The area around Qualcomm is dead. I wouldn't want something like that in downtown San Diego.

Qualcomm is surrounded by the largest parking lot west of the Mississippi, The new stadium will not be, thats the point to put the stadium into an urban setting to avoid the mistake of qualcomm.

Actually they're going to turn all of east village into a huge parking lot.

This county seems to have a surplus of idiotic leadership.

I saw this on channel 8 also.

This group headed by nazi-environmentalist Don Frye plan to make Qualcomm Stadium the transit hub of San Diego not downtown or the airport. Reason being is they want the HSR to avoid the Rose Canyon fault.:shrug::haha: :rolleyes:

First of all whatever high speed rail system California gets, the best earthquake-resistant technology will be taken into account *cough cough* SHINKANSEN *cough*
San Francisco, LA, Inland Empire and the Central Valley all run along the mother of all fault-lines (San Andreas) so if HSR can route thru that, Rose Canyon is no problem.

I don't understand the logic of Qualcomm as a transit hub. This group wants an environmentally responsible HSR route but wants to turn SUBURBAN Mission Valley into a hub? Not urban downtown? Didn't Frye talk against the Qualcomm Stadium redo (a dense collection of condos, hotels, and offices) proposed a few months ago because of congestion issues? And now she wants to turn it into a destination hub? Huh?!?!?

Get out, Donna Frye. Seriously. Get the f**k out.

Yea she is lame.

The California HSR blog shares my exact sentiments.

"Dropping passengers in the Qualcomm parking lot would be a cruel joke, a sign that San Diego isn't willing to truly embrace sustainable transportation or smart growth principles."

http://cahsr.blogspot.com/

wouldn't the money we're gonna spend on HSR be able to build every county in the state their own new airport? wouldn't the regional economy as a whole benefit more from having better regional air transportation versus being able to get to san francisco (when I don't work or live in San Francisco) in an hour?

Maybe because Qualcomm is in her district and Downtown isn't. Just sayin'...ulterior motives.

And ShekelPop, I would be the first to agree with you that San Diego needs a new airport, it's why I got into civil engineering in the first place, but the HSR has already been approved and the airport has already been shot down. Besides, the whole state and Fed is dumping money into the HSR whereas SD would cover much of the costs of its own airport. I know the state and fed might help on an airport but what SD spends on train is less than for an airport. I'm for taking what opportunities there are. PLUS, a huge amount of traffic out of the airport is California based. Put in a train, you alleviate that pressure on the capacity.

To the following gentlemen,

Your comments deserve answers.

To SDviaPhilly(which strangely enough also describes me), the other half of the reason was that they had a huge junk of real estate and someone who promised to develop the East Village. But the Ballpark was not the reason that the Horizon,Renaissance, Electra, Park Row or City Walk were developed in the Marina District. They were developed because we made it easy for Bosa and friends to develop these properties. Ditto for Little Italy.
If we had done the same for the East Village, we coud have had similar development without the current 25-30 million bond servicing we face with PETCO. I have yet to see any study that indicates that PETCO has paid for itself.

To IconRPCV,

Yes there is life, but the same could have been had if we had used the same approach used in other parts of downtown. I also frequent the area.In fact, some of you may not realize that the Western Metal was going to be developed into luxury lofts and there was talk of developing the other Tom Hom property to the south before the ballpark became all the rage in development. These developments could have fostered the same excitement that you attribute solely to the ballpark(this I know because I had plunked down an earnest money deposit on the development in 1992). The very building you live in was the home of artists lofts and one of the theater companies had already been interested in using space (When it was the Reincarnation Bldg had was famous for Torres's eyes).

To Mr Crackertastik,

I was hoping that you were being tongue and cheek. It probably is not very persuasive to call people idiots, particularly since you seem incapable of using spell check.

^^^

I understand that some people don't value professional sports, and no amount of arguing will change this. I for one am one who does value professional sports and no amount of persuasion will change this.

As much as I would love to see a world class stadium built around a dense urban village that's woven into a web of mixed use, cultural areas, etc. If it came down to a choice, I would much rather see the money spent on parks, affordable housing, public art, and business development downtown.

Thank you. I could not agree more. Glad to see you are stepping up with your election to the CCAC.

I see little evidence that a football stadium will lead to an improved day to day urban experience. Maybe I am wrong, and if so, give me some examples. There might be a few and I think it would be useful to share the case studies.

Oh my.. I just read the blog piece on this... I just don't know what to say. High Speed rail to the Qualcomm parking lot? These council people represent the City of San Diego. That is embarrassing.

It shouldn't matter if you like or don't like sports. I don't see why people can't be for better development because of the benefits to the area. Plus studies show that having a professional team attracts more businesses and people.

In that case we should look at NFL stadiums in urban cores. A stadium could be pretty downtown here, but that doesn't mean it would be functional with the neighborhood.

Exactly. I know the hotel interests will be all over it. But I don't think a lot of people could argue that surrendering that much land in East Village will contribute to an improved 24 hour environment. I don't think one could argue that the stadium would sit empty at least 5 days of each week. Is that an appropriate land use for what should be a dense, urban land area? This will be a 1 billion dollar investment. I think Petco was around a 1/3 of that and it is used a bit more than a football stadium.

MLB also benefits from having 81 homes games each year; NFL is 1/10 of that. I think the Aztecs plays 5 or 6 home games. I have mixed feelings on this. On the one hand that parking lot at Qualcomm seems like a waste of space. On the other, football stadiums are so massive and hard to build around. Even in very urban Barcelona the area around Camp Nou isn't very walkable.

Actually,when PETCO was first being debated, studies leaned more towards stadiums having either a neutral or negative benefit. The author of one of the more respected studies against public funding of stadiums was then hired by the pro-stadium group, and lo and behold, he suddenly seemed to feel that maybe he was being too harsh in his analysis. So if you start indicating that studies are for something, I'd also want to be sure that the research is unbiased.

it is a good point about the need to alleviate the capacity taken up with interstate travel