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Ballpark Study Confesses: "We Hastened and Greatly Worsened the Glut"
I looked back and honestly I don't even begin to understand how to think about this. "That is a major reason why there is not only a huge glut of condos and hotels in the ballpark district, but the ballpark-generated overbuilding has also helped cause gluts elsewhere downtown and throughout the city. Hopefully, San Diegans understand that downtown condos are a disaster, as are hotels. (Any hotel built or refinanced in the last five years is underwater.) The consultant clearly admits that the rapid and excessive construction of these buildings to facilitate the ballpark project is greatly to blame" Essentially what I _THINK_ you are arguing is that Moores/Ballpark deal fueled subsidized and speculative construction - detached from general market signals. But you are also dealing with variables pointing in the same direction such as cheap money, overall real estate asset bubble, and difficulty in tying what was going on in downtown to say speculative building/buying in Chula Vista. Pretty tortured logic to get from here to there. I don't know if anecedotal responses from people about what the streets feel like are a good measure. The buildings are designed to be self contained where residents drive into underground lots and go up to their condos. Maybe bad urban form but it is what it is. As noted above, the better measure is to find out if there are less owner occupied units than in other parts of the city as this would be a good measure that the real estate that CS&L is examining was largely priced as a specuative asset or, for all its warts, the ballpark district did provide 3000+ housing units people are using as their primary residence. Only data answers that question.— July 19, 2010 4:24 p.m.
Cunningham Says Local Economic Recovery Losing Momentum
The comparisions between New Orleans and pretty much anything fail, in part, because floods on that scale disrupt the energy grid. That is what made Katrina so devastating and helped illustrate just how much modern urban cities rely upon the grid. Even if the fires had burned to the coast responders would have been deployed within hours to get the city back working again. What should concern LA (and to an extent us) is a massive earthquake that cut water and power to LA. They spend A LOT of time planning for that possibility but an 8.0 that knocked out the CA aquaduct pumping stations and created a cascading failure in the transmission grid could make for scary times in the Southland.— July 19, 2010 11:28 a.m.
Ballpark Study Confesses: "We Hastened and Greatly Worsened the Glut"
Don - some of these comments point to something that Potter or a stringer could do for the Reader - get into the property tax records for a few of the ballpark district condos and try to ascertain % owner-occupied. Shouldn't be _THAT_ hard. First screen could be whether or not the mailing address for the property tax bill same as unit. Second screen could be whether or not individual also owned another residential property. You could compare with 2-3 projects in Little Italy (or a Mission Valley/UTC condo project) to see if the DT property truly outlier. Would answer speculation above and be good journalism.— July 19, 2010 11:20 a.m.