[longbeachnik]

Downtown Condo Project
Gets More Time


Plans to start building condominiums downtown got approved, for a second time, by the Planning Commission this week.

The property south of Ocean Boulevard and just west of Chestnut Place originally was part of the Camden development, but sold to Intracorp. Plans for 246 condo units on the land was approved last year.

This week, Intracorp was back before the commission asking for some changes to its project. While the overall density did not change, Intracorp wants to build the larger building first and the smaller one second, the opposite of the original plan.

The rest of the project — dealing with Victory Park, parking and other site details — remained the same. Work on Victory Park, which will include a renovation to put in green space there that can be used as a park, must be done as part of the first phase.

The commission approved Intracorp’s new plan unanimously.

What has been built so far at Camden’s Park at Harbour View, and through much of the rest of downtown, are apartments. City officials have pushed to have parts of these projects become condominiums, hoping that more home ownership will be a key to long-term success of the renovated downtown.

Intracorp’s project was designed as the second phase of Camden’s development. In the master plan for the Camden development, there were to be three towers on this site, one an office tower with about 100,000 square feet of office space. However, Intracorp decided the office tower would not work financially and scrapped it. The area where the office tower was to be will now be a parking structure, according to the plans, which will be used by tenants of the California Bank and Trust building as well as condominium tenants.

As they had at the previous meeting, commissioners said they were generally pleased with the design. Most of their questions focused around parking and traffic flow in the high density area.
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I'm pretty sure that the larger tower is over 22 storys, though I really don't know.