Why East Garrison Got Its Apartments Before Its Town Center

Drive past the fire station on Sherman Boulevard on any given evening and you'll see the same thing you've seen for years: a stretch of open land where a town center is supposed to be. The community bulletin board on Lee Avenue, near Lincoln Park, has carried some version of a Town Center update since before most current residents moved in. If you've lived here long enough to remember when that fire station was the newest building in the neighborhood, you've also lived through more than one round of "coming soon."

Here's the part that doesn't show up in the newsletter blurbs: one major piece of the original plan already got built, on schedule, while the piece everyone actually wants is still sitting on paper. In November 2023, the nonprofit developer CHISPA finished the Alfred Diaz-Infante Apartments, 66 units of affordable housing on Ord Avenue between Watkins Gate and Chapel Hill roads. Meanwhile, the 34,000 square feet of retail that the development's own conditions of approval said should be finished by 2025 hasn't broken ground. Neither has the one-acre town center park, the amphitheater, or the conversion of 23 World War II-era buildings into an arts district. The difference between the piece that got built and the pieces that didn't isn't red tape. It's financing.

The Plan on Paper vs. the Plan on the Ground

East Garrison's development has been governed since 2005 by what's known as the 2004 Specific Plan, approved by the Monterey County Board of Supervisors under Permit PLN030204, which allows up to 1,470 dwelling units across the community's 244 acres. Buried inside that plan is a Town Center component that was supposed to give the neighborhood its commercial heart: retail space, a public library and sheriff's substation, a central park, and a Historic Arts District converting decommissioned Fort Ord buildings into 100,000 square feet of live/work artist studios.

Here's how those pieces actually stack up as of this year:

Only one row in that table is finished. The rest have been sitting in some form of "planned" status since before the pandemic, and the 2025 deadline attached to the retail requirement has already passed.

Why the Apartments Came First

The reason isn't mysterious once you look at how each piece gets paid for. CHISPA's apartment project came with a financing stack that already existed: state tax credit equity, a construction loan from JPMorgan Chase, funding from the County of Monterey, Central Coast Community Energy, and the Local Initiative Support Corporation. That combination of programs exists specifically to fund affordable housing, and once CHISPA qualified for it, the project had a clear runway to completion.

The Historic Arts District doesn't have an equivalent. According to the development agreement that governs East Garrison, the arts district is explicitly the last funding priority in the deal, set to wait until the affordable apartment complexes are fully funded first. That affordable housing milestone only cleared in late 2023. The nonprofit partners slated to restore the buildings, Artspace and Arts Habitat, still need to secure their own tax credit financing before work can begin, the same kind of process that took CHISPA years to complete for its 66 units.

Retail is a different animal entirely. There's no grant program that forces a developer to build a coffee shop or a dry cleaner on a deadline. Commercial space gets built when a developer believes the numbers pencil, and a retail study cited in the town center's own FAQ found the area could support a maximum of 12,000 square feet from residents alone, well under the 30,000 to 34,000 square feet the plan calls for. That gap between what was promised and what the market can actually support may be part of why the retail piece keeps slipping.

A Plan B That Trades One Promise for Another

Starting in 2022, builder Century Communities began floating a revised concept for the remaining phases, then formally requested the changes from the county in January 2023. Instead of building the 66 ArtSpace affordable live/work units on the two parcels that flank the Arts Park, as the original plan specified, Century proposed folding those units into the town center parcel itself, stacked above 30,000 square feet of commercial space. The two Arts Park parcels that were supposed to hold artist housing would instead become market-rate single-family homes.

That's a real trade, not a technicality. Residents who bought in expecting a dedicated arts housing component next to the Arts Park would instead see more rooftops there, with the affordable and commercial pieces consolidated elsewhere. The plan also already carries a long runway. Back in 2020, Century secured a 15-year extension on the project's completion deadline, pushing the target end date from 2020 out to October 2035.

The Parking Fight Nobody Saw Coming

When the County Planning Commission took up Century's amendment request on April 10, 2024, the meeting exposed a detail that hadn't gotten much attention before: the affordable units proposed for the town center phase would have no dedicated parking spaces of their own. Residents raised concerns, and commissioners questioned CHISPA's CEO directly, who acknowledged he had not yet worked out a parking plan for those units. The commission ultimately voted to recommend approval, but only with conditions attached, requiring dedicated parking be addressed and insisting the central park be built alongside the commercial and housing phases rather than left for later.

That last condition matters. Nothing in the plan's history suggests the park would happen first if left to market timing alone.

What Residents Are Actually Tracking in 2026

A resident-run group called Preservation and Restoration of East Garrison has spent the past few years doing the kind of homework most people don't have time for. PREG ran a Town Center survey that drew 593 responses from residents and neighbors, published its own parking impact study in 2024, and hosted a session comparing Century's revised parking numbers against what residents actually reported. The group also promotes ties with the Fort Ord Trail and Greenway coalition and Citizens for Sustainable Marina, and it works alongside the community's Kiwanis Club chapter on service projects.

This year alone has been busy on the governance side. The master HOA held an open session on February 10, a bi-monthly board meeting on March 3, and a special meeting on March 25 at the fire station where county staff and Monterey County Free Libraries representatives gave updates. The board met again July 7, and if the bi-monthly rhythm holds, the next session lands around September. Separately, the Liberty Townhome sub-HOA has been sorting out a contested board election that stretches across two years: all three seats came up for a vote with ballots sent last September, a count in December that failed to reach quorum, and a recount in January of this year. A construction repair project affecting Liberty Townhomes ran from October 2025 into early 2026 under contractor Recon360.

None of this is hidden. It's posted on the East Garrison community site and discussed at meetings anyone can attend at the fire station on Sherman Boulevard.

What This Means If You Live Here Now

It helps to know that East Garrison residents are paying into two separate funding streams that serve different purposes. The master HOA fee, roughly $125 a month for a single-family home as of 2022, covers front yard maintenance on private property, private roadways, transit services, the entry statement, and stormwater drainage in private easements. That's separate from the Mello-Roos taxes tied to the Community Facilities District and Community Services District, which fund public infrastructure, park maintenance, and county sheriff operations inside East Garrison. The CFD portion rises 2 percent annually and is set to retire once its bonds are paid off around 2036. The CSD portion can rise with the consumer price index up to 4 percent a year.

Understanding that split explains a lot about why the town center keeps moving at its own pace. The apartments got built because a dedicated financing program existed and the developer qualified for it. The park, the retail, and the historic buildings are still waiting on some combination of market viability, tax credit approval, and a development agreement that puts them last in line by design. That's not a story about bureaucratic delay. It's a story about which promises come with a funding mechanism attached and which ones don't.

If you're weighing what any of this means for your own plans in East Garrison, whether that's understanding how these public improvements might shape the neighborhood over time or just wanting a clearer read on where things stand, the Finkle Team knows this market well beyond the headline numbers. Request your complimentary home valuation and we'll walk you through what we're seeing on the ground.