More to look forward to in Otay Ranch!
--The Eastern Urban Center is someday expected to be home to 7,500 in 3,000 residential units — 20 percent will be affordable units for seniors and assisted living — and the site of 10,000 jobs and 3.5 million square feet of office, retail and civic services. It will have a main street served by ground-floor retail outlets, an entertainment district, and housing and offices. The center will feature a firehouse and a two-story library taking up the first two floors of a five-story office building. Sprinkled in will be parks within a three-minute walk of residences, plazas, town squares, trails and bus rapid transit stops.-
It will take 20 years to build and its first phase will have to wait for the construction market to return.And that’s not expected for another year or so, or possibly even three to five years.
But the 210-acre Eastern Urban Center, a planned $4 billion, mixed-use development intended to be the focal point of the Otay Ranch communities, was approved Sept. 15 by the city of Chula Vista.
When built out, it will provide a glimpse of how green urban development can produce a beautiful place to live, work and walk from place to place without having to get into a car.
The Eastern Urban Center is someday expected to be home to 7,500 in 3,000 residential units — 20 percent will be affordable units for seniors and assisted living — and the site of 10,000 jobs and 3.5 million square feet of office, retail and civic services. It will have a main street served by ground-floor retail outlets, an entertainment district, and housing and offices. The center will feature a firehouse and a two-story library taking up the first two floors of a five-story office building. Sprinkled in will be parks within a three-minute walk of residences, plazas, town squares, trails and bus rapid transit stops.
“It will be a regional destination,” said Todd Galarneau, project manager for its developer, The Corky McMillin Cos. “It’s a forward-thinking, sustainable design that brings the urban experience to Otay Ranch for the first time.”
The center’s proximity to Mexico is key, adds Galarneau. “There are a good number of buyers from Mexico,” for both permanent and vacation homes.
Green Features Galore
The project is now assembling applications for LEED Silver certification of environmental efficiency standards. That designation requires a pedestrian-friendly design, transit service and mixed housing/office development to reduce necessary car trips by 38 percent. Other green features of the project are the innovative processing of runoff water. Stormwater flowing off of buildings will be filtered through surrounding landscape and tree wells, says Galarneau. Those systems improve the quality of the runoff water, he said, and reduce the volume of water runoff into storm drains.
Nick Lee, the project’s sustainable development engineer, says the biggest challenge he faces is designing the project’s buildings to be green.
“You try to take a step back and see the economies of scale,” he said. Along with the runoff water systems mentioned by Galarneau, Lee says the project will cut typical water use with a pipe system of reclaimed water from the Otay Water District. That water, which is filtered, but not intended for consumption, will also irrigate street trees and public landscaping.
Electrical service for buildings will be designed to plug into a future “smart grid,” which allows utility customers to have wireless meter reading and a real-time look at electricity usage. The idea, says Lee, is to show customers when they are using high volumes of power and encourage them to turn off appliances to cut usage and costs. Other energy efficiencies planned for buildings include use of windows for lighting, solar energy options and insulation.
Nate Cherry, an architect with the Los Angeles office of RTKL Associates Inc., is the lead building designer for the project. He says the goal of the design is to create a mixed-use project that connects all the neighborhoods around the site as much as possible, since they were built as a series of separate, unconnected developments.
Cherry also placed the commercial hub of the project at the north end. He planned the “very important transit connection” there. For the project’s housing he put in blocks of dense housing clusters. He included design features often seen in Southern California and San Diego architecture.
“There’s use of indigenous styles so it feels like a friendly, familiar place,” said Cherry, noting the use of a lot of plaster and clay tiles for building materials, trellises, indoor and outdoor terracing, and balconies that look down onto public squares and awnings.
Variation Of Similar Theme
Gary Halbert, the city of Chula Vista’s deputy city manager and development services director, says the Eastern Urban Center is often compared to University Towne Center in San Diego.
“Frankly, I don’t think that’s a real good comparison,” said Halbert. “The Eastern Urban Center will be a high-density, mixed-use of office, hotel and residential. It will be a walkable community. Bus rapid transit will literally go right into the heart of the community. To come out of the ground with bus rapid transit feeding it from day one will be a wonderful thing.”
This project is unusual, he says, because it won entitlement approvals first, before any construction drawings were submitted for approval. He figures those will take another year to draw up.
Looking ahead, Halbert sees the tough conditions in the building market to continue for some time.
“Somewhere in the three- to five-year time frame is when I’d expect to see first-phase construction,” he says.
Eastern Urban Center
View more documents from The Corky McMillin Companies.
Mark Larson is a freelance writer for the Business Journal.
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