PACIFIC BEACH – San Diego city officials say they won’t approve the controversial 23-story “Turquoise Tower” in Pacific Beach — at least not as currently proposed.
And city planners’ objection to the proposal is specifically over one of the issues that has driven community opposition to the Vela project since its developer, Kalonymus, pitched it in 2024.
The city’s Development Services Department sent its message to Kalonymus in an unambiguous December letter following the developer’s Oct. 22 update to the project.
“The project cannot be approved at this time. … plans lack necessary information or contain errors that need to be corrected to conform with code,” city officials wrote.
DSD’s letter concludes there is one major issue that could quash Vela: The developer’s tactic of counting some of the tower’s 213 units as hotel rooms — while leasing them as apartments.
Counting the units as hotel rooms but using them as housing allowed the developer to exceed the building height it would have been entitled to under city regulations if it had simply counted them as apartments.
Richard Berg, a city spokesman, said the letter reflects the city’s “responsibility to the public and future users of the building that it actually complies with code.”
Kalonymus can review the city’s comments on the project, correct their plans, and resubmit the proposal, Berg said.
“If the applicant wants to qualify under the prior version of the law regarding visitor accommodations, it must submit a project consistent with those rules,” he said.
“What it cannot do is call the units visitor accommodations on one hand and housing on the other. The developer cannot have it both ways because the city needs to know which type of units they are in order to know which set of rules to apply — those that apply to commercial space or to residential space.”
In other words, the city is now saying that the developer’s gambit of counting some apartments as hotel rooms to qualify for a larger building under city regulations will not fly.
The letter says the proposal does not comply with building and land use regulations, including some meant to protect health and safety, in part due to incomplete or conflicting information.
Those conflicts have frustrated the city’s attempts to determine if the project is eligible for the state’s density bonus law, a powerful regulation that lets projects bypass certain development restrictions in exchange for low-income housing.
The city says it can’t determine whether the project qualifies, based on the developer’s interpretation, without a complete analysis of the facts about the project.
“Statements regarding floor area ratio have been and remain inaccurate,” it said. “Most problematic is that the plans still contain inconsistent information about which units will be used for residential versus commercial purposes. This is a critical issue to resolve because it not only affects the incentives and waivers analysis. It is critical for basic project review.”
The “Turquoise Tower” Vela project, at 970 Turquoise St., includes 10 low-income housing units, 65 market-rate housing units, and 139 hotel units. If the project is ever built, it would become the tallest San Diego coastal building constructed since the 21-story building at 939 Coast Blvd. in La Jolla, built in 1964.
The tall project on a small, 0.8-acre site surrounded by a single-family residential neighborhood has become a poster child for growing opposition to city policies meant to spur denser home building.
Kalonymus and its attorneys now contend the Vela project should be considered “automatically approved” because the city did not greenlight it within a state deadline meant to expedite housing approvals.
Their argument would require the city to issue building permits immediately.
The city says it hasn’t been approved because the developer submitted multiple rounds of incomplete or incorrect plans.
