SLC Planners Eye San Diego As Role Model Tuesday, December 28, 1999   BY BRANDON LOOMIS THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE     SAN DIEGO -- Picture a little bit of Southern California on Utah's Wasatch Front.     Throughout Utah's high-growth 1990s, it's exactly the nightmare many Utahns envisioned: California-style traffic congestion, thickening air pollution, quickening erosion of the open spaces that link residents to their farm roots.     Like it or not, at least part of the vision is becoming reality. The Wasatch Front is projected to mushroom from 1.6 million people today to at least 2.6 million by 2020, roughly equaling San Diego County's population.     It's not everyone's ideal, but from an urban planner's perspective, there could be worse role models. San Diego's recent history is one of downtown renewal, convenient alternatives to traffic jams and the slow reversal of sprawl that sucked the life from the city before this decade.     With a little foresight, Utah planners say, metropolitan Salt Lake City can reach the same goals.     "We have better potential," said D.J. Baxter, program director with the nonprofit Envision Utah planning partnership. Utah's expanding transportation network runs past some of the state's most blighted, undervalued lands in the Salt Lake Valley, he said. It may be even easier to house and transport people near Utah's urban core than it has been in California.     "Look at our north-south TRAX [light rail] line," said Baxter, who toured San Diego last month. "There is tremendous potential. There are a lot of sites along that line that are not very heavily used right now."     The same is true of the 17-mile Interstate 15 upgrade, which will be ready to ease traffic to and from downtown in just more than a year.     As recently as the 1980s, much of downtown San Diego was a rugged wasteland, city officials say. A prime example is the Gaslamp district. Now a thriving nightspot with nonstop shopping akin to The Boyer Co.'s vision for Salt Lake's Gateway, Gaslamp was a Navy dive.     "This was quite honky-tonk -- a red-light district heavily oriented toward the Navy," said Janice Weinrick, who negotiates contracts and development plans for the Centre City Development Corp. (CCDC), San Diego's nonprofit downtown redevelopment agency. "This was an area that respectable people didn't go to until about 10 years ago."     But when Weinrick guided urban planners through the 16-block district last month, sidewalk cafes abounded. Bicycle rickshaws shuttled tourists to and from the waterfront. Light-rail trains and a stream of city buses deposited thousands of shoppers at the upscale Horton Plaza shopping center, smack in the middle of the city's office and commercial heart.     "As the evening gets later, the crowd gets younger," Weinrick said. "This is the happening place."     The energy started in the 1970s with infrastructure upgrades. The city created an improvement district that funneled federal dollars into street lamps and brick sidewalks. CCDC condemned blighted buildings and contracted with developers to replace them with a blend of shops and mixed-income housing, pushing for the fabled "24-hour downtown" where people stay on the streets and feel safe.     With visions of new tenants, building owners restored turn-of-the-century storefronts and apartments. Apartment vacancy rates fell below 1 percent. An expanding conference center brought more tourists. Musician Jim Croce's widow opened a popular eatery in Gaslamp, no longer the baddest part of town.     Now downtown San Diego appears to have the sort of momentum urban enthusiasts dream about: private spinoffs from public investments.     Developer John Given's CIM Group is buying what's left to develop in Gaslamp, and turning its attention to the stubborn pockets of blight that surround the area. He is working with CCDC to acquire a gray, empty department store on Broadway, the city's main street.     "The Gaslamp area dies at Broadway," Givens said. "We want to bridge it."     On the other blighted end of Gaslamp, the city is working with the San Diego Padres to build a new 46,000-seat baseball stadium surrounded by shops, a 200-room hotel and at least one office tower. Shunning the ballclub's current reliance on the West's largest parking lot with 15,000 spaces at suburban Qualcomm Stadium, the development does not include new parking. Instead, Qualcomm -- the continuing home of the NFL's Chargers -- will serve as a park-and-ride lot for light rail to Padres games.             With or without the Padres, San Diego's policies, available land and demographics tend to favor continued downtown revitalization. Like the Wasatch Front, San Diego County expects to add 1 million residents by 2020, and half are expected to live within city limits. By then, all the land in the low-density outlying zones will be used.         "Downtown really has the distinction of being the only area that welcomes more density," Rask said. In fact, contrasting to the days when public officials wanted a grassy lawn for every Californian, the City Council routinely implores CCDC to increase downtown housing densities. And the average density already tops 100 units per acre on downtown residential plots.     Some 20,000 people already live in the 1,500 acres considered downtown San Diego. CCDC hopes to attract at least 50,000.     Tight quarters do not hurt property values. The El Cortez Hotel, a stucco tower overlooking downtown, is a prime example of the new money flowing downtown from young people and older couples whose children are grown. Closed and dilapidated for years, it reopens this winter as a condominium tower with penthouses fetching $5,000 a month.     "The residents on Cortez Hill are ecstatic," Weinrick said.         The other side of downtown renewal, though, is that rocketing housing prices can leave behind low-income families. Recent news reports depict San Diego's Sudanese immigrant population, once 10,000 strong and squeezed into small downtown apartments, leaving for cheaper digs in places including Utah.     It is a grim sight for Elizabeth Morris, chief executive with the San Diego Housing Commission. Politically, she said, San Diego favors incentives such as density bonuses for developers willing to mix low-income housing with market-rate units. But it only works if enough high-density developments are planned.     "We've got our fair share of NIMBY [Not In My Back YARD] issues," Morris said. "Between the people who don't want their neighborhoods to change and the people who don't want any more cars on the road, it's difficult to put together new developments that contain much density."     The result is what does get built downtown is snapped up by the well-to-do.     Morris' answer, if not easy, is simple and identical to CCDC's goal: Build more housing downtown.     Some have the same goal for Salt Lake City.     Eugene Carr, University of Utah adjunct professor of urban planning, hopes developers will start to capitalize on growing interest in living downtown. When Carr's students at the school's Community Planning Workshop surveyed downtown workers in 1996, a slight majority said they wished they could live downtown.     "The potential is there," Carr said.     Carr worries that the Gateway project might draw away energy from the budding Main Street revitalization unless it includes enough housing.     Equally important in Carr's vision is development of public spaces, such as what Gallivan Center off 200 South and Main Street was to be before new buildings started encroaching. Downtown residents and visitors need a place to sit or congregate, Carr said.     On that count, downtown San Diego is lagging. The waterfront, arguably the city's most valuable public asset, was walled off from most of downtown by huge hotels and even the conference center. The most prominent public space is a palm tree oasis on the edge of Horton Plaza and Gaslamp, about the size of Gallivan Center's ice rink. Park benches were removed when transients co-opted them.     Away from downtown San Diego, the light-rail system that has grown since opening in 1987 is breeding the same transformation that supporters of UTA TRAX envision throughout the Salt Lake Valley. Nodes of "transit-oriented development" are springing up, and many more are planned to allow Californians to live, work and shop all within walking distance of the trains.     One of the instigators already is a familiar face in Utah. Peter Calthorpe, the planning consultant for Envision Utah, has designed residential and commercial mixtures that cater to the light-rail crowd.             © Copyright 1999, The Salt Lake Tribune All material found on Utah OnLine is copyrighted The Salt Lake Tribune and associated news services. No material may be reproduced or reused without explicit permission from The Salt Lake Tribune.