Born in Denver, Benito, 59, was injured while on patrol in Iraq in 1983. After finding himself homeless after a failed marriage and the death of his second wife, who overdosed on heroin, he became a welder and lived in an SRO in downtown San Diego. Failing eyesight cost him that job and his housing but forced him to quit drugs and re-focus on his colorful sketch art. He met his current wife, Karen, around the same time. They live in a tent on an overpass close to downtown.
Award-winning photojournalist Peggy Peattie has been telling the stories of the nation’s unhoused for more than 30 years, many of them here in town, where she teaches journalism at City College and San Diego State University.
“I have met healthcare professionals, teachers, artists, authors, skilled craftsmen and women, decorated war veterans, chefs, landscape designers, musicians, and entrepreneurs. For these artists, the motivation to paint, sing, draw, write, make jewelry or pottery or medicine bags brings them joy and elevates their existence above the demands of daily survival,” Peattie explains.
Artwork by Benito
Photo Credit: Peggy Peattie
Unsurprisingly, what that looks like for people who are experiencing homelessness is a bit different: they don’t always have access to new or good supplies, requiring that much more resourcefulness and creativity, and, frequently, whatever supplies are amassed are stolen or lost to homeless sweeps conducted by the city.
Peattie says, “I hope these portraits remind readers of the importance of creativity and invites us all to stop and talk with the person living in a tent on the sidewalk we typically walk right past.”
More detail about these artists and the lives of many other unhoused San Diegans can be found on Peggy’s website, talesofthestreet.com.
Henry, who lives in Balboa Park with his dog, Lulu, uses all sorts of different materials to paint and draw his creations. “In the ʼ90s, I met a lady who had been in a concentration. camp. She had old art of hers, and while in the camp, she used a feather to paint. So I learned that from her,” he explains. As a rule, Henry uses both hands, sometimes at once, just to see what kind of new textures and lines he can uncover.
Ceramicist Tad, who sells his wares every day in OB next to the beach with his pup in tow, lives in his van. Recently, he made a stunning string necklace of “teeth” sculpted from clay interspersed with quartz, crystal beads, and oxidized hematite bands.
Casper, 46, grew up in East L.A. and learned to draw by watching a friend of his mother’s paint murals. He doesn’t like spray paint – only pen and paper. “Everybody that I grew up with that was a mother figure to me is gone. If you grew up in the barrio, [it will] claim you at some point,” he says. He draws mostly women, including the Virgen de Guadalupe, because “women run everything. They’ve got their shit together.”
Jewelry maker Turtle uses wrapping techniques, working with “pure” elements like copper, crystals, and stones – he won’t use fake materials, saying it “despiritualizes” his work. “I can’t do that,” he says. “It’s just wrong. There’s a better way.” He gives much of what he makes as gifts – talismans to ward off evil on the streets.
Mobyte, who is originally from Georgia, lives in a tent with his wife, Amy, downtown. They met at a Vegas bus stop. The next day, they stopped overnight at a motel, where he started singing. She videotaped him, and they’ve been together ever since. He wants to make a living with his music.
Lorenzo is finishing up his final year at SDSU, after which, he hopes to start a community-oriented art gallery. He taught himself to paint during Covid, while at first bedding down with his parents in Imperial Beach. He lives in a house with roommates near campus these days but has been previously on the margins of having secure housing. He admits he doesn’t know what the future holds, especially with “how expensive everything has become.”
Originally from New York, Daniel came to San Diego following a string of unsuccessful romantic relationships, because his sister lives and works in Chula Vista. Recently, he has been painting landscapes, Japanese swords, samurai, and traditional Japanese women’s clothing–he likes the 1700s-era Japanese wood carvings and the craftsmanship and dedication to perfection they require.
Patrick makes medicine bags, quilts, and jewelry. He spent 24 years as a caseworker for both adults and youth experiencing homelessness in San Francisco but was forced out of his job during Covid, so he’s living here in his van and selling his artwork in OB. He says, “I want my art to outlast me when I’m gone. My art is my fossil footprint.”
Voices of Our City Choir member Patricia performed the spoken word section of the choir’s America’s Got Talent audition back in 2020, becoming an instant internet sensation. A week later, she found affordable housing, thanks to the San Diego Housing Commission and the efforts of the choir.
His love for South Bay is one he wishes more people shared. “It’s somewhere that’s constantly overlooked,” he says. “But South San Diego is the heart of San Diego.” Because the area offers so much, it was hard for Moon to pin down just a few ways to spend the day in the area—but he somehow managed.
To start a morning off right, Moon heads to Home Coffee in National City. The bright, airy space has plenty of room to work alone or chill with friends, making it a hub for the community that’s easily accessible off the 805 and 54 freeways. Plus, a set of outdoor swings are sure to bring out the kid in anyone. “I prefer it to Starbucks,” Moon laughs, recommending the Tahitian vanilla latte.
Courtesy of Exclusive Cuts Barber Shop
Moon says he’s had the same barber, Ray Muñoz, since high school. “Initially, he started cutting hair out of his garage then moved into shops,” he recalls. “I got to see his journey, and for him to live his dream is pretty cool.” Moon now visits him at Exclusive Cuts Barber Shop, the spot Muñoz owns in Imperial Beach.
After a fresh trim, Moon hits San Diego Kabob Shack in Chula Vista for a chicken kebab plate or Poke Etc. in National City for spicy mayo ahi tuna. As someone who focuses on eating healthy, Moon says both options hit the spot, especially after a workout.
Courtesy of Element Design Build
To unwind, Moon points to Thr3e Punk Ales in Chula Vista. “I don’t drink too much, honestly, but I have a great relationship with the owners,” he says. “If I do ever crave a drink every now and then, I prefer to go there.” Moon says he reaches for lighter beers like Mexican lagers, but pretty much anything coming out of the brewhouse promises to satisfy.
Beth Demmon is an award-winning writer and podcaster whose work regularly appears in national outlets and San Diego Magazine. Her first book, The Beer Lover's Guide to Cider, is now available. Find out more on bethdemmon.com.
Jackie Mendoza’s bilingual sound is growing more versatile. Not pictured: her ukulele.
Credit: Tayo Oyekan
In high school, Jackie Mendoza dreamed of seeing her name on a Broadway marquee. The Chula Vista native took drama class, starred in junior theater productions, and developed her love of music first through musicals. But it wasn’t until after briefly entertaining a theater major in college—then realizing how rigorous and unglamorous a career it really is—that she came to the epiphany that maybe writing and recording her own music was a much more compelling path.
“Once you start doing it professionally, it becomes really intense, and it’s not fun anymore,” she says via a Zoom call from Ohio, where she’s been spending a month taking an audio engineering course. “It was a lot of pressure, and the thing I like to do the most is sing and perform, so I started writing more of my own music.”
As a teenager in Chula Vista, Mendoza took up the ukulele and posted covers to YouTube, eventually learning to use music production software Ableton. She moved to New York City for college and joined the indie rock band Gingerlys, which later morphed into Lunarette—both of which released records through San Diego-based label Topshelf. “I played music in my bedroom,” she says, “but that was the extent of my music life. When I joined [Gingerlys], we played in Brooklyn and would do tours on the East Coast. That was my intro to playing shows.”
While she was playing in those bands, however, she also began to cultivate her own songwriting voice. In 2019, she released the LuvHz EP, which built up a steady stream of accolades and eventually resulted in a tour booked with alt-rock twin-sister duo Tegan and Sara. (Unfortunately, the tour had to be canceled on account of the pandemic.)
After living in Brooklyn for the better part of a decade, Mendoza fell in love with her hometown again and moved back to San Diego where she wrote her debut full-length album, set to be released in early 2023. Loosely speaking, the style of music that Mendoza plays is pop, shaped by the sound of pulsing beats and dreamy electronics. It also features lyrics in both English and Spanish; Mendoza lived in Tijuana until she was six and grew up in a bilingual household.
The X-factor in Mendoza’s sound is her unconventional choice of instruments. She plays a ukulele, which is fed through effects (often sounding unrecognizable), and therefore detached from some of its more precious connotations. She took up the instrument because, as she admits, she was “really bad at the guitar.” But soon enough, she found more to explore through an increasingly manipulated uke.
“I realized I could get a ukulele and buy pedals and effects and play it that way,” she says. “That kind of just started defining my music, because I had never seen that done before.”
Mendoza’s influences and musical direction keep changing as she continues to write and record, her sound growing ever more versatile. With her debut album on the way, she’ll have a new opportunity to showcase the full spectrum of music that she loves.
“It’s music that I really like to listen to,” she says. “I like pop, and I like reggaetón. I like trap music. I like electronic, psych rock—I wanted to put all of that together and tell my story through music. It’s a blend of all the music I like to listen to.”
There’s also one other crucial element she notes: “It has a little of that showtunes touch.”
Jackie Mendoza plays the Escorted Trips festival at the WorldBeat Cultural Center on Saturday, December 3.
Jeff Terich is the music critic behind the blog The Setlist. His writing has been published in Stereogum, Bandcamp Daily, American Songwriter, Fodor's and Vinyl Me Please.
The logic was fair and sound: Cultural institutions and events help attract visitors. Those visitors pay hotel taxes. So, the people agreed, some of that hotel-tax revenue should go back into maintaining the cultural ecosystem that helps bring those visitors and that money.
Projected as a five-year plan, the measure was supposed to increase funding to $17.9 million by 2017.
It never did. The penny was never guaranteed, so each year the city used part of it for other priorities. By 2023, the money going to arts and culture was up to about a half a penny. Even as TOT revenue has gone up significantly.
In 2019, TOT revenue was $245 million.
In 2025: $325 million.
One fix would be to guarantee the penny. Not simple, given San Diego’s financial woes. But the alternative—eroding the culture that makes San Diego San Diego, give it its identity—also doesn’t feel wise. Plus, even a locked percentage still rises and falls with tourism, which is why culture advocates want a guaranteed floor on top of it.
Another solution would be to give the arts commission actual authority.
“It’s an advisory body,” says arts commissioner Kamaal Martin. “You’d be hard-pressed to find anybody who takes our advice.”
Photo Credit: Katie Gardner & Matt Furman
He described the commissioners debating real, consequential questions this year, like whether and how to divide the cuts between funding pools. But those conversations “don’t connect to whoever’s actually deciding,” Martin says. “We haven’t been entrusted with decision-making about relevant things nearly enough.”
Christine Martinez is building political infrastructure through her organization Arts+Culture:San Diego—which is starting a 501(c)(4) lobbying structure not unlike police and fire unions. Martinez is also keeping her community actively engaged. “We won’t be caught off guard next year like we were this year,” she tells me.
Then there’s the evergreen issue of affordability and accessibility. Kiplinger’s most recent report ranks San Diego as the 11th most expensive city in the US, based on cost of living. The average home value is $980,700 (the US median is $540,000), but San Diego’s median household income is only one-third greater than the national level. Rent is also 66 percent higher than the national average ($2,716 vs. $1,636).
This is why San Diego has long suffered from the creative brain drain—creatives leaving for more affordable cities. “Artists are free to live wherever they want, and they will go where the rent is affordable,” says Jennifer de Poyen of Space 4 Art. “When they leave, they take their gifts with them, and their contributions, and their economic impact.”
One saving grace is the presence of Tijuana, where the cost of living is about 60 percent lower than San Diego, per Numbeo. Tijuana has long functioned as an affordable neighborhood for many in San Diego’s creative culture. It’s part of the reason why the binational identity is such a constant in our galleries, music, theater, murals, and culture. While that cross-border blood flow is one of San Diego’s most compelling attributes, few artists living that life would call it convenient or easy. A city is at a disadvantage when its culture creators have to cross a border to go home at night, and cross again the next morning to work.
In May, San Diego County Board of Supervisors approved a $2.75 million arts initiative of its own. It includes an Artist Space Grant Program aimed directly at the affordability crisis, as well as an artist-in-residence program, a dedicated Binational Creative Economy Investment, and a one-time investment in the Black Arts and Culture District in Encanto.
Bob Lehman of San Diego Art Matters has been doing county-level, binational organizing for years; in 2023, he helped get the county’s arts commission reestablished after 30 years of defunctness. That’s important because it gives arts and culture an official seat in county government, advising the County Board of Supervisors on arts and culture policy. He also brought in consultant Laura Zucker, who ran LA County’s arts program for three decades, to build a real regional plan.
“I really believe we’ll have something set up here that other communities come and look at,” he told me. “A national template other cities come to learn from.”
When asked who decides which artists will get the new grant money, county arts commissioner and executive director of the Chicano Park Museum and Cultural Center Monica Delgadillo Hernandez doesn’t hedge.
“That’s part of the infrastructure we’re going to be building,” she says. “What should a panel of reviewers look like? Should it be the commissioners? Should it be other folks? A supervisor?” She was just as candid that the commission itself doesn’t reflect San Diego’s population—Chicano communities are roughly a third of the city, she tells me, “and that’s not represented at the table yet.”
Photo Credit: Katie Gardner & Matt Furman
What Other Cities Prove Is Possible
The great news is that none of these solutions have to be invented from scratch. Numerous cities serve as examples of what’s possible—if we have the will.
Jonathon Glus—Prebys Foundation Senior Fellow for Art & Design, the Executive Director of the Art + Design District, and board president for California for the Arts—worked in Houston before coming to San Diego. The Texas city dedicates 74.5 percent of its hotel tax to arts grants by formula, and that support is guaranteed. Washington, DC locked in dedicated arts funding in 2019. Salt Lake City, my hometown, has run a voter-approved arts tax for almost 30 years, most recently reauthorized through 2034. And just this summer, New York City pushed cultural funding to a record $323.8 million, even incorporating an emergency fund.
Denver’s model is interesting because instead of a city-dependent funding model, theirs is a 0.1 percent regional sales tax. In place since 1988 and renewed by voters three times, their Scientific & Cultural Facilities District has distributed between $54 million and $85 million to arts, culture, and scientific orgs—each of the last 12 years.
This is part of a three-part series. This is Act III. See Act I and Act II here.
None of these cities got there by accident. They decided, on purpose, that arts and culture were worth protecting from politics—and, in some cases, worth building an entire identity around.
“That’s how Miami has flipped the switch,” says Glus. “People go to Miami for culture as much as they do the beach.”
San Diego has spent decades selling itself backward: Beach and weather first, culture as an afterthought you might stumble into. Glus would love to see the strategy flipped: Visitors should come for the art, “and then, by the way, you’re on the beach.”
Photo Credit: Katie Gardner & Matt Furman
So What Happens From Here?
“I do think it was a wake-up call for the community,” de Poyen says of the budget fight. “People understand that our funding is vulnerable. It was a lesson in how much power people have when they coalesce. But wow, is it painful.”
Glus says he’s genuinely optimistic. “The players have all changed seats, but the work is moving forward.”
“I believe optimism is a moral duty,” says Martin, who’s both power-fist and polite.
In eight months, there will be another budget fight. Everyone I talked to expects it will be worse. But something happened this spring that can’t be undone.
“I hope this rupture has brought us together in a moment of self-realization,” says Leticia Gomez Franco of the Balboa Art Conservation Center. “I hope we stop being so transactional; we begin to see ourselves and each other as partners in this work.”
That’s the whole ask, really. And it’s on all of us.
This is part of a three-part series. This is Act III. See Act I and Act II here.
Aaryn Belfer is a writer and editor specializing in nonfiction across art, architecture, and culture. Once upon a time, she wrote a provocative column for San Diego CityBeat (RIP). She was a runner up in the 2025 Matchbook Stories contest at the San Diego Central Library and is irrationally happy about it. Currently in her Soft Girl Era, Aaryn has expensive taste in (mostly flat) shoes and will choose a great art exhibit or live jazz concert over almost anything else. Except, possibly, Javier Bardem.
The Best Gym in San Diego Isn’t Really a Gym Anymore
Earlier this year, Fit quietly dropped "athletic" from its brand, from Fit Athletic Clubs to simply Fit, and started calling itself something new: a social wellness club.
There’s a version of San Diego that lives in two extremes. On one side, the 5 a.m. crowd: biohackers, marathoners, people who’ve already logged a cold plunge before your alarm goes off. On the other, the after-dark crowd, the ones chasing sunset happy hours and late dinners with friends. Everyone seems to be either optimizing or unwinding, and most of us feel like we’re failing at both.
Fit, San Diego’s reigning Best Gym for the third year running, has built its entire identity around erasing that divide.
Walk into one of Fit’s three San Diego locations on a Tuesday afternoon and the lines blur fast. Someone’s mid-set on the squat rack. Someone else has a laptop open at a café table a few feet away, half-working, half-people-watching. A group is trading plans for the weekend’s event by the recovery lounge. Nobody’s in a rush to leave.
“We’re not competing for the same people,” says Emily Waybright, Public Relations Manager at Fit, addressing the arrival of a national luxury gym chain in San Diego this year. “We don’t really feel like we’re in the gym category. It’s this unique thing.”
That unique thing has a name now. Earlier this year, Fit quietly dropped “athletic” from its brand, from Fit Athletic Clubs to simply Fit, and started calling itself something new: a social wellness club.
It’s a small wording change with a bigger idea behind it. Fit was never built around escaping the workday. It was built around the people who genuinely like what they do, and who want workouts, work, and friendships to happen in the same place instead of three separate ones. Because sometimes red light therapy with a stranger turns into weekend plans.
Fit’s philosophy traces back to its founder, who started the brand nearly two decades ago after failing to find a gym he actually wanted to belong to. He looked instead to the old-school country club, where people came for a shared interest and stayed for the community. His version was made for a younger generation, minus the golf, plus the loud music.
Which makes it a little ironic that the very award putting Fit back in the spotlight this year is Best Gym.
What does the best traditional gym look like when the definition of a gym is becoming less traditional? It’s a fair question, and Fit’s answer is that the fitness industry itself is shifting. The 45-minutes-in, 45-minutes-out model is giving way to something closer to a genuine third space, the kind of role the office and the bar used to play before remote work and changing nightlife habits rearranged how people spend their time
For Fit, community isn’t a marketing add-on to fitness. It’s the through-line. Members aren’t just paying for a treadmill; they’re paying for an entire day of social wellness that’s built on performance, recovery, connection, and a plan for the next event on the calendar. That’s a much harder membership to walk away from.
Ambition and ease aren’t opposites here, they exist side by side, where passion and play share the same morning. On September 12, Fit is hosting Sol, a full day wellness festival at Fit Social. The morning focuses on wellness classes and vendors and then the evening is a full party with multiple DJ sets and an open bar. Think of it as a kick-off to locals’ summer in San Diego.
Ready to see what a social wellness club actually looks like? Visit fitclubs.com, or follow along at @thefitclubs on Instagram.
This is part of a three-part series. This is Act II. See Act I and Act III here.
Without concrete, wildflowers are just weeds. Any honest history of San Diego art and culture is tension and its reckonings. It begins before the name existed, with the Kumeyaay. It must pass through the Panama-California Exposition, one hell of a county fair that conjured Balboa Park as our grand cultural stage. It pays tribute to the lights of La Jolla, where the donor pool helped realize unrealizable things. It should mention names like Marston, Scripps, Ochoa, DeWitt, Lopez, Klauber, Baldessari, Torres… so many.
In short spaces like this, long histories like that become roll calls. So this is more of a walk through pressure points, notes on recurring forces and regional oddities.
Border life is key to understanding the here of here. Art without dialogue is just decoration. At its best, that dialogue should be a tad muddy, emotionally gassed. In other words, it should be in need of art—to widen perspective, parse meaning, see the unseen.
San Diego’s central dialogue—the magic and the stressor—is being flatmates with Mexico’s second-largest city by population. That makes San Diego a swing-gate of shared and vastly different perspectives, both its own place and something larger. And in no other major city in the US do the fresh flow of ideas from two countries—different governments, laws, mores, expressions, arts, cultures, traditions, economies, loves, and resentments—mingle at such a constant daily rate (due respect to El Paso).
That binational steam created Chicano Park, one of the most uniquely San Diegan contributions to national and international culture. When construction of the I-5 and Coronado Bridge divided Logan Heights, neighbors protested by transmuting prejudicial concrete into redwoods of Chicano art. Turning a civic wound into a beautiful and enduring landmark that expressed and preserved a core identity—like East Side Gallery in Berlin or Constitution Hill in Johannesburg—is damn near the core of what art is supposed to do.
Like any city, the underground-overground friction is crucial in San Diego. Our culture is headlined by institutions that lift creative work onto national and international stages: MCASD, The Nat, SDMA, Centro Cultural de la Raza, the Symphony, WorldBeat Center, The Old Globe, La Jolla Playhouse, Mingei, Museum of Us, Stuart Collection, Timken, ICA, Comic-Con, etc. The next mutations grow in the seams: street murals, music dives, tattoo shops, wheatpasted walls, graffiti, lowriders, surf and skate art (though in San Diego, this is mainstream), pop-up shows, backyard shows, beach raves, any place with room for people and a loose relationship with regulations.
Photo Credit: Katie Gardner & Matt Furman
Both art and culture get their power from power. They’re fundamentally a conversation with and retort against dominant structures. San Diego’s most pervasive structure is arguably the most rigid form: the military. Its presence is heavy in the southern tip (Border Patrol), the middle (Navy and MCAS Miramar), and northern edge (Camp Pendleton). The military is San Diego’s largest employer, by a long shot.
Within this plus-sized environment of order and hierarchy, it’s understandable that Shepard Fairey’s “OBEY” posters in the late ’90s struck such a potent chord. The most compelling punk rock is often outside a strong governor’s window. (The “OBEY” series featured an ominous, propaganda-style André the Giant wheatpasted on random ugly surfaces across San Diego—launching Fairey’s style that he eventually used for Obama’s “HOPE” poster.)
Armed forces are often viewed as the absence of creative culture—understandably so, since rogue individual expression feels like a pretty sure way to sink a war effort.
But in San Diego, the Navy’s unsuspecting role as art creator—directly or indirectly—is hard to ignore. Tattoos are a dawn-of-time practice of many early cultures, including the Kumeyaay. But Polynesia was a core realm. Sailors were exposed to it on deployment in the Pacific Rim, inking their arms with the names of loved ones and unit insignia. Back in San Diego, they’d flaunt those tats in the beaches and bars of Mission Beach or PB (Marines did the same in Oceanside.) Enlistees were the muscular flesh galleries that helped turn skin art into one of the city’s most widespread modern art forms.
During WWII, the military also trained huge legions of San Diego laborers how to build war machines. Those mechanics, engineers, machinists, welders, painters, and metal fabricators used those skills for creative good in their neighborhoods—especially in custom car culture, which took off in the post-war ’50s and ’60s. Mexican-American vets helped develop the lowrider scene, a deeply rooted part of San Diego creative expression. Galleries on slow-moving wheels.
Tourism is the other mainstream force ripe for creating against. It is both critical to San Diego’s economy, and one of the greatest barriers to deeper, more nuanced expressions of what and who San Diego is. The industry of selling our city to passers-through creates a gigantic tarp of cultural tropes. It reinforces the most obvious charms—cute zoo animal takes in an epic sunset with a giant margarita—and doesn’t yield much airspace to the thrilling micro-cultures that live and breathe where locals live and breathe. Nothing against watercolors of dolphins, but much against the hegemony of watercolors of dolphins.
Maybe because of these dominant forces, San Diegans especially tend to force underground and institutional art into a needless cage match. It’s human instinct to champion the underdog as more worthy, but that has always felt like a form of articide.
Photo Credit: Katie Gardner & Matt Furman
It’s like saying the only good food is made by gritty upstarts who crafted their own whisks from discarded shopping carts. Most of those plucky whisk-makers would love to eventually be paid properly, would love a stage, a grant, a building, a donor, a lighting rig, health insurance, maybe even one chair that doesn’t threaten the spine.
That’s what the major institutions do. Both stages—the duct-taped and the donored—serve vital roles and deserve commensurate support if we care about the entire lifespan of creative expression and not just its first exciting steps. Championing the starving artist exclusively just secures an enduring poverty for the creative class at large.
I’ve often theorized it’s harder to create great art and culture in cities like San Diego, where the climate is supernaturally pleasant. In colder/hotter/rainier/less beautiful cities, people are forced indoors to fabricate their own beauty (the grunge music of Seattle, the obscene creative output of Reykjavík). San Diego’s eternally mild sunshine tends to make the human body our art medium of choice. But scratch the surface of that surf poster (and I’ve only scratched a miniscule percent here), and this city’s far from the cultural shallows it gets accused of being.
Addendum: A Personal Agenda. In scouting the route of art and culture across San Diego county through history, two areas come up again and again: La Jolla and Barrio Logan. So I propose a collaboration between two icons of artful concrete—Chicano Park and Salk Institute (one of the world’s great examples of brutalism architecture). Let Barrio Logan’s muralists go nuts on that coastal science fortress, unite the realms for a moment in time.
This is part of a three-part series. This is Act II. See Act I and Act III here.
Troy Johnson is the magazine’s award-winning food writer and humorist, and a long-standing expert on Food Network. His work has been featured on NatGeo, Travel Channel, NPR, and in Food Matters, a textbook of the best American food writing.
San Diego Restored Arts Funding—But the Crisis Isn’t Over
The city’s cultural sector regained millions after a proposed 85 percent cut, yet nonprofits, youth programs and major institutions still face painful losses
This is part of a three-part series. This is Act I. See Act II and Act III here.
Every spring, Christine Martinez reaches out to the arts community to explain what’s on the line, hoping they’ll engage with the city’s budget process. Cultural funding, she constantly reminds, is almost always strapped to the guillotine. Especially in a city strapped for cash.
“It’s not an easy ask,” says Martinez, manager of Arts+Culture:San Diego. “Showing up is a real cost for small, volunteer-run groups that can’t spare half a day at City Council without possibly having to close their doors.”
Then, last April—with one day’s notice to arts leaders—Mayor Todd Gloria proposed a budget that didn’t trim arts funding; it eviscerated it, from $13.8 million to $2 million. An 85 percent slash. Other city departments faced cuts of about 7 percent.
The scheduled date of the cuts was just three months away (beginning of the fiscal year). Organizational leaders have to plan months if not years ahead to run their organizations. They had made hires, dedicated spending, and programmed their seasons based on a reasonable expectation that support for the arts would be somewhat in line with previous years. (The City has allotted at least $7 million a year to arts every year for the last 20 years, and the last four years have ranged between $13.8 and $18.2 million.)
The day felt even more existential given the national and international climate around the arts: namely, the federal government’s repeated proposal to eliminate the country’s two biggest cultural foundations (NEA and NEH), and the global trend of AI replacing more costly human creatives.
“It shocked everybody,” says Kamaal Martin, arts commissioner and co-founder of Art Power Equity. “If the message had been, ‘Times are tough, everybody tighten their belts a little,’ it would have landed differently. But there was no vision offered for the future, no parity in the cut. It was just, essentially, ‘Fuck you.’”
Among things I’m good at—sleeping late, low bidding for expensive shoes on Poshmark, parallel parking on either side of the street—budget analysis isn’t among them. In trying to understand how bad the finances were for San Diego to propose this drastic cut, I found myself drowning in numbers, pie charts, and politi-speak.
In his April 27 newsletter, Gloria explained that balancing the budget means “asking hard questions about every single dollar this city spends: Is this a core responsibility of city government, or is it something we do when we can afford to?”
Fair enough—if he were to ask those hard questions about every single dollar this city spends. It also makes his conclusion clear: The City of San Diego does not view supporting arts and culture as a core responsibility.
Which begs more than a few questions: Should the City be responsible? If not, then who? How crucial are arts and culture to a city? And since this is a budget discussion, how much revenue does the arts and culture industry generate for San Diego? What’s the ROI?
Photo Credit: Katie Gardner & Matt Furman
The Impact of Arts & Culture
$1.2 billion.
That’s how much economic activity San Diego’s arts and culture nonprofits generated in 2022, according to the City’s latest Arts & Economic Prosperity 6 report. The industry created nearly 17,000 jobs and generated $878 million of personal income for local residents. About 15 percent of the people showing up to arts events in San Diego are tourists, so money was raised through TOT (Transit Occupancy Tax). The activity generated $275.7 million in tax revenue to the city.
In other words, the ROI seems to be ROI-ing.
Still, there have been signs that cuts were coming. In 2025, the City demoted the Department of Cultural Affairs to a division, folding it into the Economic Development Department (EDD). That meant Cultural Affairs no longer had independence, nor its own leader sitting at the same organizational level as departments like parks and recreation, library, police, and fire. It lost institutional leverage and would now have to compete with other EDD priorities—real estate, airport operations, business development, etc.—for budget allocation.
To be clear, few arts administrators and leaders I spoke with are interested in the either/or false choice of funding law enforcement or after-school programs; the fire departments or libraries. They’re sincere in looking for solutions that don’t leave any single group with a greater burden of righting a long-out-of-balance budget.
Aaryn Belfer is a writer and editor specializing in nonfiction across art, architecture, and culture. Once upon a time, she wrote a provocative column for San Diego CityBeat (RIP). She was a runner up in the 2025 Matchbook Stories contest at the San Diego Central Library and is irrationally happy about it. Currently in her Soft Girl Era, Aaryn has expensive taste in (mostly flat) shoes and will choose a great art exhibit or live jazz concert over almost anything else. Except, possibly, Javier Bardem.
Growing up, Laika Nur, MD, Scripps Clinic sports medicine specialist, loved watching beach volleyball when the Association of Volleyball Professionals tour came to her hometown of Chicago. A talented volleyball player herself, she remembers sitting in the stands all day, and once, even got a couple autographs. Years later, Dr. Nur was attending a professional event focused on women’s sports, and the discussion turned to a new professional women’s volleyball league. The general manager and coaching staff for San Diego’s team, the Mojo, happened to be in attendance, and Dr. Nur took the opportunity to ask them if they needed a team doctor. Flash forward to the Mojo’s inaugural 2024 season, when Dr. Nur officially became the team physician. Click here to read more about Dr. Nur and how she incorporates lessons she learned on the court into her practice.
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