San Diego Area
Fields Numerous Projects

The biotech infrastructure surrounding La Jolla and UC-San Diego is well-documented, but its reverberations are being felt well outside city limits.
        New real estate firm CruzanMonroe, in partnership with JMI Realty, is developing two San Diego office parks totaling some 630,000 sq. ft. (58,527 sq. m.) of space, in addition to purchasing the Prescott Industrial Park in Oceanside. At the community's Ocean Ranch Corporate Centre, IDEC Pharmaceuticals recently located their manufacturing and process development campus. The main incentive was the waiving of fees and a rebate of the city's portion of the personal property tax on the machinery and equipment used directly in manufacturing for a five-year period. But the path for the deal was paved long before last year.

The $1.3-billion manufacturing campus for IDEC Pharmaceuticals in Oceanside will complement the company's new corporate headquarters in San Diego, 40 miles to the south.

        "Stirling Development, out of Orange County, was seeking a large unentitled piece of land in Southern California to develop," explains Jane McVey, director of the Oceanside Economic Development and Redevelopment Department. "There are relatively few large land sites left in San Diego and Orange Counties, and they discovered this 400-acre (162-hectare) site that sits about three miles (4.8 km.) east of the coast. We worked with Stirling for over a year while they worked with the owners of the land on the business deal. Once we had an entitled site, we made a presentation to IDEC, [whose officials were] being shepherded by the San Diego Regional Economic Development Corporation. At that time they had spent three and a half years looking at sites, some of them out of the state."
        Those other sites included San Antonio, Texas, a location in the Southeast U.S. and Chula Vista, immediately to the south of San Diego. McVey says it's no surprise that the company stayed close to its roots, and close to where its people want to live.
        IDEC is currently building the first phase of its planned 1.37-million-sq.-ft. (127,273-sq.-m.) project, which had a projected budget of around $1,000 per sq. ft. ($10,764 per sq. m.) McVey adds, "They purchased a shell building across the street that had been built on spec. They paid $3 million for it and have put about $50 million into it." One hundred people are already working at that facility.
        In tandem with those projects, the company has begun construction on the first phase of a 750,000-sq.-ft. (69,675-sq.-m.) corporate headquarters, located on 42.6 acres (17.2 hectares) in San Diego. IDEC CFO Phil Schneider says that the company will benefit from both the biotech momentum of the city and the savings realized from bringing staff together from three separate buildings in the Torrey Pines Mesa area of the city. Company strategy calls for R&D to take place there, with clinical trials and manufacturing slated for the Oceanside campus.