Midway Construction Project Will See 190 Units on Former Barnard School Land

The San Diego School District sold the property of the former Barnard Elementary School over in the Midway area about 2 years ago. Now, it’s the site of a massive construction project that will when completed host 180 apartment units and 10 townhomes.

The project – called the Barnard Apartments – is on 9.5 acres and will be a gated apartment complex.  A company called the Monarch Group bought the site at auction for a reported $16.5 million, and plan to have the project completed by January 2016.

The apartments will include one-, two-, and three-bedroom units, as there will be 19 residential buildings. In addition, plans call for a rec building with a fitness center and “teaching kitchen”, and there will be a swimming pool and an artificial-turf dog park.  Each apartment will have their own garage space as well.

Monarch is a La Jolla–based real estate developer and has built similar properties in Carmel Valley and near Lake Miramar in Scripps Ranch.

According to Ian Anderson who wrote in  San Diego Reader:

The cost of construction looks to hit the $30 million range, on land purchased for about $40/sq. ft. The school district handled the demolition of the school buildings that previously occupied the property, but a San Diego Unified rep could not provide a dollar amount for the cost of doing so.

Barnard Elementary, officially known as Barnard Asian Pacific Language Academy, moved to the former site of Bayview Terrace Elementary in Pacific Beach at the beginning of the 2013 school year. The Mandarin-language magnet school only briefly occupied the Point Loma campus, which was built during World War II as a school for children of Navy service members.

When this property – and others held by the School District – were sold, they were met with a barrage of criticism from the community – and their own board, in that they sold the land for way under what it was/ is worth, and that they should have held onto the property and leased it out instead of getting rid of it.

One commenter to Anderson’s article stated one of the main criticisms:

School districts should not be playing property speculation games, but that was what was happening with San Diego…. If/when the district ever needs more schools in those areas of the city, it will be hell to pay, in that assembling large parcels will be breathtakingly costly. Like as not, that will never happen. But some sort of real plan for this sort of thing would be a wonderful thing. 

Also, writer Anderson added to his own article:

I tried to figure out what the worth of such property should be, but considering undeveloped property in Point Loma only usually exists as a hypothetical, the real estate savvy people I reached out to didn’t feel comfortable speculating. The math says it went $40/sq ft for the undeveloped property, with construction costs adding near $75/sq ft, meaning the post construction investment for Monarch would be $115/sq ft at ~$47 million.

If they turned around and sold it for double that (a simplistic estimation, I know), that would raise it to $230/sq ft. Looking as sites like trulia.com and zillow.com, I see single family homes in the PL area on the market for closer to $400/sq ft. Not scientific or reliable, but safe to assume it’s a pretty reliable long term investment for Monarch, with rental income likely to hover in the $4 million range annually, presuming an average rent of $1800/month (which seems to be the figure going around currently).

Perhaps more telling is that SDUSD would have sold the Barnard St. property for as low as $10 million (< $22 sq ft). Clearly the Mission Beach property proved more valuable, at closer to $190/sq ft.