Mavourneen O’Connor has friends in high places

San Diego Square's near-empty parking lot
- Photo by Kelly Davis

Scratch that: What really keeps her up at night is having to drive by her apartment complex and see an empty parking lot where neither she nor any of the building’s other tenants are allowed to park.

Walker, 73, has lived at San Diego Square for 10 years. As CityBeat reported last month, some residents of the low-income senior-housing complex, located Downtown at Ninth Avenue and Broadway, are dealing with issues ranging from bug infestations to management thwarting their attempts to form a tenants association. But the most bizarre problem is that, for years, the building’s 28-space parking lot has sat nearly empty, open only to San Diego Square employees, while tenants are forced to find street parking.

In response to CityBeat’s story, City attorney Jan Goldsmith agreed to take another look at the parking issue.

“It appears to be one of the many matters in the city that went on and on without any resolution,” Goldsmith wrote in an email. “We come across these never ending issues a lot. Unfortunately, people involved are left without finality.”

San Diego Square sits on city-owned land that, since 1979, has been leased to the nonprofit Kind Corporation for $1 a year. Kind Corp. was founded by Mavourneen O’Connor, whose twin sister, Maureen O’Connor, was a City Council member from 1971 to 1979 and mayor from 1985 until 1992.

For the last 10 years, Walker’s made getting the parking lot open her fight. A few years ago, she wrote a series of letters to the City Council. Each letter highlighted difficulties faced by a particular tenant.

“People have learned not to park on the corner because drivers come around the corner, they lose control and smash into the car,” Walker described in one letter. And, in another, she wrote about a man who was carrying his groceries from his car to the building and was offered help by two people— though, Walker added, “they weren’t going to help him; they were going to take his stuff.”

She wrote, “Would you want your mother or your father to experience this? No you wouldn’t. You’d do something.”

The closed parking lot has been an issue since at least October 1993, when the city’s Neighborhood Code Compliance Department, in response to a complaint from a tenant, issued a citation to San Diego Square for not allowing residents to use the lot. The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, which provides rental subsidies for the project, followed a few months later, giving Kind Corp. one month to open the lot to tenants.

By all accounts—from public records and folks involved in the matter—Kind Corp. put up a fight that lasted until late 2004, when, despite the city having threatened to revoke San Diego Square’s permit and take legal action, the nonprofit declined to sign a settlement agreement.

Edward Whittler, Kind Corp.’s longtime attorney, didn’t return a phone call or email seeking comment.

Amid the stacks of documents the City attorney’s office has pulled from the archive to research the case, none answer exactly why a nonprofit whose stated mission is helping and housing seniors has been so bent on denying those seniors safe parking.

According to correspondence from Whittler, arguments against opening the lot to tenants ranged from it being against city policy to encourage car ownership with public transit close by to it being a safety issue should there be additional traffic coming in and out of the lot. In 1996, Kind Corp. hired a private investigator who described in a report that the area surrounding San Diego Square was a hot spot for “undocumented persons, male and female prostitutes, homeless, mentally ill and, of course, drug dealers and drug abusers,” and, therefore, access to the lot should be kept to a minimum.

The same year, former San Diego Mayor and then-California Gov. Pete Wilson sent a letter to members of the city’s Planning Commission—which was poised to revoke San Diego Square’s permit—arguing that there had been a tacit agreement that “No residential parking was to be provided.”

However, the project’s original permit and tenant lease agreement clearly show the 28 spaces were intended for residents. A man who answered the phone at Wilson’s office said neither the former governor nor his secretary were available. Wilson didn’t respond to emailed questions.

According to records, from 1997 to 2004, Kind Corp. appeared willing to negotiate a settlement, but then would either make proposals that were untenable or cut off communication with the city. A Dec. 2, 2002, proposal from Whittler, for instance, proposed that each month a single floor of the building would have access to the lot. In 2004, there was a proposal to divide the parking lot in half. Employees of San Diego Square would use the same secure entrance they’d always used on Ninth Avenue while residents would have to enter and exit from Tenth Avenue, an option that seems to undermine Kind Corp.’s safety concerns.

“You couldn’t get from the parking lot to the building without going around [the block],” Walker said.

The agreement included an 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. curfew. Walker didn’t like the curfew, but, ultimately, it was better than nothing.

“We had a meeting of the residents, and the decision was: Better to get into the parking lot than to fight something like that,” she said.

Kind Corp. never signed the agreement. Heidi Wierman, the deputy city attorney handling the case at the time, said she wasn’t surprised: “It seemed that whatever solution was posed, a roadblock was put up for that solution.”

Goldsmith said he has an attorney researching the case. Once that’s done, his office will present options to the City Council.

“The folks involved are entitled to some conclusion to this one way or another,” he said.

Write to kellyd@sdcitybeat.com and editor@sdcitybeat.com. Follow @citybeatkelly on Twitter.