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Construction Watt gets green light on Downtown apartment plan

A residential developer with several other San Diego County projects will start construction in June on a 389-unit, 18-story twin-tower apartment building in Little Italy.

Watt Commercial Properties Inc. received approval for the project earlier this month from the Centre City Development Corp., the city’s redevelopment agency, said Jonathon Genton, vice president for the Los Angeles-based company.

The 60,000-square-foot parcel where the project will be built is on the block bounded by Columbia, Beech, State and Ash streets. The project doesn’t have a name yet.

Watt Commercial purchased the site, which is now a parking lot, for about $7.2 million in November 2000 from the Stephens family of San Diego, Genton said.

John Stephens, who is an attorney with Robbins & Keehn of San Diego, represented the family. Gina Bucciarelli, a broker with Burnham Real Estate Services, represented Watt Commercial.

Watt has been developing residential and retail projects in San Diego County for more than 30 years, said Nadine Watt, project manager for the company.

Her company developed San Diego Country Estates, a master-planned community southeast of Ramona, in the early 1970s.

It was also the developer of Fairbanks Ranch, a luxury home community, and The Landing at Coronado, an apartment development, Watt said.

Architect Daun St. Amand, vice president of RTKL Associates Inc. of Baltimore’s Los Angeles office, said he designed the Little Italy project with no intent to copy any historical references in the neighborhood.

That’s in contrast to the nearby Village Walk low-rise condominium project, where Tony Cutri of Martinez & Cutri Architects of San Diego said he was inspired by old towns in Italy.

Many of the buildings immediately to the north date to the Craftsman era and the turn-of-the-20th-century, when the neighborhood was home to fishermen who went down to anchorages near where the Star of India is now docked.

St. Amand designed the high-rise terraced Meridian condominiums on the southwest corner of F and Front streets while at Maxwell & Starkman Associates of Beverly Hills.

“The street walls were challenging to design on the Little Italy project, with the 10-foot grade from the southwest to the northeast,” St. Amand said.

There will be 525,000 square feet of residences and parking. The structure will be cast-in-place concrete with steel framing, St. Amand said. Two-story lobbies will face Ash and Beech while the parking entrance will be on Columbia, he added.

Watt Commercial’s partner in the project is the Fidelity Management Trust Co., an affiliate of Fidelity Investments of New York, on behalf of an institutional investor, Genton said.

Rents at the development will be about $2 a square foot for the one- and two-bedroom apartments that will average about 800 square feet of floor space, Genton said. There will also be two-story, three-bedroom penthouses in both towers.

Amenities will include a common pool, spa and gym, and fiber-optic wiring for each unit, he said.

The participation of a major outside developer in a local Downtown high-rise residential development has been the hallmark of recent projects in the area.

Several other residential towers are being built to the south, although the Little Italy project is the first apartment development in the area, said Russ Valone, president of MarketPoint Realty Advisors of San Diego, a local housing analyst.

“Downtown is different these days when compared to three years ago,” Valone said. “It used to be you only thought of the Marina District near Seaport Village as the residential area, but now there is an entire arc around the central business district of upscale residential development.”

The new development has led many small businesses to relocate to such areas as Little Italy and Cortez Hill, Valone said.

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