Costa Verde Center Redevelopment
University City // The history of San Diego’s most potent transit oriented development opportunity:
In the 1960’s, Marine Corps Rifle Range Camp Matthews closed and was replaced by a fledgling UC San Diego. It seemed inevitable for an edge city to emerge around the new university in response, replacing the chaparral-covered canyons and mesas surrounding it, and master plans were quickly penned and roads were quickly constructed to achieve this. But the construction boom for the now-named University City only truly began upon the completion of two projects: the 805’s north section in 1974, and the University Towne Centre mall (now Westfield UTC) in 1977.
Above: University Towne Centre Opening Day, 1977. From CBS 8.
From there, construction of medium-density townhomes and office buildings spread like wildfire. The plot that became Costa Verde, the subject of this article, was one of the last vacant superblocks on the University City mesa to begin construction. A master plan for the superblock was prepared by local San Diego architecture firm SGPA Architecture & Planning for Dallas-based Guaranty Service Corporation, named “The Costa Verde Specific Plan,” and was filed with the City of San Diego in 1986. Grading and construction began about a year later.
Above: The 1986 Costa Verde Specific Plan.
The plans echo a distinctly mid-1980’s view of urbanism, like much of University City’s development around that time: density exists, but is extremely focused on the car as the primary mode of transportation, and the residential and commercial spaces are clearly separated to a fault. Mixed use was not yet a concept worth considering in developer circles. In essence, this created two separate developments within this superblock: the residential community of Costa Verde, and the Costa Verde Center strip mall - done in such a fashion that one could have mistaken the two for being completely unrelated to each other had they not shared a name. The strip mall, of course, was oriented toward UTC and Genesee Avenue, positioning Genesee Avenue as essentially an arterial mall access road.
Above: Genesee Avenue in between Costa Verde and UTC, 2011 Google Street View.
Neither UTC nor Costa Verde were originally designed to be transit oriented, despite SANDAG’s 1986 regional plan calling for a Trolley extension “from Old Town north to the North University City Area.” As we know, this eventually came to pass in 2014 with the approval of the Blue Line’s Mid-Coast Trolley Extension, in what became an elevated alignment over Genesee Avenue with a station directly in between the two malls. When the extension opened in 2021, UTC, which had recently gone through the second phase of a massive retail expansion toward Genesee while integrating the Trolley station’s future elevator banks within it, was already set in stone. This left the Costa Verde Center strip mall as arguably the most potent transit oriented development opportunity site in all of San Diego. Developers knew this.
Above: The elevators at UTC Blue Line station to a shuttered Costa Verde, 2025.
Unfortunately, the aforementioned 1986 Costa Verde Specific Plan was a massive roadblock in potential redevelopment plans. The plan mandated that the area taken up by the strip mall be a commercial center, including local shops and a grocery store, while also prohibiting any residential space (after all, the rest of Costa Verde was where the residential was supposed to go!) For any redevelopment plan of the strip mall to get shovels in the ground, it would have to be accompanied by an amendment to said Specific Plan.
In 2020, after five years of planning work and many renderings that never gained footing, Jacksonville-based owners of the strip mall Regency Centers applied for an amendment of this type, accompanied by renderings like below. Notable is the logo on one of the buildings in these renderings: Alexandria Real Estate Equities, a life science and biotech developer with a large presence in the area. This is because the plan completely eschewed residential portions and was instead an ultra-modern transit oriented life science/biotech hub - a joint venture between Regency and Alexandria. A convenient analog for what this iteration of the Costa Verde Center redevelopment could have become is IQHQ’s now complete Research and Development District (RaDD), which was also first announced in 2020.
Above: The renderings born from the Regency-Alexandria plans for Costa Verde.
We say “could have become,” because it did not pan out that way. Just over a year after applying for the amendment, Regency Centers had divested themselves from the project, selling the site completely to Alexandria for $125 million. The now-dilapidated mall was consequently shuttered for good.
The plans from the original joint venture did not change after the sale, but shovels never hit the ground. As the results of 2020’s biotech new-build shell boom began coming online in early 2024-2025, and as another mall-to-biotech conversion project that did begin construction in The Campus at Horton (Plaza) was quickly and publicly going sour, it was clear that the region no longer needed more lab building supply. The region needed housing, and especially so on this opportunity site, now even more appealing after being upzoned to 218 residential units per acre in the 2024 University Community Plan Update. Due to all this, Alexandria sold the site to GM Residential Partners LLC for $124 million in January 2025, with a stipulation that the site could not be used in any way for life science.
Above: Costa Verde Center in it's shuttered form, 2025. From CBS 8.
GM consequently partnered with local owner-developer Cass Street Venture LLC to pen a new master plan altogether. This master plan, described in the remainder of this article, was approved by the San Diego City Council on October 23, 2025 to flat-out remove the strip mall property entirely from the Costa Verde Specific Plan. In its place, the site will be divided into 13 different parcels.
Above: The proposed, and accepted, division of parcels for Cass Street's Costa Verde plan. From Cass Street.
The Costa Verde Center Redevelopment plan, as now currently publicized, entails using those 13 new parcels to create a mixed-use, walkable, residential community around them. Included in some of these parcels are ideas for a boutique hotel, as well as a grocery store to fill the void left by the locally beloved Bristol Farms.
However, Cass Street does not intend to build all 13 buildings at once, or even be the developer for all 13: rather, they will act as more of a steward for the new neighborhood as a whole. Cass Street will do all the demolition work, road creation and construction, and civil and utility improvements - preparing the site to take that next step into the idealized ultimate transit oriented development San Diego desperately craves. They could still be the developer on some (or even all) of the parcels in the future, but they could just as well “sell off some of the blocks to recoup costs” upon civil construction completion. The point of the breakup of the site into these 13 parcels is to allow that flexibility into the project so it actually can, one day, leave the realm of drawings and renderings and actually come to fruition.
Above: Costa Verde Center's current conceptual redevelopment renderings. From JWDA.
And indeed, with approval from the city now acquired, demolition of the still standing but abandoned strip mall is planned to finally begin in early 2026. A brand new transit oriented community may not be necessarily imminent for the Costa Verde Center site as of this article’s writing, but there is certainly light at the end of the tunnel for the limbo this strip mall has sat in for years, and that is worth both celebration and anticipation for what is to come.
-------
SOURCES:
The presentation Cass Street gave to the UCPG Planning Group was nicely archived by universitycitynews.org. You can watch it at this zoom link, with the password being i9At.zpm and the presentation beginning an hour and a half into the recording. There is a lot of interesting information in here. https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/share/1epZFxqQ7CVwjLqOzrEjf-CaSMQEmZXJ98Ik0o8aODTmLwFxrxG7ZN_e6YZky9g.vCML16hlbJYMN6Es
https://www.sandiego.gov/sites/default/files/2025-03/costa-verde-specific-plan.pdf
https://retailinsite.net/major-overhaul-slated-for-strip-mall-next-to-utc-new-trolley-line/
https://www.sandiego.gov/sites/default/files/2025-07/university-community-plan_print_july-2024.pdf