Las Vegas-based JMA Architecture Studios, one of Nevada’s oldest and largest architectural firms, has selected Downtown San Diego for its first divisional office. The firm has taken about 3,500 square feet once used by Carrier Johnson in the Horton Court building at Fourth Avenue and E Street in the Gaslamp Quarter. With about 10 employees, the firm already is looking to expand.

“Right now, if I had the space I could hire 25 people,” says Thomas Schoeman, president of JMA.

His company has 160 employees split between two offices in Las Vegas. It selected San Diego for expansion after evaluating in seven western states the 10 largest cities with a population of at least a million and a decade of positive growth. The office opened in January.

“What really drove the final decision to go to San Diego was a paradigm; the need for additional people and we are hoping the hiring market will be better in San Diego than Las Vegas,” says Schoeman. Most of the company’s work now is in Nevada although its clients have projects in Southern California and Schoeman expects that business to grow.

Thomas Schoeman

Schoeman will run both offices. He and his wife already have rented an apartment in Little Italy and are scouting for-sale condos.

Schoeman offers a somewhat surprising observation on the cost of doing business here. “I think San Diego is more affordable than Las Vegas,” he says. “Even though the housing is more expensive, the office space is more economical than Las Vegas and the salaries are comparable.”

Locating Downtown was an easy call.

“Design firms are strong supporters of urban lifestyles,” Schoeman says. “Much of the work we do is urban planning, mixed-use type of development. We honestly like the culture and lifestyle that a downtown location affords.”

The company divides itself into six studios, or areas of work: health care, hospitality (which includes condo towers), public projects, interiors, commercial and education (mostly K-12).

JMA also was targeted and wooed by the new Downtown Business Attraction Program, with company officials meeting with representatives that included Donna Alm at CCDC, Julie Meier Wright and Lauree Sahba from the Regional Economic Development Corp. and Barbara Warden, head of the Downtown San Diego Partnership.

“We love being Downtown” says Amber Mauer, JMA’s regional marketing coordinator. “It is a really neat change from Las Vegas. Everyone in the San Diego community has been incredibly welcoming to us.”

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While the exponential number of new residents keeps adding to the Downtown residential sum, the commercial count will be minus one prime number when Ernst & Young departs in June after 16 years on Broadway. The Big Four accounting firm will move its entire 190-employee work force to the Plaza at La Jolla Village, where it has signed a 10-year lease for 25,646 square feet for $10.8 million.

“Our lease was up June 30, (2005) so we reviewed options in Downtown, University Towne Centre and Carmel Valley,” says John Belli, E&Y managing partner. “We did a ZIP code analysis of where our clients were located. Out of 225 clients, almost every one is in UTC or North County. We have one client Downtown and one or two south of Downtown. We’re in the service business; we need to be with them.”

Belli says that proximity will save the accounting firm money. E&Y also did a ZIP code analysis of its employees. “Recent graduates are 20 percent to 25 percent of a firm like ours; that group lives in Pacific Beach. The rest live north or a bit east. Only a handful live south of the city,” says Belli.

He says E&Y was on a 15-year lease for its 30,000 square feet of space occupying all of the 11th floor and portions of the 12th and 13th floors at 501 W. Broadway. “If we had stayed, we would have completely redone the space, gutted the floor and started from scratch,” Belli says. “We’re still very much proponents of Downtown.”

It still is a large loss for commercial Downtown. “We’re very sad to seem them go,” says Barbara Warden, president of the Downtown San Diego Partnership. “Somebody will come in and fill the space.”

She admits she doesn’t know who yet, but she points out the Gray Cary law firm is moving back Downtown after several years away. Warden also is gratified Sempra Energy decided to stay Downtown. With a Sempra employee on the Partnership board, Warden was aware of stirrings there earlier than at E&Y. “By the time I found out they were out the door, they were already committed to a lease.”

Jason Hughes, a partner in the Irving Hughes company, says E&Y had been looking outside Downtown for three years. “They had it in their mind years ago,” he says. “They could have negotiated a cheaper deal Downtown; clearly it was not for economic reasons.”

Hughes says E&Y won’t be the only sizable firm to leave Downtown this year. Without identifying the particular company, he says a newly acquired financial firm will move its call center from Downtown. “They want very inexpensive space,” he says.

Warden says Downtown commercial marketing needs to refocus from nationwide to regional. “We need to speak to people within a 100-mile radius who are used to the (property) prices and would appreciate the urban lifestyle,” she says.

Brian D. Ulf and A. Brennan Ochs of Cushman & Wakefield in Los Angeles and Steve Rosetta of Corporate Real Estate Advisors represented E&Y in its new lease. Equity Office Properties represented itself as lessor with Bess Wakeman.

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Caltrans has topped out its $72 million, 300,000-square-foot low-rise office construction in Old Town, a relocation project that future leaders of the Downtown Business Attraction Program declined to pursue for the Centre City before the Downtown Business Attraction Program was formalized. Government agencies are supposed to operate from urban redevelopment districts whenever possible. Caltrans claimed the government policy didn’t apply to it.

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“Manpower Tower” is what Phil Blair is calling the 27,000 square foot building at 1855 First Ave. that he and Mel Katz bought for $4.875 million as the new headquarters for their employment company. The two have had offices Downtown for 21 of the firm’s 28 years. The building and its 64 parking spaces will be home for 18 of Manpower’s 100 San Diego employees. Move in is April 1.

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Dan Novak has many reasons to be thrilled about Cox Communications nailing down a lease for two lower floors at the 306,700-square-foot, 15-story DiamondView Tower that will house the Channel 4 San Diego television station as well as the company’s advertising sales group, San Diego Interconnect Operated by Cox Media. For starters, when the office tower outside right field at Petco Park opens in January 2007, he will be down to a single office, rather than working from both the 33-employee television operation he runs in Little Italy and an office in the 97-person cable advertising business that Jeff Fisher, a fellow Cox g.m., runs in Hillcrest.

The 45,000 square feet of space also will afford Novak a new luxury: real studio space. “It will be the first time we had a studio since we launched Channel 4 (1997),” Novak says. “To take up tenancy and really grow Channel 4 San Diego is something we are really excited about. To be able to flip on the lights and spit out some shows, to put it bluntly. We have been shoehorned into a space since we launched and we are bursting at the seams.”

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Also at DiamondView, Comerica Bank will consolidate its two B Street regional offices on a pair of mid-level floors and build a ground floor retail branch. Comerica knows baseball; the ballpark for the Detroit Tigers carries its name.

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Yehudi “Gaf” Gaffen’s development firm, Gafcon, has expanded its Downtown space by 4,000 square feet and now is using 16,000 square feet on the 16th floor of the 701 B Street building.

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Geary Interactive, a full-service online advertising agency, has moved its headquarters from 906 10th Ave. to 5,716 square feet in the Bank of America Plaza at 450 B St.

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Tucker Sadler, one of San Diego’s oldest architectural design firms, has moved to new 9,000-square-foot office headquarters on the 17th floor of the NBC Building. With 40 employees, the firm outgrew its previous Bankers Hill headquarters where it had been based for 37 years and was known as Tucker Sadler Noble Castro Architects. The new name took effect Jan. 1.

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On Call Employee Solutions Inc., a staffing company specializing in placing administrative, financial, mortgage and technical staff, has moved from 444 W. Beech St. to new offices at 110 West A St. to accommodate growth. The 25-person firm, which is celebrating its 10-year anniversary, found work for more than 1,200 individuals during 2004, reports CEO Dirk Broekema.

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DG Energy Solutions, a San Diego-based energy systems company, has moved from 733 Eighth Ave. into 7,472 square feet of office space at 1660 Union St.

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Months into his new gig with Mark Steele, planner Steve Silverman, formerly of Rick Engineering in Mission Valley, is feeling cozy at Urban Counsel, a division of the M.W. Steele Group. Occupying 1,500 square feet of new space at Steele’s 15th Street offices, the two-person Urban Counsel is about to grow to six. Steele and Silverman are combining urban design with policy planning. Most planning in San Diego is done either by engineering firms or maybe by architectural firms that focus on physical design, not the policy aspects of land use planning, says Silverman. Outside of Father Joe’s Village, food choices remain slim in the far east of the East Village — 325 15th St. Silverman confesses to hunger pangs when thinking about the pending opening of Deborah Helm’s new Mission Café in the neighborhood.

The Downtown Relocations column features news on firms that are moving into or expanding in the 92101 Zip code, and news of those companies abandoning the inner city or considering it. Send submissions to Manny Cruz, manny@sandiegometro.com.