By John Earl
Surf City Voice

The Huntington Beach City Council will most likely vote tonight to amend an agreement with the Pacific City developer to allow it four more years to finish required infrastructure improvements—including streets, sidewalks, trees, landscaping, sewers, street lighting, and water lines for the long-stalled downtown redevelopment project, according to a city report.

The item is on the consent section of the agenda, which means its quiet passage is considered routine. (The meeting starts tonight at 6 p.m. and will, of course, be over shadowed by the council’s public hearing on annexation of Sunset Beach, which is expected to be a 5-2, if not 7-0 vote.)

The $850 million project was approved by the city in 2004 as a 31.5 acre mixed-use and luxury hotel extravaganza exemplifying New Urbanism. But the nation’s sharp economic decline took its toll on the developer and Pacific City stalled.

Instead of 512 luxury condos resting on top of retail business and a 165 room hotel/spa, plus a 12,000 square foot restaurant, all that exists today is a few streets and a behemoth partially completed parking structure that reaches up from a huge pit with its concrete walls and rebar that passersby say is rusting away in the salty air.

Bordered by Pacific Coast Highway, Huntington Avenue, and First Street and Atlanta, Pacific City would fill the gap between downtown and the Hilton and Hyatt hotel resorts to the south on PCH.

In return for permission to wait until 2014 to finish major infrastructure construction, the developer, Makallon Atlanta, LLC, agrees to finish landscaping and pedestrian access around the project’s parameter by the end of this year.

Construction of homes, retail business buildings and the supposed hotel presumably cannot begin before the infrastructure is in place, which means an even longer delay before project completion.

As the Voice reported in June, city staff and county records indicated that Farallon Capital Management switched places with Makar Properties to become the principal owner and manager of Pacific City. The $129,970,243 loan, originally acquired from CWCaptial, a Boston lender, is now held by Cadim Note Inc., a Canadian lender.

At that time city Economic Development Director Stanley Smalewitz told the Voice that he had not been contacted by Farallon other than a “courtesy call that they replaced Makar as the major owner of the project.” Smalewitz added that “They are reviewing the original concept and will be talking to various developers and when they are ready they will call to discuss.”

Smalewitz said Farallon has been “tight lipped” about the future of the project. Calls made today to Farallon and Makar requesting specifics were not responded to by company officials by press time.

But by now, the realization of the Pacific City dream, like the city’s other godly but elusive adventure by the sea (search Poseidon on this site), seems so far off that it brings to mind the lines of a famous poem about the mythical city of Xanadu described in Samuel Taylor Coloridge’s classic poem, Kubla Khan.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree :

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea.

In the meantime, for at least another 6 years, Surf City residents will probably have the beautiful ocean on one side and the Pacific City parking structure on the other to look at as they drive by on Pacific Coast Highway.