Makers Quarter: Anchored by a Unified Vision

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SAN DIEGO—GlobeSt.com is talking to the visionaries behind organizations like Makers Quarter, including I.D.E.A. District and the Downtown San Diego Partnership, which are aiming to capture the unique qualities that Downtown San Diego has to offer, in addition to maximizing the universal real estate trends that are sweeping the nation's CBDs. We sat down with Stacey Pennington, urban planner for Makers Quarter, to discuss the project, what makes it special and how it fits in with the other new developments taking place in the Downtown submarket.

GlobeSt.com: For our readers who don't know, what is Makers Quarter?

Pennington: Makers Quarter is approximately six blocks located in Downtown's East Village, and it contains the largest number of contiguous undeveloped blocks in all of Downtown. There's one very basic reason it's special: the Navarra family [of Jerome's Furniture fame], which owned a furniture business down there and had acquired a combination of properties Downtown and in other locations throughout the San Diego region. They imagined the future of these properties would be best suited as anchored by a vision rather than piecemeal, and they selected our team to be the master developers.

L2HP is a partnership between Lankford and Associates, HP Investors LLC and Hensel Phelps Construction Co. Since being selected in 2011, we have beenworking with the Navarra to plan and design 2.5 million square feet of ultimate residential, retail, lifestyle, arts, culture and office projects on those six blocks.

Truly, the relevance of it is that it will be the new employment center for Downtown and the city. We have 1 million square feet of creative office planned, and it's an opportunity to engage firms in San Diego who can't expand in their current location or other West Coast locations. It's important for Downtown because we have such a thriving and healthy, vibrant innovation cluster within our region. Combined with the values of future tenants, this will give CEOs and employees the opportunity to have creative office space, with operable windows and natural daylight within our Downtown office market, which is not currently available. There's a cool trend of tech companies and start-ups who have essentially “hacked” older traditional office buildings to create these types of spaces.  There is a strong demand for something that's much more in touch with the next evolution of office space. That's a very special part we're working on.

GlobeSt.com: What makes Makers Quarter special, and what do you hope to accomplish with it?

Pennington: The values underlying Makers Quarter are differentiating. When we embarked on this process in late 2011 and early 2012, the market was just starting to come back. We were still very much that last untouched quadrant, and we saw a huge opportunity with City College and the Newschool of Architecture & Design, the way F and G sts. connected to the 94 and the trend of tactical urbanism—short-term interventions to achieve long-term goals. For us, that meant taking an underutilized dirt lot and turning it into SILO, a community entertainment venue. Across the street, a parking lot was transformed to SMARTS Farm, Downtown's first community garden. It's engaging underserved use around urban agriculture and art and photography. Those two activities have engaged more than 25,000 people in Makers Quarter.

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We're using these spaces to test ideas and conduct community outreach experientially. We're learning what the community has gravitated toward and is engaged with, and in the next seven to 10 years, the importance of art and makers will grow. SILO is a rotating curated space. We're involved with a collaboration with a local artist that allows the community to connect with the arts—it's part of a strengthening and maturing arts and culture scene in San Diego. There are different events at SILO; it's an ethos anchored by the Makers spirit.

Two makers anchor Makers Quarter today: Fab Lab, which moved in last fall and had a relaunch event with the Mayor in early February, helps support start-ups and innovation; and Moniker Warehouse, which has been in the neighborhood for four years now and is a collection of unique, talented artists and makers who share a collaborative workspace. Moniker includes about 20 companies working together that have tapped into San Diego's very dynamic market for local handcrafted goods, backpacks, wallets, tables, leather goods, bicycles and much more. This is the epicenter for that. This is all happening in Makers Quarter: it's not a “build it and they will come” philosophy—it's turning that whole paradigm inside out.

GlobeSt.com: How does Makers Quarter fit in with the other new developments going on in the Downtown submarket?

Pennington: We are the catalyst for the I.D.E.A. District, which is a very powerful planning framework for this area of the East Village. Many planning principals articulated the vision principles are intertwined into the approach we're taking at Makers Quarter. Everything we're working on is in close collaboration with the Downtown San Diego Partnership to strengthen the role of Downtown as the CBD for the entire region. Downtown is where density should be and where we should focus on future employment centers.

What's really exciting is that for the past 10 years, we've been stressing the importance of walkability and bikeability and placemaking, and we had to fight for and articulate it in development, but now it's so intertwined in the development process (because that value system mirrors market demand). The level of collaboration between the different stakeholders and interest groups and vested parties is epic and really exciting. Our approach is connecting grassroots to tangible, informative development. We have SILO, but we're showing that we don't work in our own silos.

GlobeSt.com: How does the project reflect a general trend toward urbanization in our cities?

Pennington: Makers Quarter is definitely bold and visionary. My role in it, my piece of shaking the paradigm shift is anchored in my professional experience, education and background. I worked with one of my professors at Harvard, Margaret Crawford, who wrote a book called Everyday Urbanism. I was already involved in development Downtown, working on a high-rise office building at Kettner + Broadway (Broadway 655) and Smart Corner, a mixed-use condominium, office and retail project at Park Blvd. and C St. The reason why I went to Harvard is I believed there was something more here, and I wanted to expand my way of thinking about it. I was so fortunate to have the influence of a professor like Margaret, who was articulating the value of the minutiae in urban life and how that creates ambiance and culture. I've also always been involved in larger development projects in San Diego and London, and I got the chance to work on an open-space planning effort as well as the waterfront Embarcadero and its visionary plans that span for years. I believe that the public realm is a community fabric that will pull together everything. The community has made it what it's become.

GlobeSt.com: What else should our readers know about Makers Quarter?

Pennington:  Our vision is becoming a reality. With a strong foundation in arts, culture and the maker movement, the neighborhood will begin a transition towards higher densities and becoming a vibrant, dense, thriving urban neighborhood. There's also a brick-and-mortar component, beginning with our first mixed-use development project with Alliance Residential. It located across the street from City College. We're launching an office brokerage and marketing effort in a couple of weeks on a collaborative office hub, that will become the demonstration of the qualities of this neighborhood and allow for pioneers to participate in the revitalization of the area. In the next couple of months, we're staring the entitlement process on our second mixed-use residential project. The initial phases include mixed use residential. The emphasis on office is a strong component of the vision and will become a key part of the future phases.

There are so many ways to be involved. Whether through the events and ideas explored at SILO, the community gardening at SMARTS Farm or the community wide effort to support a K-8 Charter school in East Village, Urban Discovery Academy. Makers Quarter can also be found on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. We also update the community with weekly emails.