What’s Next for Downtown San Diego?

Downtown San Diego is at a crossroads. “The city has a golden opportunity to answer a really important question, which really is the question that every major city in America is wrestling

with: What is a downtown for in this post-Covid, remote work era?” says Grant Oliphant, CEO of The Conrad Prebys Foundation. “Downtowns are hugely important to how entire regions are perceived. And because of their role as a hub for a cultural life, they can be a real center of creativity and dynamism.”

That golden opportunity took root in 2022, when Mayor Todd Gloria proposed the Civic Center Revitalization effort. The idea was to lease or sell the downtown Civic Center’s city-owned buildings to a developer and use the money to fund a new City Hall, while adding housing and potentially businesses and public space to the area.

No developers were interested. So, a few big players— the Downtown San Diego Partnership and the urban planning firm U3 Advisors—got together to draw up a blueprint for what the space could become. Oliphant’s charitable organization, the Prebys Foundation, is contributing $300,000 to the visioning work. The nonprofit got involved to preserve the San Diego Civic Theatre and “explore how the city could integrate culture in a reimagining of downtown,” Oliphant says.

For Oliphant, that starts with a Civic Center that doesn’t stop you in your tracks—because in its current iteration, the center is a physical blockade in downtown, completely separating the east and west sides. “It’s an extraordinarily bad experience,” Oliphant says. “And it, in many ways, communicates all the wrong messages about what an incredible place San Diego is.”

The Civic Center covers four blocks between A Street and C Street and First Avenue and Third Avenue, including buildings such as City Hall, an office tower, Golden Hall, and the Civic Theatre. The layout and many of the buildings were designed in the 1960s—a time when cars were king, prioritized above everything, including pedestrians, says Megan Groth, an urbanist, architect, and author of the local guidebook Places We Love: San Diego Tijuana.

The center’s layout reflects this vehicle-centric mindset. “One of the most architecturally striking buildings at the Civic Center is the parking garage, designed by Hal Sadler,” Groth explains. “And the original design had B Street running through the site,” though it was later closed off.

Now, almost everyone agrees Civic Center needs a makeover—yet opinions differ on what it should look like.

And it’s possible the area won’t get a facelift anytime soon. After Measure E, which would have increased sales taxes in San Diego, failed in November 2024, Gloria announced that the revitalization of Civic Center is on hold—despite the fact that the city is contributing very little in funding.

Mixed-Use Spaces

The major players leading the Civic Center Revitalization effort say they aren’t yet ready to share the grand concept that could shape the future of downtown. They have a wishlist, though.

An original visioning document for the Civic Center Redevelopment, authored by a panel of community leaders and architects in 2022, calls for a mixed-use area that “serve[s] the needs of residents, workers, and visitors to ensure the area is active and vibrant. The space should be holistic and cohesive with streets, landscaping, amenities, office space, and residential mixed into a pleasing multi-purpose urban core.”

Groth believes that initial vision “is a thoughtful, well-informed, and achievable overview of what our Civic Center can and should be in the future. The key now is for the city to design the process to achieve these goals,” she says. It is absolutely within reach, and there are countless examples from other cities that we can draw on—not to mention people within our city who can help get this done in the equitable and collaborative way that this visioning document demands.”

With the Civic Theatre onsite and the newly rehabilitated venue for the San Diego Symphony nearby, the area already has anchors for arts and culture, and Nathan Bishop, senior director of economic development at the Downtown San Diego Partnership, wants to add housing, retail, and an outdoor space that would be inviting to the public.

“I think that we will continue to see … more of a tilt toward experiential activities [that encourage tourism],” he says.

A Greener Downtown

Some of those “experiential” spaces should be parks and outdoor activities, Bishop continues. “We have this amazing weather,” he adds. “We should have more activated rooftops than anywhere else in the country. We should have great park spaces, a lot of places … to [enjoy] that indoor-outdoor nature that really sets us apart.”

Rob Quigley, a 40-year downtown resident and longtime San Diego architect who designed the Central Library, isn’t involved with the Civic Center Revitalization project, but his dreams for downtown also include more nature. He is working with the group San Diego Commons on “Green the Gap,” an initiative that would better connect Balboa Park with the urban center to give downtown “a huge and contiguous green space,” he says.

Beyond that, he argues, there should be parks and other greenery sprinkled throughout downtown. He recently visited London, and as he strolled through the city, he was struck by the way its layout prioritizes green space.

“It just makes living there delightful, even though it’s this massive, dense city,” he says. “If I was a dictator for downtown, I would mandate that every two blocks, there has to be some green space.”

More Infrastructure and Offices

And, given his way, Quigley would ensure that there were plenty of office workers around to enjoy all those parks.

“You’ve got to have places to work downtown, or else downtown becomes a bedroom community for people that work elsewhere,” he says. “That’s the opposite of what a vibrant downtown is. It’s an issue and a problem that’s going to grow in magnitude.” As of August 2024, downtown’s office vacancy rate was at a historic high of just over 25 percent, according to a report from CoStar.

Those who do live in the area need more public infrastructure, like parks, schools, and transportation to connect downtown with other parts of the city, Groth adds. “We focus so much on units of housing that we have neglected the quality of the public realm and all the other things that support housing,” she says.

Say No to Superblocks

Quigley also believes that a successful downtown requires a diverse array of small businesses, creating a pedestrian experience like those tourists eagerly flock to in Little Italy and the Gaslamp. However, “what’s happening all over downtown is that developers consolidate all those small lots into a full city block and develop one mega project called a superblock,” he says. “So, instead of having the fine grain of multiple buildings on a block, like in the Gaslamp, you end up with these giant block-by-block projects.”

He would like the city to institute a zoning rule that requires at least four development entities on any city block.

Because of the city’s effort to enlist one developer to conceptualize the entire space, Quigley worries that the Civic Center redesign set off on the wrong foot. “You want to hire professionals that understand civic architecture and public planning and not developers,” he says. “Developers don’t get that and are not interested in maximizing the public good—they’re interested in maximizing profit.”

Instead, he advocates for a public process. When he was working on plans for the Central Library, for example, he hosted a series of workshops to gather input.

“Developers don’t work like that,” he says. “It’s not in their DNA.”

However, because the effort to sell to a developer failed, Oliphant says it’s now “wide open” how the space could be divided. “You could imagine a single developer taking it on, but more likely, it would be a series of developers interested in various aspects,” he adds.

And Bishop asserts that the U3 consultants running the visioning process are well-versed in public-private partnerships. They know how to bring the two sectors together and “make them thrive,” he says.

A Better Vision

Creating a successful Civic Center—and, beyond that, a downtown that people want to spend time in—doesn’t just happen by accident, Groth says. She points out almost every other major city has a design commission of some kind that helps intentionally plan and envision urban spaces that are functional and appealing.

Groth believes San Diego needs such a commission, one that would review projects not just on the design of the building, but “actually how it fits within the streetscape and how it would relate to other buildings and the whole urban environment. Right now, our development approach to housing is to make it as easy for developers as possible, which on one hand produces housing, but doesn’t necessarily produce the housing we want or need,” she says. “We are outsourcing the design of our city to private entities, basically. And we can do something about that. We are just choosing, as a city, not to.”

Meanwhile, the Civic Center Revitalization is currently on ice, waiting for the city’s budget to recover.

“Once the city is back in a position where it can get moving again and feels comfortable focusing on this again, we would then get into the process of really designing actual projects and re-engaging the public around that,” Oliphant says.

Groth hopes that eventual progress is in service to the community as a whole. “Our city government prefers handing over large amounts of land to one master developer without any public value strings attached,” she adds. “It is a faster, cleaner transaction and doesn’t require the city to have any in-house development experts to manage the project. But this is an opportunity to do something different, if we are able to think differently.”