Vacant office space in Hillcrest to become Walgreens

Originally proposed to be part of a boutique hotel, the vacant building at 301 University Ave. in Hillcrest will become a Walgreens before the end of 2012.

read more: sduptownnews, 06.01.12.

so what, if the boutique hotel thing fell through?
I’m sure there’s some group of creative architects out there that would love to make this place pretty. or upcoming entrepreneurs wanting to set up small shops. (but probably need $$$$)

I should’ve gotten into this stuff earlier and popped in to the Uptown Community meetings. 

what I would like: 3-4 story apartment building — ground floor as retail, restaurant/bar, or community space; rooftop garden/park with solar panels.

no one’s got vision here!

Sippin’ on drinks at Urban Mo’s in San Diego’s happenin’ LGBT neighborhood, Hillcrest..  gonna be way more fun staring across at a Walgreens than this! 

because we just can’t get enough of big-chain pharmacies!
thanks for accessing the community demands and making the best decisions on our behalf! our urban environment can’t get any uglier!

feelin’ kinda glad I moved out of Hillcrest now..

On Atlantic Cities, Nate Berg reports that an analysis by Wendell Cox and Hugh Pavletich for Demographia on affordable housing is incomplete. I would go further and say that the analysis is flat-out wrong…

That connection between appeal and higher costs can be mitigated in at least two ways, aside from direct subsidies for affordable housing. One idea is to recognize that the most important barrier to new development is not regulations per se, but the speed at which the regulatory process moves. That crucial distinction is completely missed by Demographia. Most US municipalities rely on the same regulatory tools — but move through the process at greatly varied speeds. Some cities and towns allow endless delays and appeals — raising costs for development and keeping a lid on supply.

One strategy a city or town can employ to promote affordable, sustainable development is to align land use regulations with what citizens want, and then speed up the process for developers who meet those criteria.

A second strategy is to tie land-use with transportation, particularly public transit. Walkable, mixed-use development with access to public transit lowers household transportation costs, which are nearly as large a line item as mortgage payments or rent. Some development — sprawl in particular — tends to raise family transportation expenditures substantially. Other development — the mixed-use, transit-oriented kind — lowers these costs…

bettercities, 24.01.12.

SF listed as the second most expensive city for housing, by house-price-to-income ratio.

sd u-t, 25.01.12.

so this is going to be built or not?

I can’t comprehend this article no matter how many times I read it. 
I should start following San Diego news more often. 

Board Approves Design of Fat City Lofts Project; Fails to Pass Recommendation on Land-Use Permits

The Board voted 6-0 with two abstentions (Chair Kilkenny and Secretary Relyea) to grant design review approval, based on architecture and urban design, for the Fat City Lofts project, a proposed mixed-use project development on the block bounded by Pacific Highway, California and Hawthorne streets, and a vacated portion of Ivy Street. The proposed project would include 232 apartments, 4,485 square feet of ground floor retail space and 294 parking spaces.

The project also requires approval of a Coastal Development Permit and Centre City Development Permit by CCDC Board Chairman Kim Kilkenny. Due to the residential project’s location in close proximity to the Solar Turbine’s industrial complex, CCDC staff recommended denial of the permits based on the project’s inconsistency with policies of 1992 Centre City Community Plan and the City of San Diego’s General Plan Economic Prosperity Element that seek to avoid land use incompatibility and protect base sector industrial uses..

– ccdc newsletter

In “Rethinking a Lot,” a new study of parking, due out in March, Eran Ben-Joseph, a professor of urban planning at M.I.T., points out that “in some U.S. cities, parking lots cover more than a third of the land area, becoming the single most salient landscape feature of our built environment.”

As the critic Lewis Mumford wrote half a century ago, “The right to have access to every building in the city by private motorcar in an age when everyone possesses such a vehicle is the right to destroy the city.” Yet we continue to produce parking lots, in cities as well as in suburbs, in the same way we consume all those billions of plastic bottles of water and disposable diapers.

What to do?

Featured story on the nytimes homepage on sunday. 
nytimes, 06.01.11.