A few tidbits I gathered that didn’t quite fit into today’s story:
- The people I talked to emphasized that negotiating with a private developer doesn’t necessarily mean the city will get taken for a ride.
Long-term land leases, said real estate analyst Gary London, aren’t the equivalent of the city signing its first-born away. And London said the city staff who would be involved in such negotiations is capable.
“People like Jim Waring, they’re not green,” he said. “They’re very sophisticated.”
And economist Murtaza Baxamusa from the liberal-leaning Center on Policy Initiatives feels much better about the city negotiating a lease than selling the land outright.
- He still wants to talk about Qualcomm: Gary London, local real estate advisor, re-iterated a point he made to Andrew Donohue earlier this week — that he thinks the Chargers shouldn’t give up on the Qualcomm site to rebuild their stadium, instead of looking only at Oceanside, Chula Vista or National City.
“I believe that you can get a mixed-use project to pencil sufficiently (at Qualcomm),” he said of the kind of development the Chargers are looking for in conjunction with the construction of the stadium.
“You would want to redevelop the Qualcomm site whether you put a stadium there or not,” he said. “I don’t think we’ve tried nearly hard enough on Qualcomm.”
- I have a call into another real estate analyst who’s been crunching some numbers to see how the City Hall deal could work out for a private developer. I’ll post more when I hear back from him.