Why Pacific Beach's "Felony Park" Got Fixed Before Ventura Cove or De Anza Cove
October 1, 2026
October 1, 2026
For roughly two years, from 2024 until this past May, the playground at Fanuel Street Park was a rectangle of bare sand with a couple of spring riders and an empty swing frame. City inspectors had pulled the rest of the equipment after finding it corroded past the point of safety, and with no funding or replacement plan on the books, the lot just sat there. Neighbors started calling it Felony Park. In February 2025, thirty-three of them signed a letter to the city after even the donated toys, the plastic shovels and buckets families had left behind, got hauled away too, according to NBC San Diego.
Then, in the span of about three weeks this past May, it wasn't. New recycled-plastic equipment went in, along with fresh safety surfacing, sand-play elements, and a dedicated toddler zone. The park reopened before Memorial Day weekend.
What's worth noticing is what didn't happen at Fanuel that is happening, right now, at the other two bayside parks getting worked on this year. Ventura Cove, elsewhere on Mission Bay, is mid-construction with a torn-down restroom building and a completion date that keeps circling back to "after Labor Day." De Anza Cove, the biggest of the three, has a redesign on paper that would remake 143 acres of shoreline and it still hasn't broken ground, because it's waiting on a signature from an agency in Sacramento. Three parks, three timelines, and the difference between them tells you more about how Pacific Beach's public spaces actually get built than any single ribbon-cutting does.
Fanuel moved quickly because its funding and scope sat outside the city's multi-year capital improvement pipeline. A San Diego resident named Dan Smith, who founded a company called Zoom Recreation in 2019, kept driving past the empty lot and eventually brought a plan to the San Diego Parks Foundation and the city's Parks & Recreation Department. The Foundation, led locally by Kim Mathis, set a fundraising goal of $70,000 with a $10,000 matching gift and got to roughly $45,000 in private donations. Zoom Recreation installed the new equipment pro bono.
That structure kept the project separate from the capital improvement pipeline that carries the larger Mission Bay work. It ran on private donations, a company willing to install equipment for free, and a groundbreaking on May 4, 2026 with city spokesperson Tyler Becker on hand, according to Times of San Diego. Mathis put the speed in city terms: getting it done within the month was, in her words, "lightning speed." San Diego City Council President Joe LaCava was expected to help cut the ribbon once the structure went in, per Hoodline's reporting. One Pacific Beach parent, Joan Mendoza, put it more simply to a local TV crew: "This is the best place in San Diego to live."
The equipment itself is built for the specific problem that killed the old playground. Salt spray and humidity ate through the original metal and steel. The replacement is a recycled plastic engineered to mimic natural wood but resist that corrosion, a material choice suited to a park that sits right on Sail Bay.
Ventura Cove is a different kind of project, and it's the one currently under construction as you read this. It's a $4.4 million effort to demolish and rebuild the restroom building to ADA standards, add accessible sidewalks, and expand parking, including conduits for electric vehicle charging. The city already knocked down the old bathroom and started building the new one, according to reporting from Axios San Diego published in April.
The timing here isn't arbitrary. Phase 1, the parking lot work, wrapped up earlier this year. Phase 2, the more disruptive restroom and site work, was deliberately scheduled to begin after Labor Day 2026 specifically to stay clear of the California Coastal Commission's summer construction moratorium, the same rule that limits shoreline disruption during San Diego's busiest beach months. That's why anyone who walked past Ventura Cove in July saw a mostly quiet lot and why the fencing and equipment showed up in September instead. The target is substantial completion around October, with the full project wrapped by early 2027.
So if the restroom at Ventura Cove looks worse before it looks better this fall, that's the plan working as scheduled, not a project falling behind.
De Anza Cove is the project that makes the other two look simple by comparison, and it's also the one that hasn't started. The proposal, called De Anza Natural, would remake 143 acres in the northeast corner of Mission Bay: restored wetlands, a waterfront trail, a nature center, an area for non-motorized boats, plus the existing golf, tennis, and ball fields kept in some form. It would also touch two long-running leases. The City Council approved 10-year agreements with Campland on the Bay and the Mission Bay RV Resort last year, but the city could end those early if the wetlands expansion moves forward, per Axios San Diego's reporting.
None of that can happen until the California Coastal Commission signs off, and as of this year it hasn't. A smaller, separate slate of improvements at South De Anza Cove, new bathrooms, a playground, a basketball court, is proceeding on its own track through the standard capital improvement process. The bigger De Anza Natural vision, the one that would reshape that corner of the bay, remains in California Coastal Commission review, and the city has not announced a start date.
Fanuel ran on donations. Ventura Cove and the De Anza projects run on something else: the Mission Bay Park Improvement Fund, a mechanism San Diego voters created through Proposition C in 2008 and expanded through Measure J in 2016. The fund pulls from commercial lease revenue generated inside Mission Bay Park itself, including SeaWorld and several hotels. Mission Bay generates roughly $30 million a year in lease revenue. The first $20 million goes to the city's General Fund, and the fund gets up to 65 percent of whatever's left after that. For the current fiscal year, that works out to roughly $12 million available for park projects across the entire bay, not just the three sites getting attention this year.
That revenue stream isn't guaranteed to stay uncontested either. City leaders had floated the idea of charging for parking at Mission Bay and its beaches, but backed off the proposal after the pushback that followed similar parking fee changes at Balboa Park, according to Axios's reporting. The money behind these projects is real, but it's also tied to political appetite that can shift year to year.
If you're walking or biking the bay path between Crown Point and the Bahia this season, here's roughly what you'll find at each site:
None of these three parks are broken. They're each just moving at the speed their funding source and their approval process allow, and that gap between a donor-funded playground and a state-reviewed wetland redesign is the actual story behind why one corner of the bay looks finished while another still looks the same as it did last year.
If you want more of this kind of on-the-ground detail about what's actually changing in Pacific Beach, block by block, Kathleen Westwood pays close attention to exactly this sort of thing and is always glad to talk through what's happening in the neighborhood, whether or not it has anything to do with a transaction.
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