LA MESA — Eleven years ago, the city of La Mesa leveled 5 downtown acres to make way for a redevelopment project to recharge the aging heart of the village.
This month, after years of projects scuttled by financing difficulties, the city's long-awaited centerpiece is finished: the $26-million La Mesa Village Plaza.
Sitting at La Mesa Boulevard and Spring Street, the busiest downtown intersection, the project includes 95 condominiums, 60,000 square feet of office space and 35,000 square feet of retail space.
La Mesa Boulevard is the city's version of the classic small-town Main Street, lined by modest one- and two-story buildings that are home to several neighborhood businesses. In the midst of this fine-grained fabric, the city has allowed a comparatively bulky project that, in some places, rises to five stories, or more than 60 feet. In a once quaint, old-fashioned downtown, La Mesa Village Plaza is an interloper, the biggest, glitziest thing around.
Was it worth the wait? With some minor exceptions, the answer is no.
Conceptually, La Mesa Village Plaza represents the state of urban planning. Because of the mixed-use nature of the project, because it sits conveniently near other downtown shops and because it is on the San Diego Trolley line, residents will be able to live at La Mesa Village Plaza without relying on cars.
As such, the project is a prime example of the "Pedestrian Pocket" concept being touted by San Francisco planning guru Peter Calthorpe, who has been much in demand as a conference speaker this year. Calthorpe promotes pedestrian-oriented, mixed-use developments on or near transit systems.
But the project falls short of realizing its potential to knit together this modest-scaled downtown.
La Mesa Village Plaza, which was developed by a partnership of the Commonwealth Cos. and CMS Inc. and designed by San Diego architect Lou Dominy, fails most noticeably along La Mesa Boulevard, one of the most visible edges of the project. The developers had a good idea: condos above ground-level retail, a mix of uses that thrive on each other. The upper residential floors are set back from the ground-level retail spaces, which helps soften the impact of the bulky residential building.
But, instead of building the retail spaces out to the existing sidewalk, which would have helped retain some of the village's old Main Street character, the developers set their new shops back behind two rows of diagonal parking next to the street. They felt they needed abundant, visible parking to lease the retail spaces.
