San Diego county builders bring home the gold!  The Pacific Coast Builders Conference is the largest show for builders on the West Coast and is held in the Moscone Center in San Francisco yearly.  This year’s theme was “Power. Forward. Sustain.” which focused on helping homebuilders succeed in a challenging marketplace and being prepared to capitalize when the market makes an upswing.  This years June conference held the annual Best in the West competition where this years judges favored and handed out the Gold Nugget Awards to the affordable and environmentally sensitive developments.  San Diego County brought home 6 Golden Nugget Awards as well as 18 Merit Awards.   Among these Gold Nugget Winners was downtown San Diego’s Smart Corner that won for best infill project.  The Smart Corner building exemplifies the principles of Smart Growth.  Smart Growth is a approach to urban planning that seeks the benefits of a close connect between where people live and work.  It combines residential living, an office building and ground floor retail space, and mass transit all on one city block.  Downtown San Diego’s Current in Little Italy was also recognized for Apartment projects of four or more stories.  Click here to view other San Diego county winners.  Congradulations to all the San Diego developers and projects recognized this year!  It’s great to see San Diego be recognized for the progressiveness in urbanization and smart growth.   San Diego planners and developers have been on the leading edge of future living creating enviormentally friendly projects and utilizing ideas of New Urbanism.  Proud to be a resident of this city!

I recently read an interesting article in the Union Tribune titled Italian planner marvels at San Diego’s smart-growth tenets.  It was fascinating hearing a European’s point of view on San Diego’s city planning and development.  It is very popular for American architects and planners to travel to Europe to study how the Old World built cities, but Claudia Trillo did the opposite. Trillo is a Fulbright scholar, city planner and assistant professor at the University of Naples and spent the last six months in San Diego to see how this Southern California city battles sprawl with smart-growth principles.  Smart growth is an urban planning and transportation theory that San Diego has embraced, concentrating on growth in the center of a city to avoid urban sprawl; and advocates compact, transit-oriented, walk-able, bicycle-friendly land use, including neighborhood schools, streets that work for everyone; mixed-use development with a range of housing choices.

Trillo studied under a SDSU professor and Italian transplant that acquainted Trillo with San Diego when he gave lectures in Naples.  In this article she compares San Diego to parts of Italy with some interesting correlations.  Trillo stated that, “In the last few years, sprawl has been plaguing Europe, and San Diego has the reputation in worldwide planning circles for planning smart.”  She was particularly interested with San Diego’s intertwining of local and regional interests and priorities through her research into local and state agencies that affect land-use decision stating that the, “level of democratic discussion is much higher… European land-use controls tend to employ more national, top-down policies and requirements, compared to the United States, where local control is paramount.”   She plans to publish a book on “best practices” she noted in San Diego and to give a series of lectures this summer to colleagues at her university and for her clients so they can learn about Southern California land use.   Check out this article to hear some of her opinions and suggestions for San Diego

This week Little Italy becomes the inaugural site in a series of beautification plans for Downtown San Diego.  400 brightly colored planters and hanging baskets began to line India Street.  The project is aimed to provide a softer urban feel by adding more color and life to the streetscape.  “Great urban environments throughout the world feature plants, flowers, and other decorative foliage.  It is a way to engage and beautify a city and to connect spaces while enhancing the pedestrian experience,” said CCDC president Nancy Graham.  San Diego is no doubt a perfect place for these kinds of projects with the year-a-round gorgeous weather and pedestrian friendly atmosphere.
The greenery extends throughout India Street, Ash to Laurel, and sections of Kettner Boulevard, Ash, Beech, Cedar, Date and Fir streets. Flower selections were chosen to compliment the unique characteristics of the buildings and storefronts in the neighborhood. This project in Little Italy is to be the beginning of this Downtown beautification process.

Coming in at the number 1 spot is London, at a whopping $6,191 per sq ft. A $1.5 Million price range will have you living atop some of Downtown San Diego’s finest buildings.  However, this will only get you a small studio in London, Courchevel, Monaco, Manhattan & Hong Kong to name a few. I’m pretty sure we pale in comparison at around $512 per sq ft.

 More reason to buy in Downtown San Diego!

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