Mayor Bruce Delgado is the first to admit parts of Marina look abandoned. 


“General Jim Moore [Boulevard] right now looks kind of like a road to nowhere,” he says. “We assumed, like the world did, that the great growth happening was just going to continue. Now you’re left with a ghost town on East Garrison, and UC MBEST [UC-Santa Cruz’s Monterey Bay Education, Science and Technology Center] never took off. And all those abandoned barracks between REI and Seaside are just waiting for the economy to turn around.”


There’s little in Marina today besides the CSU-Monterey Bay campus itself to show for its thriving college-town ambitions, but Delgado talks about transforming Marina into a San Luis Obispo-like community, attractive to an under-30 crowd with a green sensibility.


The optimistic blueprint is for 70 percent growth to 33,000 residents by 2035, and eventually to 45,000, which would make Marina the second-largest city in the county.


Part of that growth means remaking downtown Marina, a sliver mostly of small shopping malls set back from Reservation Road by parking lots. The city is in the final stages of preparing a specific plan and environmental impact report for a downtown build-out. “We’re basically remodeling our town to be more pedestrian-friendly, bike-friendly and more of a place to be, instead of a place to drive through,” Delgado says.


But the vision for adding 2,100 new residential units combined with retail fronting the street might be just a vision. “It’s probably unrealistic even in a 30, 40 year window,” says Steven Emerson, who has served for five years on the economic development commission.


Still, there’s talk of narrowing Reservation Road from four lanes to two, or at least applying traffic-calming measures to make the downtown stretch less imposing to pedestrians. And Delgado is hopeful that a planned light rail, which includes a half dozen stations in Marina, will get up and running. “That provides the largest single opportunity we have,” he says.


Meanwhile, the number of business licenses in Marina dropped by more than 15 percent to 586 over the past four years, as capital projects like General Jim Moore age without the predicted population influx to use them.


Delgado and Emerson attribute the population and construction lags to the economy. Two major residential developments, The Dunes at Monterey Bay and Marina Heights, are shovel-ready, but market conditions have dissuaded developers from proceeding.


Marina Heights, a 1,050-unit housing development proposed near Ord Market on Imjin Road, doesn’t represent the pinnacle of sustainability Delgado envisions for Marina. “They’re able to check a lot of boxes for neighborhood design and green attributes,” he says, “but I’m talking about smaller homes that have an emphasis on resources conservation.”


While Delgado is thinking big picture, he’s also optimistic about plans for an eco-village near CSUMB that would combine a Monterey Mattress factory with a student-oriented cafe and gym, generating an estimated 300 jobs. The eco-village plan is scheduled to go before City Council Aug. 2.