County Supervisor Greg Cox wants the old Chula Vista to flow with the new Chula Vista.

Take a look at fast-growing Chula Vista, and you’ll see a tale of two cities. Old Chula Vista by the bay still has the personality of a traditional Southern California town. Its urban center has sprawling commerce, government complexes and an eclectic collection of stately Victorians and comfortable but basic apartments and homes.

The other Chula Vista stretches beyond Interstate 805 in neatly arranged, master-planned communities like Eastlake and Otay Ranch. This is an upscale suburban world spreading systematically, year after year, across what was once open space. It’s producing much-needed homes in the super-heated, demand-driven real estate market. On the ample land at the outer fringes of housing development are amenities that put Chula Vista on the destination map: the Olympic Training Center, Coors Amphitheatre and a water park, Knott’s Soak City USA. Parts of Otay Valley may be earmarked for industrial development, but the city and county are working together to preserve an 11-mile corridor for equestrian and hiking trails.

Now that Chula Vista has a population more than 200,000, Mayor Steve Padilla — the first Hispanic mayor for a city with a big Hispanic population — and the Chula Vista City Council face the task of redeveloping the west side so that it, too, keeps its place in the sun.

“The biggest challenge I see is that there will not be a de facto old town and new town created,” says Greg Cox, county supervisor and former Chula Vista mayor.

He’s optimistic. Chula Vista has a long history of redevelopment going back to the 1970s, he notes. And there are projects either recently completed or in the pipeline, including a Chula Vista sign over Third Avenue, new office space at Third Avenue and H Street and an addition to City Hall.

Although two marinas and the Chula Vista Nature Center already grace the Chula Vista waterfront, the city has grander developments in mind. The Port of San Diego and Chula Vista have approved an ambitious 546-acre bayfront master plan. It combines 126 acres of private property with port-owned land to form, in the words of port officials, “one of the last great development opportunities for creating a legacy destination on San Diego Bay.” Among the projects in the plan are a resort hotel, an aquatic center, an amphitheater, a sports complex, a retail plaza, a new commerce and civic plaza and a new power plant. Years in the planning, its backers hope that at last the dream of a spectacular bayfront will come true. Concludes Cox, “The changes (to Chula Vista) are great, but the changes that will come are even better.”