A decade in the making, Seaside’s Campus Town development is about to break ground.

David Schmalz here. Tomorrow, April 11, marks a historic milestone for the city of Seaside. The first phase of Campus Town, a development on 122 acres of blighted, former Fort Ord property south of Lightfighter Drive and north of Gigling Road, is finally breaking ground after about a decade in the planning. 

The project will ultimately have 842 for-sale homes, about 600 apartments, 100,000 square feet of retail and a hotel with up to 225 rooms, though developer Danny Bakewell Jr. says more realistically, it will be about 175 rooms. 

Bakewell spoke about the development at an April 7 town hall at Embassy Suites hosted by councilmembers Dave Pacheco and Alex Miller, and called Campus Town “an enormous endeavor.” 

He outlined the broad contours of the project to the 100-or-so attendees, and said that building the first phase, which will include 242 homes and an approximately 175-room hotel, will require a year to 18 months of work to install underground infrastructure before the project goes vertical. Dirt, he said, will start moving within 30 days.

In the meantime, he said, the construction of 21 very-low-income apartments on the property of Greater Victory Temple will start in about six months and be completed about eight months after that. (The project will go toward meeting Campus Town’s affordable housing requirements.)

When asked if any of the for-sale homes will be affordable, and whether Seaside residents could get priority, Bakewell said yes to both. (Four to five of the first phase’s homes will qualify as affordable.)

“I’m working on this right now,” he said, and that it would probably entail some type of lottery. “We have to get legal sign-off for a way that’s not discriminatory…My goal is to not sway the deck, but heavy the deck toward Seaside residents.”

The project has been delayed over the past two years due to contamination in the soil on part of the property, which has since been cleaned or removed, and Bakewell says the state Department of Toxic Substances Control gave the signoff on the project just over a month ago. 

Bakewell estimated the total cost to build Campus Town would be about $400 million, and that the first phase will cost about $75 million. As to whether a shaky economic landscape might impact the project, he said, “Obviously, we’re taking a look at what the tariffs will look like,” adding, “Overall, we feel pretty positive we’ll get this project going.” He expects it will take about a decade for the entire project to be completed.

The groundbreaking ceremony starts at 11am on Friday on the corner of Lightfighter Drive and 2nd Avenue, and Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis will be a special guest. If you’d like to attend, RSVP to rsvp@bakewellco.com.