CP&DR

Disney Puts Tax Dollars to Work

Oct 1, 2000

Deals, Disneyland, Morris Newman, Vol. 15 No. 10 Oct 2000

It's the oldest contract in the world: I'll scratch your back, if you'll scratch mine. The Walt Disney Co. recently worked a variant on this contract when it agreed to help the City of Anaheim obtain attractive interest rates for nearly $400 million in public improvements around Disneyland and the city's other big draws. On its face, the deal looks good. The town gets fixed up, and both the city and the theme park make money. Why would I care that The Walt Disney Co. was able to obtain at l...

High-Tech Metts Pickleweed in Redwood City

Sep 1, 2000

Morris Newman, Places, Vol. 15 No. 09 Sep 2000

"Your money or your life," says the hold-up man in an old Jack Benny joke. "Didn't you hear me, buddy?" the irate gunman says after Jack fails to answer. "I said, your money or your life!" At last, Jack responds: "I'm thinking, I'm thinking!" Jack Benny's difficulty in making up his mind mirrors my struggle with Pacific Shores Center, a 106-acre office park currently under construction in Redwood City. It is true that the project — a group of 10 office buildings containing a...

Oakland Shows How to Gain Attention

Aug 1, 2000

Deals, Morris Newman, Vol. 15 No. 08 Aug 2000

Doctor, I need to tell you why I am lying on the couch today. In my line of work, as you know, I report on public-private deals for California's most distinguished land-use newsletter. And, for the most part, I perform my job without major psychic distress or disturbance (except for occasional bouts of rage when I learn that redevelopment agencies have declared open fields of wildflowers to be "blighted" in order to build power centers.) But something has happened recently. I ...

Redevelopment Repairs Economy and Environement

Jul 1, 2000

Morris Newman, Places, Vol. 15 No. 07 Jul 2000

The Park Avenue Project in the City of South Lake Tahoe is not the largest or the most expensive downtown plan ever contemplated in California, but it might be the most ambitious. I can't name too many other downtown projects that undertake, all at once, to remove blighted buildings, provide all-new urban design, build a new resort hotel, retail space, high-end condominiums and an ice-skating rink, erect a gondola that carries visitors to two local ski areas — and undertakes major environmental pro...

McClellan Plan Relieves the Pain of Base Reuse

Jun 1, 2000

Deals, Morris Newman, Vol. 15 No. 06 Jun 2000

Describing the closing of a military base as successful might strike some people as a poor choice of words. Anybody acquainted with base closures knows they are traumatic events. The initial trauma, of course, is the loss of jobs and resulting economic depression that befall surrounding communities. The secondary trauma, which happens more slowly, is the series of barriers that communities encounter in their efforts to reinvent a base into an office park or airport. Redeveloping bases can b...

Cathedral City Tames the Highway

May 1, 2000

Morris Newman, Places, Vol. 15 No. 05 May 2000

Few other land uses inspire ambivalence like the highway, and rightly so. Like the twin Hindu deities, Brahman and Vishnu, the highway is both creator and destroyer, giving life to cities and then making them uninhabitable. Serving the role played by the railroad and the river in earlier times, the highway is the city's lifeline to the larger world. And just as the river and the railroad each gave the city a new kind of settlement, the highway has given rise to its own type of urbanism: the strip....

Builder Becomes San Diego's $50 Million Man

Apr 1, 2000

Deals, Morris Newman, Vol. 15 No. 04 Apr 2000

Everybody in San Diego seems amazed that developer Doug Manchester is willing to guarantee the city $50 million in tax revenues from his yet-to-be-built hotel. Even he seems amazed. "I challenge any reputable developer to step forward and say he or she would do the same deal," Manchester wrote in an Op-Ed piece in the San Diego Union-Tribune last October. At that time, he was offering to guarantee $5 million annually for two years, not the same amount for 10 years, as he would later agree to. ...

Orange County Flavors Plan for West Sacramento

Mar 1, 2000

Morris Newman, Places, Vol. 15 No. 03 Mar 2000

I recently had one of those "aha!" moments that gives us special insight into the deeper nature of things. The magic moment came during a recent exercise in home buying, when I was fluttering back and forth between two different houses on two different streets. One house stood on a street with sidewalks and gutters, while the second house stood on an equally nice street, or nearly so, but without sidewalks. I assumed that the house with sidewalks would cost more because of the added amenity. M...

San Jose's Montgomery Hotel: An Expensive Souvenir

by Morris Newman on Feb 1, 2000

Deals, Morris Newman, San Jose, Vol. 15 No. 02 Feb 2000

The preservation of the Montgomery Hotel in the City of San Jose could be likened to a brick rescued from a burning house by its owners. By itself, the brick would have little or no value. As a souvenir of a vanished house, however, the brick becomes a treasured relic. That analogy might help outsiders understand the rationale behind the extraordinary labor and expense that the San Jose Redevelopment Agency has devoted to saving what is, by all accounts, a handsome but rather ordinary buildin...

A Touch of Barcelona Would Be Grand in Los Angeles

Jan 1, 2000

Los Angeles, Morris Newman, Places, Vol. 15 No. 01 Jan 2000

In its own way, Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles is as strange and fantastical as the imaginary towns in Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. One of the Italian novelist's inventions is Armilla, a city that consists of nothing but a forest of water pipes, where beautiful women shower. Another is Morlana, which has a gorgeous faï¿½ade of alabaster gates and coral columns, which hides a pile of trash. Yet another city is a sphere made up of twisted roads designed to prevent a woman from escaping....

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