested residents is Joyce Summer, who moved from New York City 10 years ago, buying a unit at the Meridian and opening with her husband a small marketing business on Fifth Avenue called To Market, To Market. Summer has steadily gotten more involved in Downtown planning and now is chairing the Centre City Advisory Committee that advises CCDC, the City Council and Planning Commission. Summer talks glowingly about Downtown, but also sees the need for more.

“We don’t have a well-rounded community,” she says. “We are flourishing, but I see it as a one-sided flourishing. We need to get business people down here, but it is mostly residential. We have to get workers down here, we have to find room for parks, schools and medical facilities. And we have to mix in more affordable housing.”

She is optimistic that all those things will happen, and that transportation will key Downtown’s prosperity.

“Within a mile or two we have an airport, cruise ship terminal and train depot,” Summer says. “How wonderful it would be to update and link all three. How wonderful it would be to have people fly in here from all around the world and have their baggage automatically transferred to the cruise ship or a train. My husband sees us digging a tunnel under the bay to a small terminal with a few runways for overseas travel. How wonderful it would be, we would be the only three-way transportation hub in the world.”

Residents with those kind of dreams are probably the best legacy that CCDC and Hahn could imagine.