Author: Source

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.

From Peninsula News

Please join the Ocean Beach Historical Society on Thursday, February 19, 2026, 7pm, at Water’s Edge Community, 1984 Sunset Cliffs Blvd. Local author Jill Hall discusses her recent novel “On a Sundown Sea”

From Protect Point Loma

Jan. 23, 2026 Point Loma Community,

Protect Point Loma group wanted to update you on our fight to protect PL from the predatory developers.

The owner/developer, Michael Contreras, pushed his project to build an over-height, 4-story, 56-unit apartment building to be permitted and start construction in early 2026. He is there.

However, community opposition – coupled with the real threat of drawn-out legal action and the increased costs of environmental mitigation – is working. The community’s action appears to have paused the development of 1004 Rosecrans. In over a year, the community has stepped up repeatedly to voice our opposition in public, to our elected representatives, and to underwrite the work of a crack legal team. Community members provided essential historical data on the property that enabled us to initiate environmental actions to protect neighbors and Cabrillo Elementary students from exposure to carcinogens in the soil. The broad support of the community has been essential.

This pause is an opportunity. Community members have consistently offered to purchase the property from Contreras to prevent the project from going forward.  We continue to support those who are trying to make this happen.

“Don’t cause trouble. You’ll just make matters worse.”

PL-OB Monthly reporter Steven Mihailovich had a great piece on the OB Planning Board and its latest meeting on February 3 in the Feb. 11th issue of  Point Loma – OB Monthly  which is published by the SDU-T.

The most interesting part of his report for us was when he summarized in detail what some OBceans commented on during the Public Non-Agenda segment of the Board’s agenda. They had attended to raise concerns and support for their efforts to preserve OB’s historic district in order to prevent large-scale, super-dense or too-high new construction in the community.

Mihailovich’s account that follows raises very important details that OBceans need to acquaint themselves with because they go to the very existential heart of OB’s character.

Here is his report:

‘Emerging’ historical district
During non-agenda public comments at the board meeting, Barbara Houlton and Lynne Miller of the nonprofit organization Coastal Caretakers addressed an expected City Council vote Tuesday, Feb. 24, on adopting legislation called “Preservation and Progress Package A.”

If passed, the package would limit the status of Ocean Beach’s “emerging” historical district to the 72 beach cottages already designated historic and potentially open the rest of Ocean Beach to the city’s “Complete Communities” development rules.

Coastal Commission Public Hearing Keeps Getting Postponed

By Quinn Welsch / Courthouse News Service / January 30, 2026

For Ghalia Mohder, “the Knoll” is more than just a tall mesa overlooking the view at Scripps Coastal Reserve along the San Diego coastline.

Mohder said that she first discovered the Knoll — and its historic view of the Pacific Ocean — during her freshman year at University of California San Diego after a resident advisor in her college dorm took her and some other students for a visit.

“To be honest, ever since then I was hooked,” she said. “You could always go to La Jolla Shores and it’s a big public place, there was partying going on. This place was different. The people who went there, went there to enjoy the scenery.”

But public access to the Knoll has remained locked behind a gate along the mansion-lined La Jolla Farms Road community since 2020.

Since the Covid-19 pandemic, the university has restricted public access to a small number of people each week. Despite the passage of six years and multiple scheduled public hearings at the California Coastal Commission, that access remains limited and no resolution is apparent.

The Scripps Coastal Reserve is a nearly 1,000-acre reserve owned by UCSD that encompasses sandy shores, coastal canyons, a steep cliff face, and mesa top — the latter of which is known as the Mesa or Knoll, which overlooks a sweeping view of the ocean.

The beach remains open from other publicly available locations, but the gate to the Knoll and its beach trail has remained locked, despite the state’s lifting of Covid-19 precautions in 2023.

Efforts by the California Coastal Commission to bring the UCSD’s future plans for the Scripps Coastal Reserve to a public hearing have so far not been fruitful. Starting in 2024, permit applications for a managed access plan have been submitted, extended and withdrawn, only to start all over again.

by Dave Schwab / Times of San Diego / Jan. 21, 2026

Liberty Station’s historic North Chapel, closed since the previous tenant proposed modernizing the building to convert it into a restaurant and event venue, has been reopened and repurposed.

The World War II-era North Chapel accommodates 320 guests for weddings, services, meetings, or other special occasions. Since 1942, the building has hosted Navy services, weddings, memorials, and numerous other community events.

The chapel was officially reopened last December by Michael Esposito, founder of Snake Oil Venue Co. He is also co-founder and chief executive officer of Snake Oil Cocktail Co.

Esposito took over for the previous tenant, 828 Events, which had proposed altering the historical building to adapt it for possible new uses. That notion drew serious blowback from some preservationists and neighbors, who dismissed the character-altering chapel proposal as being insensitive and inappropriate to the building and its original design and mission.

A man who was responsible for punching another guy in Ocean Beach so hard that he fell and hit his head on the pavement, lapsing into a coma and dying 3 months later, has pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter.

Andrew Phillip Restrepo, 34, had been charged with the murder of Sean Glenn for administering what was called a “Superman punch”, agreed to the new charge and having the murder charge dropped, just before he was to stand trial.

The incident occurred on May 10, 2023 in the 5000 block of Newport Avenue in Ocean Beach. Restrepo also pleaded guilty to felony assault for punching another man on an MTS bus in the Midway area in a month before the fatal encounter.  Restrepo was arrested in August 2024.