By: Marie Coronel / 10News / Feb 16, 2026
A growing trend in San Diego is helping address the housing shortage as companies convert vacant hotels into apartment complexes, offering residents new housing options at competitive rental rates.
Ambient Communities has been working for years to transform the former Consulate Hotel, which was built in the 1970s and sat vacant for years, into the Celeste Point Loma Apartments. The project will offer 127 units in an area that has seen limited new housing development.
Robert Honer, a principal for Ambient Communities, said the conversion provides an alternative housing option for young professionals and students in a desirable neighborhood.
“If you’re going to graduate school, if you get your first job this is a community that people like to live in. For me the only way we could afford it was we put a bunch of kids in a single family home and did it that way. So this is an alternative to that,” Honer said.
The conversion approach allowed the company to reduce construction costs by keeping most of the building’s outer structure intact. The former hotel rooms have been converted into studio and one-bedroom apartments of similar size, but with upgraded amenities including washers, dryers, dishwashers and microwaves in each unit.
The development also features community spaces including a lounge area, outdoor BBQ area and resident kitchen to compensate for the smaller individual unit sizes.
“The reality of these units is the square footage of the units is relatively small, so we wanted to create larger spaces for people to spend time together because there’s not a lot of room in the actual units themselves for people to host larger gatherings,” Honer said.
According to Rentcafe.com typical rentals in Point Loma range from $2,500 to $3,000 per month. At Celeste Point Loma Apartments, rent starts in the low $2,000 range and goes up to the low $3,000s, depending on the unit type and upgrades, potentially saving renters several hundred dollars monthly.
The property will also offer four income-restricted apartments for qualifying applicants, with rent ranging from $1,447 to $1,550 per month.
The property is now accepting applications and is scheduled to open next month.
“Potentially saving renters several hundreds (of) dollars monthly…. ” Charging “low 2000 dollar range up to the low 3000’s'”. On what planet is this an improvement over the $2500 to $3000 per month Point Loma typical unit rent, when both statements average out to circa $2750? 4 “affordable units” vs 124 units at market hardly bends the average.
Affordable – You keep using that word; I do not think it means what you think it means.
“The reality of these units is the square footage of the units is relatively small, so we wanted to create larger spaces for people to spend time together because there’s not a lot of room in the actual units themselves for people to host larger gatherings,” Honer said.
Sounds like your living………in a hotel room. And around 40 parking spaces if I remember correctly? The website mentions gated parking. And a communal kitchen. A college dorm house on steroids.
Taking names to help struggling students is competely dishonest.
Assuming the average of $2750/month then, to afford a rent of $2,750, it is generally recommended that your monthly income should be at least three times that amount, which means you would need a gross monthly income of about $8,385/ mo. At part-time, lets say 20 hours/ week your part-time job at the coffeeshop or bar backing needs to make you $104.00/hour. This translates to an annual salary of approximately $100,620, following the common guideline of keeping rent below 30% of your income. How many struggling students are working part-time making the $100,620 required to “afford” these rents? What an absolute farce!
At least you get a meal plan with SDSU in their dorms. The house across the street from me has 8 people, likely 1K a person, which is cheaper than dorms, which is cheaper than this converted hotel mess. But there’s transit? Right? Lol.
Haven’t you heard? There’s a future Transit Hub at Rosecrans & Nimitz. Everything within a mile walk, can have unlimited bonus ADUs if it is zoned for multi family. The rest only gets 5-7 units. What could possibly go wrong, because it says “future” in some fantasy map?
Is it even legal to lease these with only a microwave and no stove, as per new AB-628? I read that there are exemptions for permanent supportive housing, SROs, residential hotels, and units within facilities that have communal kitchens, such as assisted living, dorm-style housing, or treatment facilities…but does this qualify as that?
If the city was serious about addressing the housing shortage, they would ban STVRs and instantly free up thousands of housing units.
Amen
The abandoned hotel was a blight on the neighborhood. I hope this project is successful but I also don’t understand how the economics will work out.