It’s ironic that the Centre City Development Corp. and City Hall itself would become the very impediments to “smart growth” that everyone professes to practice. Easing traffic congestion is one of Dick Murphy’s Top 10 Reasons To Be Mayor, and anyone caught in San Diego’s freeway congestion recently ought to wish him well and curse the lack of any quick-fix solutions.

The situation clogging mostly San Diego’s northern freeways — Interstates 5, 805 and 15 — was not created overnight and will take years to fix.

Among the fixes, if you could just focus the San Diego City Council long enough to implement: Put the jobs where the best transportation is. And while we’re at it, put the jobs where the people are. And here’s a hint: “old San Diego,” the vast half of the region south of Interstate 8 or at least south of Highway 52, still hosts the densest residential population in the region. And within this density is the emerging mother of all population densities, Downtown San Diego with its glistening, bristling new skyline of residential towers. That’s why Downtown San Diego has been and should continue to be the Central Business District.

But Downtown’s status as the CBD is threatened at the terrible risk of even greater freeway congestion.

That’s because for the last 30 years, including the last decade and last 36 months at breakneck speed, local governments have encouraged developers to build office space (and industrial space that actually functions as office space) in San Diego’s farthest flung suburbs. From the private side, the intent was to make some money — we’re ascribing opportunity, not greed — while meeting the growing market of office tenants. From the government side, the intent was the public good: If you’re going to allow suburban residential development, you ought to throw up a couple million square feet of office and industrial space near those suburbs to house the jobs, giving residents a choice not to commute far.

And so we have big office “nodes” or submarkets: 5.2 million square feet of office and 12 million square feet of industrial space (mostly used as offices) in Rancho Bernardo and Poway. Among the worst examples of business sprawl is the Poway industrial park where Gateway chose to relocate with enormous fanfare from the San Diego Regional Economic Development Corp., even farther out than the farthest housing development, miles from the nearest homes and conveniences. Nearby Scripps Ranch accommodates another 1.3 million square feet of office and 1 million square feet of industrial space. Mostly built in the last 10 years, with construction still going bonkers today, Del Mar Heights now has 3.4 million square feet of office space. There are 3.9 million square feet of office space and 8.9 million square feet of industrial in Carlsbad, 6.6 million square feet of office and 375,000 of industrial in the UTC area, another 5.5 million of office and 5.3 million of industrial on Sorrento Mesa, plus another 1.7 million of industrial in Sorrento Valley, and another 14.2 million of industrial on and near Miramar Road. In Kearny Mesa, there are 6.4 million square feet of office and 12.4 million of industrial space. Mission Valley hosts 6.4 million of office and neighboring Mission Gorge another 3.2 million square feet of office and industrial combined.

Countywide, 79.3 million square feet of office space and 139.8 million square feet of industrial space, counts CoStar Realty Information Inc.

And Downtown San Diego, the historic and now alleged Central Business District, hosts a mere 11.5 million square feet of rentable office and 10.2 million square feet of industrial space. At 9.9 percent of the regional total, a pretty weak showing for a CBD that represented more than 50 percent of the workplace inventory 30 years ago.

Since November 1991, when One America Plaza opened in Downtown San Diego, the last office project in the CBD, some 16.46 million square feet of office space have been built in San Diego County, not one stick of it in Downtown San Diego. Including the 1.02 million square feet of suburban office currently under construction, that’s almost two new downtowns per decade, and virtually all of the new space in places where there were not streets or sewers just months prior to construction. In those places, there still aren’t buses, trolleys, restaurants or dry cleaners.

And while the urban planning ethic seemed good and reasonable at the time — build a housing subdivision and be sure to build a little (or big) office building within a few blocks so the new resident wouldn’t have to commute far — the reality is that the Scripps Ranch resident found a job in Carlsbad, the Carlsbad resident found a job near UTC, the UTC resident is commuting to Rancho Bernardo, and within the space of a decade San Diegans have found themselves commuting slowly all over hell and back. One of San Diegans’ worst fears, its sprawling Los Angelization, has become too close for comfort.

Nothing will undo the sprawl of recent decades. Building more and bigger freeways will help ease the pain and is under way. The San Diego City Council and the County Board of Supervisors cannot decide the pace of business growth for Carlsbad, Poway, Escondido, Vista, San Marcos, Oceanside or other suburban cities. But the council and the board can stop the exodus of local government and utility employees from Downtown to Kearny Mesa and other suburban regions, a quiet but massive migration beneath the public’s radar. Not only should this migration cease immediately, but it should be reversed, and soon we’ll call upon Greg Cox and Ron Roberts for the county and Michael Zucchet and Ralph Inzunza for the city, the four local representatives of Downtown, to explain what they’re doing about it.

More importantly, the San Diego council alone in mid-2004 will have an opportunity to influence where business will grow, more than any other legislative body in the region can influence such growth. The Centre City Community Plan update is making its way from neighborhood workshop to neighborhood workshop, already a product of many months of CCDC consultant analysis and fees. The public is being asked to comment on three alternatives, and if the frustration expressed by the Downtown San Diego Partnership’s Greg Shannon is any indication, CCDC doesn’t want to hear much of anything beyond the three alternatives. If the council agrees with any of CCDC’s three alternatives, then both will be guilty of encouraging suburban sprawl and discouraging Downtown San Diego’s rightful place as the Central Business District.

That’s because in Alternative 1, new office space in Downtown San Diego would be limited to 12.4 million new square feet. Alternative 2 limits new office to 8.3 million square feet. Alternative 3, the most generous, accommodates only 13.9 million square feet of new offices. These grand totals would be accommodated by the year 2025, meaning the CBD would be expected to absorb less in 21 years than what San Diego has produced in the last 10.

In his letter to CCDC Chairman Hal Sadler, the Downtown Partnership’s Shannon, the developer who guided One American Plaza through successive ownerships, suggests that CCDC staff and consultants consider “ridiculous” the partnership’s goal of 20 million to 30 million square feet of new office space in Downtown San Diego over the next two decades. And “no one could disagree” with their ridicule “based on the past 10 years absorption of office space…. However, that would be an incorrect analysis. What the partnership is advocating is a policy decision that would concentrate employment land and office development in Downtown rather than the suburbs for the overall benefit of Downtown and the entire San Diego region.

“Remember,” Shannon continues, “a shortage of employment land was identified well before the shortage of housing land was identified and the region faces a lack of both types of developable land. Furthermore, the Partnership’s emphasis on economic development should not be interpreted to de-emphasize the residential initiative currently under way or necessarily decrease the amount of residential that can be accommodated in Downtown. Finally, please do not place too much emphasis on the exact numbers of 20 (million) to 30 million square feet of office space as a planning goal. The importance is to set a high number, just as in the late 1980s 50,000 residents was set as a high goal for Downtown.”

Until Park Row, Marina Park and the Meridian, Downtown San Diego hosted no residents other than the very poor. Today, some 20,000 people, mostly middle income and some very wealthy, call Downtown home. For the year 2025, CCDC’s Alternative 1 calls for quadrupling the residential population of the Centre City to 82,300. That’s a great goal. Residentially, CCDC’s efforts have been heroic.

The City Council has a duty to be no less ambitious on the commercial side because a home for jobs is no less important than homes for living off-hours. The Downtown Partnership’s newly proposed Alternative 4 should call for 44 million square feet of office space in the Centre City by 2025, quadrupling the current inventory, and the CCDC board should recommend exactly that when its turn comes. The plan will take shape when the city offers incentives, including public parking, to Centre City office developers and denies suburban office and industrial building permits to any speculator who asks.

If all that happens, those will be 44 million square feet of offices supporting tens of thousands of jobs not dumped on suburban freeways.