Twenty years ago warehouses and SRO hotels filled these blocks, until Petco Park reshaped East Village around you. Twenty years ago, this was a neighborhood of warehouses, SRO hotels, homeless services providers, and light industrial buildings — affordable, unglamorous, and largely invisible to tourists and downtown office workers. The decision to build Petco Park here in the early 2000s was explicitly designed to anchor redevelopment.
City officials used redevelopment agency funds and eminent domain to assemble the land, displacing hundreds of low-income residents and small businesses in the process — a history that generated significant legal challenges and community opposition. The result, over the following decade, was explosive: luxury apartments, craft breweries, boutique hotels, and tech offices colonized the blocks around the ballpark. Property values multiplied.
The old SRO hotels were converted or demolished. San Diego's experience in East Village has been studied by urban planners across the country as a case study in sports-led urban development — celebrated by some as a model of revitalization, criticized by others as a blueprint for displacement.