San Diego State University officials released new details Wednesday regarding plans for a campus expansion at the Mission Valley stadium site.
University leaders, architects, and project consultants discussed the project estimated to cost $3 billion.
SDSU's vision for a west campus includes a football stadium, apartments, buildings, and classrooms.
Some of the details unveiled Wednesday included renderings of sections of the project including 95,000 square feet of retail space, two hotels and 4,500 units of housing along with campus buildings and a stadium that could host a professional soccer team.
The plan includes nearly 5,000 underground parking spaces.
The project will be developed in phases with the initial phase being the river park, a community park, a stadium and potentially a campus innovation center and a housing site.
The full development could take as few as 15 years.
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SDSU President Sally Roush said the project would be funded by a public and private partnership. The only bond financing could be to build the stadium.
"Those revenue bonds will be covered by revenue generated by the stadium," Roush said.
"No tuition dollars or tuition increase or anything to do with tuition would be devoted to this site," she added.
On Thursday, Aztec athletic officials plan to announce what's in the works for the stadium portion of the plan.
SDSU West will compete with SoccerCity on the ballot in 2018, but unlike SoccerCity we haven't seen many details about their vision, until now.
To deal with the annual rainy season, not to mention a huge 50-year flood, SDSU's design team wants to restore the watershed to its more natural state.
They've proposed an open space much larger than the $40 million river park shown in renderings proposed by SoccerCity.
The green space would likely include sports fields, a dog park, and lots of trails which will blend up into the campus. It will be at a lower elevation so water can’t get up to the site.
SoccerCity Project Manager Nick Stone maintains that the SDSU West initiative is "virtually identical" to SoccerCity.
Stone released the following statement:
"As we were reminded again today, the uses that SDSU envisions are virtually identical to those the SoccerCity initiative promises voters. Both feature a new multi-use stadium with similar seating capacity, a large river park and space for SDSU to grow and flourish. The major difference is that SoccerCity will be built without a dime of public funds in a legally binding initiative and lease with the city, while the SDSU West plan offers no binding commitments and will leave taxpayers on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars."
