Issues: Affordable Housing

Developer Chris Foster Sees Opportunities in San Diego

By Erik Pisore, The Daily Transcript
Friday, October 28, 2005

After focusing on the affordable housing redevelopment market for more than 13 years nationwide, Chris Foster wants to concentrate more attention on the market that he calls home.
Foster, who grew up in La Jolla, is president of San Diego-based Hampstead Partners Inc., a real estate consulting and redevelopment firm. He was initially drawn to real estate back in high school when his mother began working in the real estate industry.

Foster, who grew up in La Jolla, is president of San Diego-based Hampstead Partners Inc., a real estate consulting and redevelopment firm. He was initially drawn to real estate back in high school when his mother began working in the real estate industry.

"I started looking at the books and I was just really fascinated by it," he said. "I guess it was something physical and tangible."

His first experience working with affordable housing came after college when he worked in East Los Angeles for a family-owned company that focused on apartment moving.

"It showed me that in blighted areas something needs to be done," he said. "That's what intrigued me, can we change an area?"

Soon after he moved back to San Diego, where he worked as a broker for nearly six years until deciding to develop three small houses on a lot in North Park in 1989. It was this development that turned him into a "mid-city" guy.

"I always liked urban in-fill and residential. I've never been excited about doing some sub-division in the suburbs," he said. "If you can take something that needs a little work and reconfigure it and make it work financially that's kind of art to me."

Since joining Hampstead in 1992 his business focus has been in other cities such as Baltimore and Chicago, where he seeks out redevelopment opportunities, rather than in San Diego. When hired, founder Walter Novak told Foster he would concentrate on expanding the business nationally, which has resulted in Foster making at least two trips a month to cities nationwide, usually visiting two cities in one trip and delivering a speech in each city.

"When I first started it was glamorous, but it gets old," he said, saying regular trips distracted him from the San Diego market, which appeals to him now because of areas like North Park.

Contrary to the opinion that San Diego housing prices are high and affordable housing in the city is a pipedream, he said there are opportunities for affordable housing development in the area.

"It is possible to do affordable housing in San Diego, it's just that from an economic standpoint it's a lot easier to do market rate housing. It's difficult to find the land and the subsidy to do the affordable housing needed," he said, adding compared to other cities he works in, the number of opportunities in San Diego is much smaller.

"There are more affordable housing opportunities in other cities than in San Diego. In Baltimore there's a lot of boarded up housing and it needs a lot more in terms of redevelopment," he said.

The high home prices in San Diego have made developing affordable housing difficult, which is why workforce housing may be implemented as a new solution to create affordable housing.

"Workforce housing is the next wave in areas like San Diego where prices are so high and out of reach," he said, suggesting work-force housing that provides mixed-price housing could lead to opportunities for affordable housing.

An example of this is the Lafayette Hotel & Residences; one of Hampstead's recent projects in North Park that involves redeveloping the historic part of a hotel and building 260 condominiums behind the hotel. Of the 260 condos, 42 are slated to be affordable.

"People that are fortunate enough to find workforce housing that is mixed with market-rate homes will be beneficiaries of higher appreciation rather than those that are in a big track of affordable housing," he said.

But, with any redevelopment there is the task of dealing with community opposition, which comes down to understanding the community's needs and making a compromise.

"Certainly, when you add density to an area that's something that is going to get people to look carefully," he said. In the Lafayette case "once we gave them what they wanted, they were definitely on board."

Besides speaking and working with communities on redevelopment and building of affordable housing units, he is also involved in various associations such as the National Leased Housing Association, of which he is president. It is his involvement in various associations and with Hampstead that has ultimately made him want to concentrate his time locally as he may have a problem.

"All these seminars are kind of like quitting smoking, maybe there's a patch," he said. "I need to get over this meeting habit."

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