The San Diego County Grand Jury report suggesting the consolidation of the three redevelopment agencies, including the Centre City Development Corp., under a single bureaucratic leadership is wrong. Here’s why: It focuses on the wrong redevelopment problem.

The real problem is the only type of growth we will see as our future unfolds will be redevelopment. We are out of undeveloped dirt. Yet, if we are going to continue to economically prosper as a community, we will grow. That growth will be in the existing urban areas. We will grow up, and not out, in many of our existing neighborhoods. The city of San Diego needs to be prepared, however it decides to administer that growth.

While the grand jury found some legitimate shortcomings at CCDC, what it should be doing now is zeroing in on the current state of land use planning. Investigating the way projects are addressed at the local community planning level would be eye-opening. What the city needs from the jury is suggestions on how to make policy, improve infrastructure and encourage redevelopment of virtually all of San Diego’s urban communities outside of Downtown, not micromanaging the end game of a success story.

Jurors should begin by examining the role of the Community Planning Groups, whose members, all unpaid, citizen volunteers, exercise enormous influence. Many of their decisions are anti-change, anti-density, anti-growth keep-it-as-it-is, backward-looking policy making. Worth exploring is why these groups are structured to have such enormous influence. This is by far the most important land use issue the city faces with respect to coordinating policy and administering real estate planning before they reach City Council.

It is important because, simply, the system is broken. It is so busted that eventually the absence of forward-thinking land use decisions will cause housing price escalation via delays, limited approvals of new projects, unrealistic conditions and uncoordinated planning.

The city’s professional planners are excluded from playing a larger role in the process, for reasons the grand jury should analyze.

Focusing on CCDC perhaps has merit if productivity is the standard. While there are substantial and important public improvements in the works — most notably parks, bridges and other projects necessary to support the residents and new businesses lured Downtown by redevelopment — these are rather pro forma efforts. This is not the sort of dynamic activity that represented CCDC’s focus the prior three decades. That agency stewarded the grand redevelopment of a sagging urban core, pushing through new projects ultimately at a pace and scale that made San Diego the envy of similar agencies across the nation.

Those times are past. Recent surveys by my firm, The London Group Realty Advisors, suggest there could be a six-year hold on new, market rate residential development in the Downtown market. Projects under construction total 1,400 units while those in the pipeline total 3,400.

Much of this pipeline is a pipe dream. No substantial Downtown redevelopment will go forward in the foreseeable future, and no amount of assistance from CCDC will change that. On both the residential and commercial side, construction cost increases, large unsold inventory, general market collapse and the relatively narrow market appeal of Downtown are likely to combine to create a virtual moratorium for far longer than the larger down cycle will last. And when substantial new construction does return Downtown, perhaps it does not require a special agency to expedite the work.

What is clear is much of the original purpose of the CCDC has been spectacularly fulfilled: it was created by Mayor Wilson to catalyze the revitalization of an important, large patch of deteriorating property. Even the agency’s most vocal critics must accede to its accomplishments.

Certainly it can be argued that because of its very success, CCDC has worked its way out of a job. Indeed, eventually that will happen, with tens of millions of dollars returned to the city as loans. But before we go down the abandonment route, perhaps we should evaluate what made CCDC so effective, and apply it to the redevelopment of the urban, edge neighborhoods. The Mayor and City Council might want to focus on a new redevelopment and planning model for the entire city. And studying CCDC would be the place to start.

Gary H. London is president of The London Group Realty Advisors Inc., providing real estate consulting and economic analysis. Check him out on the Web at www.londongroup.com or e-mail him at glondon@sandiegometro.com.