There’s a motif in the art world about flowers blooming in the middle of blight. Rapper Tupak Shakur wondered in one of his early poems, “Did you hear about the rose that grew from a crack in the concrete?…by keeping its dreams it learned to breathe fresh air. Long live the rose that grew from concrete when no one else ever cared.”
It could be the case that something beautiful, a place with empathy for things of artistic and educational value, will grow from a seed that finds traction under the city of San Diego’s outdated Civic Center Plaza. Remember Beatlemania? The Fab Four reached America in the same early 1960s time period the Civic Center first opened. It’s never been significantly renovated.
If an artfully designed update is in the cards, even more patience will be required. Urban progress in downtown San Diego is stuck in the mud. A flower, much less a city center garden, is still decades away.
For the second straight year, a massive city budget deficit is a roadblock to progress. Last fiscal year, taxpayers got service fee increases. This go-round, its budget cuts. The proposed fiscal budget seems to view arts and culture as a line item, and not an economic engine or even a source of community identity.
In a city with no financial resources to do great things, there needs to be an alternative. The game changer appears to be the Prebys Foundation. Teaming with the Downtown San Diego Partnership and Philadelphia-based contractor U3 Advisors, they’ve come up with a plan, a roadmap if you will, to redo the age-worn buildings surrounding Civic Center Plaza.
The cornerstone of a plan to bring new life to downtown’s core is a Joint Powers Authority. In this case, it’s a method to finance civic development when a city is broke, and distracted by an inability to balance the budget.
The city was previously motivated to get developers interested in re-doing the Civic Center space. A bid went out…and nobody responded, so the effort was shelved. But Prebys and the DSDP didn’t give up. Prebys paid U3 $300,000 for a study. The report made sense, the San Diego City Council gave it a thumbs up, and that led to the current Civic Center Revitalization Report and Implementation Roadmap.
Possibly in early fall, the Implementation Roadmap, which will include a proposal for a JPU organizational chart, will be presented to the city council for official approval. The San Diego Community College District has already expressed strong interest in the Golden Hall space at the Civic Center. Newer to the list of possible players are San Diego State University and the San Diego Unified School District.
The San Diego Civic Theatre, already on the campus, wants to revitalize in place and stay in the mix. There are also preliminary plans for up to 4,000 units of housing and the creation of a new hotel.
One of the biggest question marks about moving the project forward is what to do about the decrepit City Hall building. It could stay in the Civic Center mix – but nobody wants it to. Where would it move to? There are options. For now the mayor is busy balancing a budget. So, let’s back up a few steps.
It was nearly a year ago when Grant Oliphant told The San Diego Sun he believed San Diego had the potential to build a “cathedral.” The CEO of the Prebys Foundation (and more than one billion dollars in assets) has been on the job since 2022. That followed Oliphant’s three decades of philanthropic grantmaking at the private Heintz Endowments and the public Pittsburgh Foundation.
The Prebys Foundation, like a few (but not many) other foundations in cities around the country, has focused a great deal of time and money on civic causes, such as breathing life back into downtown San Diego’s urban core.
In a recent interview held in Prebys’ downtown headquarters, Oliphant re-addressed the cathedral metaphor.
“I love, and I think we should all love big ideas and big projects,” he said. “One reason I used that metaphor was once upon a time, we understood that really big ideas take time to implement. And now, there’s an impatience. Maybe that’s because of past failures.”
While Oliphant warns about time-line expectations, he’s also excited about how fast the Civic Center project has advanced in just a year.
That’s due in large part to the research done by U3 Advisors to propose a plan for financial traction.
A Joint Powers Authority is a separate legal entity in California (and other states) used to create a shared power structure and a cost-effective way to manage a big project.
The Civic Center’s JPA will include the city, DSDP, the Regional Housing Finance Authority, the Civic Theatre, the Community College District (if they join the project) and possibly SDSU and SDUSD and other stakeholders that may want to come on board.
Along with an oversight board, the project will contain a managerial board that focuses on day-to-day operations. Prebys and DSDP are also currently vetting for a legal firm with JPA experience to join the team.
At this point, myriad details are not finalized.
“There are still so many ways for us to be cooking this dish,” U3 Advisors CEO Omar Blaik said.
One key ingredient is whether City Hall stays or goes. If it stays, construction of the entire site becomes more challenging. That’s because there’s an underground power plant that’s 60 years old and provides electricity and HVAC to all the onsite buildings.
“You can’t decommission that central plant until the City Hall building is not active anymore,” Blaik said. “If City Hall stays, I can only demolish two thirds of Golden Hall and need to build a retaining wall for where the rest of this power plant is.”
Paging City Hall.
“Due to the city’s obvious budget constraints, we are not considering an alternate location for City Hall this year,” The City of San Diego’s Communications Department Director Nicole Darling said.
That’s OK, according to Blaik, but the sooner a decision is made the better the project will pencil out – assuming the project will move forward.
The DSDP is full speed ahead for getting the project greenlighted this year. DSDP Vice President of Government Affairs Justine Murray says the goal is to get the JPA in front of the city council by mid-fall, assuming it passes through the city’s Land Use & Housing Committee.
“There are no blaring obstacles,” Murray said. “I think we have both the city and the mayor really excited about what we’re working on. It’s all going to come down to the details and seeing what their comfort level will be.”
Let’s say that after decades of political struggle and developmental elbow grease the city is able to create an all-new Civic Center complex. Golden Hall, which until recently served as a homeless shelter (after years as the go-to spot for politicos on Election Day) becomes partly a museum space sponsored by the Community College District. City Hall moves to new digs and a hotel goes up in its place (creating some tax revenue to help fund the project). And the Civic Theatre sparkles again (after being shut down for a brief period of time while renovating in place).
Has San Diego then built a cathedral in the middle of a desolate, under-supported greater downtown?
Murray says she loves that question because the DSDP has a vision to make San Diego “America’s Outdoor Downtown.”
“If people don’t come downtown we’re going to have vacant spaces, lawlessness and public safety issues,” she said. “Foot traffic is one of the best things you can do to activate a downtown space, right? So beyond Civic Center, we’re trying to think largely, because with all the work we’re doing in this space, that’s going to help East Village, that’s going to help the Gaslamp Quarter, because right now it’s kind of dead in the core.”
Indeed, at the moment East Village is struggling with unchecked open-air drug dealing. The Gaslamp Quarter is not on the same page financially with the city, recently canceled public events, and scrapped a half-hearted effort to build a pedestrian-friendly Fifth Avenue Promenade.
Asked the same question about San Diego outside the radius of the Civic Center plan, U3’s Blaik said the hope is that an improved core area will be an economic driver for the rest of the city.
“We can continue to say, we have a symphony problem,” Blaik said. “Let’s solve it. We have a Civic Theatre problem. Let’s solve that. We have a homeless problem. We have this problem. We have that problem. By and large, all of them are stemming out of the void that sits in the middle of it all that’s sucking the wind out of any sail that the city may have. We absolutely believe that this project is the only project that has this transformative effect on the entire downtown.”
Prebys’ Oliphant agrees. He says while looking at the Civic Center they’re not only focused on the Civic Center.
“We are deeply involved in trying to figure things out to make Balboa Park healthier, better and more sustainable,” Oliphant said. “And we’re trying to connect that with the rest of downtown all the way down to the bay. That’s a big part of our focus. And it’s important to fix Civic Center because it’s actually a hole in the city right now.”
He believes a vibrant Civic Center would help free up the city to address challenges like its relationship with the Gaslamp Quarter. And other issues.
“Every city has to look at how to lift up its struggling parts periodically and how to make them stronger,” Oliphant said. “Especially if they play as central a role as a downtown does. “To say, ‘Oh, there are problems everywhere, therefore we can’t do this,’ is a formula for absolute failure and permanent inaction. Basically, what we’re then saying is we’d rather manage decline, and we’re not interested in the future.”
Striving to get flowers to rise up from the concrete seems the preferable path. SDSun
