SAN DIEGO-Culling young talent, rallying around currently existing local businesses and participating in the state’s enterprise zones are key factors in San Diego’s future growth, according to panelists at a recent Urban Land Institute San Diego/Tijuana District Council breakfast forum. Panelists discussed efforts to attract and retain business in the area, a discussion that was dominated by the belief that helping companies grow that are already here is the best way to achieve this goal.
“We will not grow jobs through attraction of big businesses,” said Mark Cafferty, president and CEO of San Diego Regional Economic Development Corp., at the forum. Cafferty pointed out that San Diego and California as a whole cannot compete with the incentives offered by other states, and as such should support currently existing business via collaboration, including public and private partnerships.
Cafferty also emphasized that utilizing the talent that local universities produce is another important strategy for supporting San Diego’s economy. “We need to compete with ideas and initiatives that attract people,” he said.
Calling for broader visa policies, Kris Michell, president of Downtown San Diego Partnership, said that “organically supporting young people who want to study here to stay here” with help and appropriate policies is one way to retain young university-educated talent. “It’s silly not to be catering to the millennials,” Michell said during a presentation about the commercial marketing district zone she and others envisioned, which was recently approved by the San Diego City Council.
Catering to millennials should involve a place-based economic model in the downtown region that promotes business and residential growth through solving disincentives to living and working downtown, such as homelessness and lack of parking, the presentation emphasized.
Another element to growth is taking advantage of the California Enterprise Zone, according to panelist Brendan Foote, a SVP at Hughes Marino. Foote named the Zone “as one of the best tools we have” for retaining and growing local businesses. Forty-two such zones exist throughout the state that allow for tax credits based on job creation and capital investment, and San Diego has one of the largest zones. However, not enough local businesses are taking advantage of the expansion- and retention-based program.
According to Foote, the California Tax Board is currently measuring effectiveness and potential regulatory changes to the program, which has been the target of Governor Brown’s efforts for elimination, via legislation. Foote agrees that the program does need adjustments, but those involved are willing to “meet in the middle.”
As GlobeSt.com previously reported, “The Urban Land Institute and other urban-planning associations have for the last several years been concerned about trying to reorient development to higher densities around transportation facilities or nodes,” Howard Ellman of Buchalter Nemer’s real estate practice group in San Francisco, tells GlobeSt.com. Ellman was referring to the resurgent trend of higher-density developments around urban transportation facilities in some of the larger California cities such as San Francisco, Los Angeles and even parts of San Diego, according to industry experts.
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Carrie Rossenfeld
Carrie Rossenfeld is a reporter for the San Diego and Orange County markets on GlobeSt.com and a contributor to Real Estate Forum. She was a trade-magazine and newsletter editor in New York City before moving to Southern California to become a freelance writer and editor for magazines, books and websites. Rossenfeld has written extensively on topics including commercial real estate, running a medical practice, intellectual-property licensing and giftware. She has edited books about profiting from real estate and has ghostwritten a book about starting a home-based business.
