If something becomes famous, the painter Georges Braque once said, it is usually famous for the wrong reason. City Heights Urban Village in San Diego is famous for being the beneficiary of local businessman Sol Price, who has donated about $50 million in various forms through his charities and business affiliates. While that money has made a big difference to this impoverished neighborhood near downtown San Diego, City Heights should be equally famous for the way that a group of Price-funded entities and public agencies has spent the money on projects that benefit the community as much as developers and City Hall. It might sound like an exaggeration, but City Heights is an experiment in community building that Price has called "holistic." Here, the needs of the community, rather than the need to generate tax increment, take precedence: Since 1994, when Price and his many partners started working with the city's redevelopment agency, the area has received a library, a swimming pool and a community service center that provides welfare-to-work support. San Diego Community College District is operating the Mid-City Community Education Center, which offers courses in adult literacy, English and job training. Price Charities has provided $18 million to improve programs in the existing elementary, middle and high schools, and San Diego Revitalization, another Price-related group, is planning a 32-acre model school and housing development. The $19 million Metro Career Training Center is expected to open in 2003, and in July, construction started on the $18 million regional transportation center. "All the social elements were addressed before the business-commercial elements were developed as the capstone of the whole process," said Robert Turner, an affordable-housing consultant who formerly headed the San Diego office of Local Initiatives Support Coalition. Originally a street-car suburb built during the 1920s, City Heights has become San Diego's "port of entry" community. Newly immigrated Somalis, Ethiopians, Central Americans and Vietnamese join longtime African-American and Anglo residents. More than 30 different languages are spoken in City Heights. With more than 72,000 people, the district is one of the densest in San Diego. A third of the households live below the poverty line. Not surprisingly, the crime rate is higher than the city average. Crime, gang activity and graffiti were particularly bad in 1990, when the city designated City Heights as an "emergency area." The city adopted a redevelopment plan for the area in the following year. In 1994, the area suffered another setback when the local Vons closed, depriving the neighborhood of a modern supermarket. Price, who founded the discount chain Price Club (it later merged with Costco), was toying with the idea of creating a chain of stores to serve low-income residents, and City Heights was one of his targets. With former San Diego City Councilman William Jones, Price created a development company, CityLink Investments, for the purpose. In the course of studying City Heights and conducting community meetings, Price underwent a sort of conversion. He did not stop believing in the value of retail development, but he saw the value of a complete community makeover. Turner said City Heights had a number of plusses that made it an attractive target for redevelopment: The density of the area meant there would be a ready audience for social services and new public facilities like the library and the job-training centers. Furthermore, comparatively few properties were abandoned, which meant that developers did not have to contend with neighborhoods with many missing teeth. "It was a vibrant area," Turner said. "It needed some kind of catalyst to bring more positive activity" to the neighborhood, he added. After numerous meetings with local residents, Price and his partners designated a 30-acre center of the redevelopment as the City Heights Urban Village, and they concentrated new construction there. One of the first projects was a remodeling of the closed Vons supermarket into a police substation. In 2001, CityLink completed a $30.7 shopping center, with a new Albertsons supermarket and, surprisingly, a Starbucks outlet. Although Starbucks generally builds in affluent neighborhoods, Jones had lobbied hard for the franchise because local residents felt strongly about it. Earlier this year, Price Charities completed the 116-unit Village Townhomes and Office Center. Half the units are low-income rentals, and the other half are for-sale units with low-interest-rate mortgages. Buyers have the option of performing community service to pay off the mortgages on the three-bedroom, 1,300-square-foot units, which cost $140,000 apiece. It is possible to interpret City Heights as a critique of redevelopment. While it would be wrong to say that other redevelopment projects do not set a high value on social services — most of them do — few have placed the creation of a "community infrastructure" as the goal to be achieved in advance of cash-producing commercial projects. As the child of urban renewal, redevelopment is a real estate-oriented strategy in which real estate development and tax-increment generation are the uppermost goals. It would be a mistake to say that City Heights is fundamentally different from other redevelopment projects. The difference is one of emphasis: In City Heights, community development on a grass-roots level has taken priority over real estate development. With the exception of the new retail center, most of the projects to date are unlikely to fill city coffers with sales tax and tax-increment dollars. In a state where redevelopment has too often been degraded into a money-raising tool in the post-Proposition 13 environment, City Heights is a reminder of the purpose for steering investment into the inner city — to aid the wellbeing of the people who live there. That alone should make it famous.