Padres-Led Development Team Agree On Price For Land Next To Petco Park

The San Diego Padres baseball team and its development partners have spent the last 14 months negotiating with the city of San Diego to buy a four-block parking lot next to Petco Park, with plans to redevelop it.

Now, they have agreed to a price tag for the land — $35.1M — and must close the sale before the end of the year due to state disposition laws, The San Diego Union-Tribune reported. The deal also stipulates that the project must include a 1.3-acre public park and make 270 residential units deed-restricted affordable housing for low- and moderate-income families, according to the paper. 

The Padres and their partners, which include Tishman Speyer and Ascendant Capital Partners, are planning a $1.5B mixed-use development on the site, called Tailgate Park. Once envisioned as predominantly office space, it was later rejiggered to include mostly residential space, with 1,800 units across three residential towers, the highest reaching about 500 feet tall. It will also include 50K SF of street-level retail. 

“The pandemic really threw us a curveball in the sense that the work-from-home and hybrid work environments that were put in place ... have abated some of the demand for office,” Tishman Speyer Southern California Regional Director and Senior Managing Director Paul DeMartini told the Union-Tribune.

“We thought that, based on the city’s housing needs and based on the demand that we were seeing for housing in the market, that it was more appropriate to meet that market demand to get this project into production and make it a reality sooner,” DeMartini added. 

The agreement with the city also requires construction on the first phase of the two-phase project to begin within 18 months of closing escrow, the Union-Tribune reported. Construction on all phases has to wrap by December 2035.