While his legacy will be stewardship of the ballpark, outgoing CCDC President Peter Hall is proudest of his role in the residential boom, one that will see a record 30,000 people move Downtown this year. (photo/alandeckerphoto.com)

Standing atop the new parking garage next to the San Diego Convention Center, Peter Hall sweeps his arm in a 180-degree arc, mapping a view that begins in the nearly built-out Marina District southwest of Horton Plaza to the large parking lots and surrounding buildings east of Petco Park. “This,” he says pointing to the lots, “is going to look just like that.”

With one of those lots alone slated for 3.1 million square feet of development, it is a statement even the relentlessly optimistic Hall would have been hard pressed to make 10 years ago. It was then he emerged as something of a dark horse candidate to ride the region’s redevelopment thoroughbred, the Centre City Development Corp.

Now, as Petco Park is about to celebrate its second season with the surrounding neighborhood unrecognizable from when he started, Hall, 62, is calling it a career. He leaves as CCDC’s third chief executive at the same time the agency is celebrating its 30th anniversary and many successes. The CCDC board this month will hire an executive search firm and Hall expects to be history by September, but no later than December. For the computer salesman turned institutional lender, turned developer, turned venture capital executive, turned private consultant, it has been quite the journey, one that prepared him well for his redevelopment leadership role.

“As I look back, I realize that in a funny way I had spent my first 25 years in many different industry segments having something to do with our Downtown,” says Hall. “That had really prepared me for this job, more than I realized.”

At Great American Bank, Hall participated in financing the very first Downtown housing projects such as Park Row, Columbia Place and Watermark as well as historic restorations in the Gaslamp Quarter such as the Louis Bank of Commerce and Keating buildings. He ultimately played a development role for the savings and loan in what is now known as One America Plaza. That was where Great American had planned to move its headquarters before the lender was seized by regulators, mostly for bad banking investments in Arizona and the re-regulation of the industry by the federal government.

Ironically, in the longest drought in modern Downtown history, probably the biggest failure of Hall’s CCDC administration has been its inability to stimulate more office development since One America Plaza opened 14 years ago. Finally, as he leaves CCDC, one office tower is nearly complete, Broadway 655, right across from One America Plaza. But in the meantime, millions of square feet of suburban offices have been built, redefining traffic patterns, congesting freeways and threatening Downtown San Diego’s historic claim as the Central Business District.

As the lender collapsed, Hall left Great American to spend time with his family. When school started that September — his wife was a teacher and his children in college at the time — he joined a venture capital company and started traveling. It became tiring after a few years and he became an independent consultant.

In 1994 he learned CCDC was searching for a replacement for Pam Hamilton and threw his name in the hat. After two separate rejection letters from the search firm, both noting his lack of experience in a government bureaucracy, he concluded it was not meant to be.

Then in November the phone rang. The CCDC board wanted to talk with private sector candidates. He and a few others were interviewed by a committee that included Gil Johnson, who today is again on the board, this time heading the effort to find Hall’s replacement.

“We took a step back and said ‘what do we really need to drive the agency at that time?’” Johnson recalls. “We had come close to signing on someone from the public sector. I like to give the credit to Gordon Carrier for helping us see the wisdom of having a private sector person.”

Hall sensed the board’s interest.

“I apparently had a pretty good interview with them,” Hall says. “They liked my perspectives, that I had worked in a fairly visible, heavily regulated public environment. When people looked at it, they found that most of my experiences prepared me for this job. But it was a leap of faith.”

Just before Christmas, CCDC’s then-chairman and Bank of Commerce President Peter Q. Davis called Hall to Davis’ bank offices at the base of One America Plaza. Hall was offered the job, accepted and started the second week of January 1995.

Davis, who left CCDC three years ago, recalls a Downtown of slowing redevelopment activity. “It was a combination of recession and the failure of many of our largest Downtown employers, the S&Ls and a couple of community banks,” says Davis, the longest-serving board chair in CCDC’s history. “With the banks’ demise, lending became difficult on Downtown projects. Meanwhile, the developers left standing were critical of CCDC’s bureaucratic attitude, claiming the agency didn’t understand them.”

About the same time, CCDC had essentially doubled its territory, adding what was then called Centre City East, a collection of aging, underutilized buildings in Downtown’s most inhospitable neighborhood. A fresh approach was needed.

“Peter was clearly the right guy at the right time,” says Davis. “He had finance experience, but more important he had development experience. So when he negotiated a deal, there was no complaining he was being bureaucratic, he was just being tough.”

As the economy heated, Hall’s skills proved a plus. “I give him credit for bringing the concentration of residential units Downtown needed to make it a community and for cleaning up the lots that had been left in the wake of redevelopment, where owners were riding appreciation without doing anything to improve the property,” Davis says. “Peter attacked this and brought eminent domain to property owned by some of the best connected individuals with friends at City Hall. He is a real professional and the respect the development industry has for him has rubbed off on CCDC.”

Hall can, and often does wax philosophic. His wife was a teacher for 36 years, the last 32 in Chula Vista. During his first 25 years of work, they had different perspectives. “I was out trying to push the business envelope and she was trying to push the individual envelope,” Hall says. “I was making the money and she was making the difference. I had never totally valued how fulfilling her job was. At CCDC, I realized how placemaking and difference-making city building was. I get satisfaction of being part of a team that is making a difference.”

While he liberally spreads the credit, difference making is evident in the statistics. When he joined the agency, it had five projects on the books. Today, he says, it has 105. “Self-deluded people might say I really turned this around,” he says. “Baloney. Timing is everything. We did a good job of carpe diem. No one person causes something like this to happen. There are things far beyond our reach that have to be right. Things like traffic congestion and the high price of suburban housing tee it up. Yes you have to hit the ball, but someone else teed it up.”

The results remain impressive.

During his tenure, CCDC figures show the private sector invested $3.79 billion in Downtown and the public sector $637.4 million. That $4.43 billion has helped generate 2,564 new hotel rooms, 700,000 square feet of retail space, 6,314 new homes (of which 1,162 are for low- to moderate-income families) and 33,820 jobs, about half in construction. The agency had 19 employees when he started; it has 47 today.

Asked what he is most proud of, Hall talks of his family. He stresses to employees the need for balance. “Redevelopment is a long-running movie in which all of us have cameo roles,” he says. “When all is said and done, you go home. That is what it is all about.”

From a real estate transaction perspective, he points to the 1997 national housing initiative, where CCDC assembled blocks in the Marina District and went national seeking interested developers. “We had 11 sites and 38 national builders, none from San Diego, that came to us with proposals,” he says. Of the 11 sites, 10 are done or near completion.

Hall is careful to point out that effort happened pre-Petco Park. “All the ballpark did was spread the success into East Village,” he says. “I know this is a bad, bad analogy, but after that it was housing on steroids.”

Within a three-block radius of Petco, he counts more than 3,000 housing units and $1.5 billion in investment, not including the ballpark itself. “It changed the destiny of the East Village,” he says. “Land went from $29-30 a foot to $200 to $300 a foot.”

All that development has gotten ahead of public services, forcing CCDC to hurry up a $230 million program to create parks and help fund the library. “We are doing a little catch-up with that now,” he says. “The same things for some of the public safety issues. We are investing in a couple more fire stations.”

Counterintuitively, the buildup of Downtown has changed the services provided by fire stations. “As we take down the underutilized 1940 and 1950 buildings and replace them with these very smart and very safe buildings, the job for the fire department has changed from fire protection to life protection,” Hall says. “Today 70 to 80 percent of the calls are paramedic calls. I expect that percentage to grow.”

Hall is an advocate of redeveloping the North Embarcadero, the waterfront roughly between Seaport Village and the County Administration Building, into an amenity all San Diegans can enjoy. He is disappointed it is moving so slowly. “The North Embarcadero will be looked back upon by generations, and by people from around the world as a project that is timeless,” he says. “It will be like Mission Bay or what Kate Sessions did with Balboa Park. When you do that western waterfront, I think our city will be looked upon as one of the great waterfront cities in this country. I don’t think there is a more important project that all of us are working on.”

The project’s weakness is that, unlike Petco, it is not an economic generator. But a Downtown ballpark in East Village would be, and Hall was an early advocate. He and his staff were quietly working on balsa wood models well before the decision to site it Downtown was made.

“We knew this would be a great catalyst for our eastern side of Downtown,” Hall says. “Proposition C (the ballpark project approved by voters in 1998) was about more than a ballpark. People thought that phrase was just a Madison Avenue PR stunt. It never was in our mind. It was going to be an anchor, a catalyst to our Downtown.”

As the project’s legal woes mounted and construction stopped, Hall fretted, not that the lawsuits would eventually succeed, but that the Padres would lose their will. “We were not worried about the legal positions, we worried about the stress it was putting on the Padres,” he says. “I’m sure there were many nights the Padres and John Moores wondered if they could see it through. I worried, ‘Could the opponents wear you down just by attrition?’”

Despite working up to 30 hours a week for more than two years on the ballpark, Hall crossed swords with developer JMI as the project neared completion. Plans were unveiled for a larger office tower, and smaller park outside center field than what voters approved. Meetings were heated. Hall, backed by his board, stood his ground. “It is better to stand up and speak up than shut up, even though politically it is easier to do the latter,” he says. “Their (park) plan changed from what was represented to the public during the election out of economic necessity.”

Hall sees the City Council’s ultimate support of the larger park, rejection of the building, as a continued endorsement of the agency’s mission.

“We report directly through an entrepreneurial, private sector board of directors,” he says. “It gives us the ability to stand up and say what we think. We are paid to try to do the right thing. Most of the time they have allowed us enough independence to pursue what we think is the right thing to do for the long-term perspective of the city. That model has served the city in a big-picture sense going back to the Pete Wilson days.”

While Hall wants his legacy to be “feet on the street,” the 30,000 people expected to move Downtown this year, he likely will be defined by the ballpark.

“His biggest accomplishment, bar-none, was the ballpark,” says Davis. “He worked, negotiated, bartered and arm twisted to get the Padres to look Downtown and to get the council to understand redevelopment law and the advantage tax increment offered the city.”

Dene Oliver, chief executive of OliverMcMillin, a Downtown developer, agrees. “His legacy will be the ballpark,” Oliver says. “He tenaciously pursued the completion of this world-class facility which is a gift to all of San Diego County.”

Hall acknowledges it is unlikely his successor will get such a trophy project. Rather, CCDC’s role is shifting to one of infrastructure support and guidance of private efforts. “The business model today is really private-public,” he says. “That means that our resources and financial resources have shifted away from big investments in private ventures.”

When the CCDC board picks his replacement, Hall is ready to go. “I have committed to the board I will serve at their pleasure this year,” he says. “But once they have my successor, I will ride off into the sunset.” When Sol sets that day behind the Downtown skyline, it will be one markedly improved during Hall’s tenure, the stuff of which developer’s dreams are made.