CCDC’s Nancy Graham is helping Downtown grow open spaces and parks, such as the Tweet Street Park (right) now under construction along the freeway edges of Cortez Hill. ‘Parks have to work for everyone Downtown,’ she says. (photo/alandeckerphoto.com)

With Balboa Park on one edge and San Diego Bay on the other, how much more green space could Downtowners hope for? Lots more – about 50 acres, to be specific, says Nancy Graham, president and chief operating officer of the Centre City Development Corp. "We don’t have enough spaces where people can be outside," says Graham. "We need spaces where we can do active things, where we can kick a soccer ball, where we can do passive things like read and people-watch, where we can take our friends when they visit, where we can meet. Our goal is to create parks and public spaces so every Downtown resident is within a five or 10-minute walk to a public open space, preferably with some green."

"We don’t have enough spaces where people can be outside," says Graham. "We need spaces where we can do active things, where we can kick a soccer ball, where we can do passive things like read and people-watch, where we can take our friends when they visit, where we can meet. Our goal is to create parks and public spaces so every Downtown resident is within a five- or 10-minute walk to a public open space, preferably with some green."

Downtown is now home to nearly 30,000 residents, all but 8,000 of whom have come in the past seven years — almost exclusively to condominiums and high-rises, many from a family-sized house with its own patch of green.

Nine new parks are coming, including the innovative Tweet Street Park that wraps around the freeway edges of Cortez Hill, and Children’s Museum Park across from Children’s Park at Front Street and Harbor Drive, both now under construction. Developers of the Pinnacle Museum Tower are building a park, tentatively called the East Village Green at 14th and Island, and CCDC is planning to convert a parking lot in the shadow of the courthouse and the county jail into Civic Square, a park-covered parking lot. They’re also pushing for parks at C Street between Eighth and Ninth, and adjoining St. Joseph’s Cathedral, and want to put green "lids" over the 163 freeway to reconnect northeast Downtown and Balboa Park to the Bay.

With $21.4 million budgeted for this year, CCDC is beginning to acquire land for the East Village Green, straddling 14th Street between F and G streets on the west edge of East Village, to add to the East Village Green. The bayfront corridor, still in the planning stages, ambitiously hopes to blend the Manchester development of the Navy Broadway Complex with the county’s plan to turn its administration building parking lots into a long, green public space full of art and activity.

Acquiring land and ensuring maintenance of the green spaces are the big challenges facing planners of new Downtown parks, which cannot be covered by the existing Downtown Maintenance Assessment District. Nico Calavita, retired San Diego State University professor of urban studies who has spent a lifetime studying the revitalization of cities from Barcelona to Berkeley and is active in Walk San Diego, says there’s a real need for more public space Downtown.

"Centre City came very late to the revelation that with so many people coming, Downtown needs more public space for residents, day workers and tourists," Calavita says. "CCDC needs to change its approach to working with developers. They are in the successful habit of holding (developers’) hands, but now it’s time to shift the paradigm to regulating developments to be sure developers pay for the social costs of the development."

Because the agency did so well at promoting development, in part by increasing the acceptable density ratios, it made it harder to buy back the land needed for parks.

"The price of the land is tied to what you can do with it, so prices went up as soon as density did," Calavita explains. "So, in terms of acquiring land now, CCDC shot themselves in the foot."

And no one created maintenance funds, so the new parks either will have to look to a pension-punched city budget or to creative mechanisms to care for the new parks. While the CCDC has plenty of money to develop parks, its mandate ends at their creation, Graham says. Once in place, money for maintenance and improvements hasn’t been set aside in most of Downtown.

Little Italy is different, as a quick walk down India Street and up Ash Street with its four piazzas full of people shows. Although there are just a few parks, the neighborhood has an open and intimate feel inspired by its public spaces. More than any other neighborhood, Little Italy has been able to leverage CCDC and its own business improvement district into neighborhood charm, most recently adding flower baskets to its streetscape.

Marco Li Mandri, who manages Little Italy’s district and runs a business that sets up and manages such districts all over the nation, says those opportunities happen because Little Italy opted out of the Downtown Maintenance Assessment District to create its own.

"All California cities are so far underwater because of pension fund costs that if people want to be able to enhance their cities, community benefit assessments are the way to go," Li Mandri says. "Then the property owners can control the funding for their neighborhoods and keep them desirable."

Little Italy is spending about $700,000 this year for maintenance, he says.

"They give us the trash cans and we empty them. They give us trees and we trim them. They give us flowers and planters and we take care of them," he says. "It’s been a great partnership."

The rest of Downtown is part of a single district and has about $6 million a year to spend, but little if any of it goes to parks, he says.

Money for parks is one of the biggest outstanding issues, both Downtown and across the city, says Councilman Kevin Faulconer, whose District 2 includes most of Downtown. Faulconer served on the Parks and Recreation Board for five years before he ran for office. He now chairs the North Embarcadero Joint Powers Authority. The preservation and expansion of parks and open spaces is an issue dear to his heart.

"Even in tough budget times, we have to find money to care for them," he says. "Now we have the opportunity and we don’t have those great urban spaces Downtown that we want and need to be a great city."

Faulconer is open to funding ideas, including assessment districts and corporate sponsorship. "I’m going to make sure we get space we can really use, no matter where the money comes from," he says. "It’s not enough to have spaces. We have to activate them to make them inviting, unique spaces that people can and do use. We want families to come. We want kids to come. We want spaces that are designed to really work for the neighborhood and the public."

The councilman was among the participants in an April CCDC program featuring urban parks and landscape experts who talked about ways to make new and existing spaces more useful to the public.

To Philip Myrich of Project for Public Space in New York, it’s clear that Downtown needs more active space, more gathering and meeting space, and more destination space — not necessarily parks alone, but plazas and streetscapes that make the neighborhood a "system of connected spaces."

"People want to go out and see other people. They say they want to be alone but they want to be around people to feel good," Myrich says. "The space is there. It needs to be programmed so that people feel connected and can use it, and it will succeed or fail depending on the streetscapes that lead to it."

Designing parks that combine public use and neighborhood affection and enhancement is another challenge. Often, residents feel such a strong ownership of their parks that they resist changes that would draw more people. Pantoja Park users opposed adding playground equipment to the park earlier this year, Graham says.

"Parks have to work for everyone Downtown, they can’t just belong to people nearby," she says. "We do a master plan so the park plan doesn’t get hijacked by the people who live closest to it."v