The Navy Broadway Complex and the Embarcadero are not the only parts of downtown San Diego on the verge of profound change. The city’s downtown redevelopment arm, the Center City Development Corporation, held a workshop yesterday with several nationally recognized architects, to brainstorm on how to make San Diego’s downtown a place to be proud of. KPBS reporter Alison St John has more.
San Diego’s downtown is transforming rapidly. As of January this year, there were more than 3,000 condominiums under construction, with another 7,000 in the pipeline. Hundreds of thousands of square feet of retail and office space are going up, and the Downtown Community Plan calls for 85,000 people to live within its 1,500 acres.
Architect Karen Alschuler from San Francisco put the workshop in a national context.
Alschuler: We’re seeing all over the United States people moving back into our cities. People are looking for life and activities and culture things that can only happen at the hearts of great cities. The implications are that we have to really focus on density. What’s good density, how can we live well, live better at higher densities?
About 100 San Diegans showed up to hear about visions for downtown, including Don Roodesil who lives in neighboring Mission Hills. Roodesil says downtown is vital to the health of his neighborhood because the higher density housing being built downtown will take the pressure off older communities like his. But he visits downtown a lot and hopes it doesn’t turn into a bunch of high rises.
Roodesil: Come to the restaurants, walk the embarcadero, count the number of cranes and you can usually tell by how high the cranes are is how high the buildings are going to be.
Downtown is in some ways a symbol of the whole city. San Diego resident Marty Kraasberg spoke at the workshop about making a downtown that doesn’t look like just any other city
Kraasberg: This is a high tech community, the aerospace, the military, biomedical. We are one of the smartest and most brilliant universities. Why does our community not reflect that and look like a city of the 21st century?
Krasberg suggested using more innovative building materials to really distinguish the City’s core from other urban landscapes.
Architect Paul Whalen from New York said the extraordinary pace of growth recently in San Diego’s downtown is one of the challenges.
Whalen: I think the level of every day residential architecture that’s being built in San Diego is maybe the best in the country, and it’s certainly better than the stuff that’s being built in New York. The problem is a lot of it’s being built at the same time. There’s a danger that it could all start to look a little the same.
Gwynne Pugh, a panel member from Santa Monica said San Diego has some unique characteristics. For example, all the earthquake faults than run under downtown mean there are spaces where highrises can’t be built, and small pocket parks can go in. But Pugh urged San Diego architects to be braver and have more spirit.
Pugh: I would like to see the city really develop that and let itself go. I think it’s been holding itself back. You don’t have any buildings in the downtown area which is “wow you’ve got to go see that building when you’re in San Diego.”
But Pugh says it’s not just about the buildings, it’s the space between them, the streets that make the character of a city. He emphasized the importance of walk-able neighborhoods, but quoted a daunting statistic. It takes about 1,600 households to support two blocks of vibrant walk-able retail stores on both sides of the street . That’s higher density than San Diego is used to.
Howard Elkus, a nationally known architect from Boston challenged the city to take advantage of its world class weather and location
Elkus: It has fantastic assets. You are willing to take chances, you are looking to the future, not dwell on the past. There’s no reason why this city can’t be on the cutting edge of what’s happening in our cities.
A group of San Diego architects leaving the workshop were glad a dialogue has started about how downtown’s public spaces could be designed. But architect Don Blair couldn’t help coming back to a very practical reality
Blair: One of the problems we have is the prices have escalated from the late 90s from less than $200 a square foot to well over $650 a square foot today. It’s very difficult for a developer to say “where’s my return in that”? So this issue of creating public uses within private enterprise areas is a dilemma.
Yesterday’s workshop is the first in a series the Center City Development Corporation plans to hold this year, to generate creative ideas that hopefully, developers can use as they rapidly build out San Diego’s downtown . Alison St John, KPBS News.
(Photo: Center City Development Corporation held a workshop Tuesday with several nationally recognized architects, to brainstorm how to revitalize downtown San Diego. Alison St. John/KPBS ).
