Bright Future hoped to recapture past
Robert Rogers, SB Sun Staff Writer 092406
SAN BERNARDINO - The work toward rebuilding the city's sparse downtown core is progressing at a furious pace.
But that isn't necessarily clear to anyone walking down the street or flying over in the Police Department's helicopter.
The rebuilding has not yet reached the stage of cracking nail-guns and tumbling cement-mixers. It's still being discussed in government meeting chambers and corporate boardrooms, where elected officials, bureaucrats and businessmen hammer out plans and policies.
Where the plans will eventually lead has yet to be decided, but the wheels of change are in motion.
"Not in my 16 years (working in the city) has there been this much focus, this much concerted activity, downtown in progress at once," said Colin Strange, a planner in the city's Economic Development Agency.
Indeed, the flurry of projects and prospective projects dotting the downtown corridor may be the best indication yet that the long-rumored, eastward-bound wave of economic and social growth is beginning to roll through neighborhoods.
But city leaders have been starry-eyed with bright hopes of reigniting San Bernardino's once-glowing core in the past. But empty caverns where big-box retailers should be and parks populated with mentally ill transients are all they have to show for it. The city has spent millions over decades chasing a prosperous era that ended when major local industries fled in the 1970s and 1980s.
"San Bernardino has for years played the redevelopment game and done so to our disadvantage," said City Attorney James F. Penman, a longtime resident.
But proponents of current and prospective projects dotting the downtown say with confidence that this time it's different. They say the market is on their side and their overall vision is mindful of past pitfalls.
In many respects, they appear to be right. Bitter relics are the ill-conceived movie theaters and drab, square apartment buildings that pockmark the city's planning history.
Instead, the bungles of the past are being replaced by plans for the future. But, critics caution, today's examples of botched planning were yesterday's plans for smarter, brighter futures too.
A handful of downtown projects at various phases of pre-construction offer unprecedented promise - not of returning the city to its heyday, but instead converting a largely untapped core into a model-planned community.
Some plans call for living quarters and a hybrid-powered public transit system that would circulate residents and visitors alike within a culturally vibrant and economically robust downtown corridor.
One central component of these plans, and also the most distant, is a proposal for a roughly 5-acre transportation hub by Omnitrans, the public-transit agency serving the San Bernardino Valley.
Omnitrans is working with city officials to acquire land at the southwest corner of Rialto Avenue and E Street. The aim is to have a central transit hub downtown that coordinates Metrolink light rail, traditional bus services and SBX, the San Bernardino Express busing service, by late 2009.
The complex has been touted by Mayor Pat Morris as a key component of the city's rejuvenation by shuttling people from around the valley into the city, efficiently delivering people to public- and private-sector jobs and services.
Omnitrans officials tout the concept as a forward-thinking project that anticipates the coming emphasis on public transit to alleviate urban congestion in an era of high energy costs.
SBX is forecast as a hybrid rail-and-bus system, with buses traveling through express traffic lanes ferrying riders from Cal State San Bernardino, through downtown, to Hospitality Lane and Loma Linda.
"The market for public transit will increase rapidly, and in this case San Bernardino will not make the mistake of building up the city before installing efficient systems of public transit," said Omnitrans Planning Director Rohan Kuruppu. "This project is proactive, an example of designing cities around public-transit systems."
The public-transit system could fit well into a handful of planned projects designed to replace languishing structures and pockets of blight and crime at Carousel Mall, around Fifth and G streets and Seccombe Lake Park.
Miami-based developer LNR Partners bought a chunk of the long-dormant Carousel Mall earlier this year with plans to replace it with a mix of residences and small shops to create a village atmosphere.
Nothing is set in stone, said the mayor's chief of staff, Jim Morris, but city officials are hopeful the location and market conditions are right for a development that could plant hundreds of residences downtown.
Seccombe Lake Park, once the jewel of the downtown park system, has become honeycombed with transients and is a haven for crime.
"When I was a boy, I would go fishing there with my father," said Penman. "It was safe, and it was stocked with fish. It was a beautiful place."
Penman said the problem with the park is the cover it affords from those wishing not to be seen and an understaffed Police Department's inability to clean it up.
Penman said developing part of the park with residential structures, which looks likely if a state assembly bill to transfer parkland to the city gets final passage, is a mixed bag. The housing could clean up the park and pay economic dividends to the city, but the park's homeless denizens will merely be displaced to another neighborhood, Penman said.
But building affordable housing closer to the downtown core has paid dividends before, and is clearly a dominant theme among city planners.
In 2004, the Redevelopment Agency partially subsidized an affordable housing developer to build dozens of new homes just southeast of Meadowbrook Park.
That project, undertaken by Los Angeles-based ANR Industries, has been lauded as a success in rejuvenating a blighted area and offering affordable homes to working families.
The rationale offered by most city leaders for building more affordable downtown housing is to lure upwardly mobile working families to the area. The construction typically replaces land that does not contribute much in terms of tax base or human capital. New homeowners would not only contribute to the tax base, but also enliven downtown economically and socially by circulating through government centers, entertainment venues, parks and public transit.
The pocketbooks of the new residents would then lure more businesses and services to cater to the area.
One of the more controversial downtown projects is the revitalization plan for the crime-ridden and impoverished area around Fifth and G Streets.
Morris and 1st Ward Councilwoman Esther Estrada have touted the roughly $30 million acquisition, demolition and development project as the salve to heal one of the city's most visibly blighted stretches.
But other council members and elected officials, and some longtime merchants slated to be bought out, have firmly opposed the plan. It calls for the EDA to buy 27 privately owned parcels so a developer can make a lump purchase and rebuild a mix of residential and commercial properties.
EDA Project Manager Mike Trout said the owners of 10 of the 27 properties his department seeks to buy have opted to go to court rather than accept the city's offer.
The plan could be in further peril if Proposition 90 passes in November. If passed, the initiative could weaken city agencies' ability to seize properties through eminent domain.
"If Prop. 90 passes, we can't get that land," Trout said.
Such a legal development would be fine with some city leaders, who view the effort as wasteful and unnecessary.
Councilman Neil Derry called the move a costly "redundancy," that buys up properties at a huge cost to the city just before market forces would draw developers in to initiate their own acquisition.
"There's no logic to it," Derry said. "It's a redundant project because its success depends on the redevelopment of the Carousel Mall, which is not a done deal anyway.
"If the mall redevelopment is successful, this area will develop on its own, and if the mall (redevelopment) doesn't happen, this whole deal will fail."
Other plans for downtown include a new county courthouse and a new, 450,000-square-foot county administrative building, the site for which has not yet been finalized.
Even The Sun's former building, dormant since the newspaper moved to a new location off University Parkway last fall, is being primed to house a private educational facility, Strange said.
Strange met with Starbucks executives who came to visit City Hall on Wednesday.
The coffee giant is poised to plant a newer, bigger concept franchise store that will have more of a "restaurant feel" at the corner of Second and F Streets, Strange said.
BS Ranch Perspective:
The whole Idea is great, however they have to have big money that is ready to put themselves into the downtown area. Myself I like the idea of living above the stores with my parking garage along the same story that I living on, at least that is what the idea was when I was first reading about it in the Sun a few weeks ago. The city scenic as it is downtown is inviting to live there, as soon as they clean it up as they say that hey are going to do.
There are a lot of Piss Bum's that are congregating down along "E" Street, and Rialto Ave. They also are living in the Park that has the lake in the center of it. I am sorry! Right now I cannot think of that parks name, but I do know on a day like today, when the sun is warm and the breeze blowing slightly like today there will be about a 100 to 150 Piss Bum's in that park all fighting over real estate and also stealing from each other, trying to get the foil, literally foil from each other to void the radio waves that are going to give us tumors and kill us or take the transmitter out of our own heads.
They are just touched with a little dementia, but some of them are touched a little harder then normal.
Well, Just be careful when looking around the areas that they are talking about and for heaven sake don't go down there at night. it is to dangerous. the boogie man really exists downtown San Bernardino, at night time. ask any of the homeless they might tell you, then yet again they might not as a joke on you!
BSRanch
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