A cold case in Sorrento Mesa

On a nondescript hill in Sorrento Mesa, across from Mira Mesa’s 3Roots housing development that covers the former H.G. Fenton Carroll Canyon quarry, sits the most normal technology park you’ve ever seen in your life. The only thing that makes Fenton Technology Park unique among the many other nearby technology parks in its immediate vicinity is that two of its lots are vacant. For the largest employment center in San Diego County, that is a rare case.

(Satelite imagery)

To be fair, these lots are not entirely vacant—and that’s what makes them intriguing. A completely undeveloped lot is one thing, it happens. But both of these lots have a surface parking lot to their name, surrounding a space that clearly is meant for a building of some kind—buildings that are nowhere to be found. Clearly something was, at one point, either here or going to be here. But what could that have been?

It’s a confusing thing. Not something that jumps out to you instantly, but as one jog around the loop road compounds into a hundred over the course of years, becomes something that nags at your brain like an unscratchable itch. This technology park was first built in 2003, it seems like a short time to already have abandoned property residing within it, no? What’s the deal with these lots? It’s my quest to find out. And as always, the quest to find “what used to be here” must begin by consulting the Google Street View archive feature. Which only amplified my confusion tenfold:

There was a building under construction here in December 2014.

(Google Street View imagery)

Less than one year later, the building has mysteriously disappeared, seemingly without a trace.

(Google Street View imagery)

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a mystery to solve.

I immediately consulted San Diego’s parcel number lookup, hoping I could search up the parcel number and track down a development record of some kind. 9800 Summers Ridge Road’s APN netted me the owner of the sites, which is a good start: BMR Summers Ridge LP. This certainly tracks: BioMed Realty (BMR) owns many lab buildings in the Sorrento Valley area. So I looked up BMR Summers Ridge LP. The top hit? A 2023 lawsuit.

Well, that’s certainly not what I expected. And it turns out, this lawsuit has nothing to do with our mysterious disappearing building, but rather what BMR attempted to replace it with: an Amazon facility, which the “Fenton Technology Park Property Owners Association” had denied development of. Beyond the scope of this article, the existence of this lawsuit only answered the side question of why a building still had not been built here as of this article’s writing.

Scrolling down a bit further in Google gets us a more exciting thread to follow, however: a passed resolution from the city of San Diego for a pedestrian tunnel on the site, signed by then-Mayor Bob Filner just six months before his resignation.

This gives us the name of the project, or at least the name of the project’s planned tunnel: the Shire Regen Tunnel. Let’s look up Shire Regen now. We get a webpage from Intersect Management, which helpfully tells us what these two lots were supposed to be: the first phase of an ultimately 850,000 sf local headquarters for UK-based biopharmaceutical company Shire plc. This first phase would have included a 250,000 sf “Technical Operations Building” chock-full of manufacturing and lab space, and a 100,000 sf “Commercial Operations Building” chock-full of offices. They confirm that the Technical Operations Building was “fully designed, permitted, topped out with completed underground utilities and slabs on metal decks” before construction was shut down and the entire building was written off as a loss.

We have our half built building. It was the first phase of Project S.H.O.R.E (Shire Operations for Regenerative Expansion), built to “house the production of Shire’s diabetic foot ulcer treatment, Dermagraft,” which Shire “expected to have significant growth thanks to the increasing prevalence of diabetes diagnoses,” after Shire acquired Dermagraft’s developer, La Jolla-based Advanced BioHealing, in 2011. With it we find ourselves a lot of breathless articles welcoming the new Shire project to the San Diego fold throughout 2012 and 2013. We learn that the architecture firm behind the project was FPBA, who also has a webpage dedicated to this project that mentions the project “ended before completion.”

But, up to this point, all the the articles I had read either talk about construction beginning, or just make a passing mention of construction ending without a reason. Our most pressing question is not yet answered. Why did Project S.H.O.R.E. go away just as quickly as it arrived? Were there structural defects? Was there a problem with the soil? Was there a fire? Some fourth potential reason?

That "some fourth potential reason" is the winner here. After some more online sleuthing, I found an answer in a November 2013 San Diego Business Journal piece. The future demand of Dermagraft, the product that birthed an entire master plan, a half-completed building and a building preparing to begin construction, two surface parking lots, and a planned pedestrian tunnel… had its revenue “nearly halved” in the year construction was starting to ramp up. In a company rife with winning products like Adderall and Vyvanse, Dermagraft had become Shire’s “poorest-performing product by far.” How does a company curb such significant losses? Cancel the building you were building for it.

It’s the ultimate encapsulation of eschewing the sunk cost fallacy. It doesn’t matter how much money has already been spent: the business case no longer makes sense, so everyone has to pack their bags and go home. And just like that, a steel structure for a building with dreams of bettering people’s lives, was taken down less than two years after it was assembled in the first place. And the only relics that prove it was ever there at all, are a couple of abandoned parking lots, and an image on Google Street View.

It’s a sobering reminder of how hard it is to get a building to exist in modern construction. You can have the perfect plan. The perfect design and contractor team lined up. You can have everything finally falling into place after years of coordination, meetings, budgeting, maybe even withstanding delays along the way... and a left hook can just come in and mess everything up permanently. It makes you think of the people involved in projects like these. To see a thing you poured so much time into, so close to seeing the light of day, suddenly over. And then nearly all evidence it ever existed gets scrubbed from the earth it once was so close to inhabiting.

Thankfully, the internet never forgets, even if a bit of digging is required to get there, allowing us to mark the case of the mysterious disappearing building as officially solved. You’re welcome.