Through the blight, seeing a stadium site

Somewhere in the middle of the downtown parking lot known as Tailgate Park is an invisible but also quite striking line that separates developed from depressed, depressing and depression.

That figurative but very real line runs between the trolley tracks that cross Imperial Avenue and the spot where on a recent morning two ladies sat on a curb, their shared shopping cart, stuffed well above its rim, sitting a few feet away.

Immediately past one side of the line is Petco Park with all the magnificence of San Diego's skyline beyond it. Immediately on the other side of the line, cracks grow in dirty sidewalks and a man yells that he hates the stench of urine while also justifying that he has no choice but to relieve himself in the street.

The plot of land where the Chargers propose to build a stadium is often simply referred to as being in the East Village.

That sounds romantic. East Village.

It’s not, as it pertains to this spot.

The Padres homestand that stretched over the past week-plus has allowed opportunity for plenty of us to walk in and around this area, located just south of the baseball park. (Should a football stadium ever be built here -- in the four square blocks between Imperial and K and 14th and 16th -- it would be the second-closest proximity of any NFL and MLB facilities in the nation, maybe a couple hundred feet further apart than Kauffman and Arrowhead Stadiums in Kansas City.)

Before we go further, let me be clear that this is not a column suggesting a football stadium can cure social ills. It is simply one man’s assessment of what is and vision of what might be should the polticians and citizenry and our football team get together and figure out how to make it happen.

What is, is a blighted place where the traffic consists of buses and shopping carts being pushed by people with nowhere to be. If grime has a smell, it is subtly evident here.

The MTS bus yard abuts 16th street. The only evidence it is a bus yard is the buses, because the MTS building, with windows high atop gray wall, looks like a jail.

The bus yard is a waste of space. Especially this space. But we need buses, so the county-owned facility could easily be relocated.

The stadium would actually begin west of 14th Street, maybe 100 feet inside Tailgate Park, and extend to about where the MTS building ends at 16th.

The structure would have the smallest footprint of any NFL stadium, as the the edifice would go up, as opposed to the out of Qualcomm Stadium.

The city owns the parking lot, the county the bus yard. The space in between is privately owned and includes a sliver of businesses, the Mission Brewery primary among them. The idea is the Chargers would buy the private property but the city would own the land the stadium is on. Other municipalities have worked out similar public-private partnerships.

A third party, contracted by the Chargers, would run the stadium. Shops and restaurants ringing the first floor of the stadium would be open every day, to my understanding. (How many other events fill the place outside the Chargers’ 10 home games will partly depend on whether the stadium is part of a convention center expansion).

Parking lots nearby would have to be converted to multi-level parking structures.

You don’t need a real estate license to see the property values going up, some developer making a nice offer to the owners of the dilapidated homes east of 16th.

It’s safe to say the stadium would extend the part of downtown we like to think about.

Now, all building a stadium here would do is push the homeless population further out.

But building a stadium is making use of land that has all but been left for dead, and maybe it is prompting us to address the homeless condition in some way. In fact, some sort of major contribution by the Chargers to that end should be a condition of the development’s approval.

But the site is there, ready at least for us to move the line.