Here we go again with Doug Manchester, San Diego’s most controversial and litigious waterfront-hotel developer, the robber baron of public coastal connections. Today, by a quirk of fate, Manchester holds in his golden palm the future of not just one prime redevelopment mega-project, but three, worth hundreds of millions of dollars and spread over some 35 acres. All are slated for the downtown bay front, and their design, financing and implementation is intertwined, or should be.
Make that, must be integrated and complementary, but this can only be accomplished if San Diegans demand it through a renewed and reinvigorated alliance among our representatives: the city and its downtown redevelopment arm, Centre City Development Corp., San Diego County, the San Diego Unified Port District and the Navy.
Manchester, developer of local waterfront-luxury hotels, single-handedly inspired the fighting words “walling off the bay” with his high-rise Hyatt and Marriott hotels next to the equally problematic San Diego Convention Center, all of which block access to San Diego Bay.
Graphic:
Whither the waterfront?
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California protects coastal access as everyone’s sacred right, but Manchester turns his properties into a privileged domain for upscale guests. Since the early 1980s, he has wielded unreasonable power in government development circles, sometimes making financial threats, other times using bait-and-switch designs that keep his architects busy and critics at bay.
From San Diego Union Tribune July 23, 2006
