San Diego
San Diego wound up not accepting federal UR dollars. The Californian city is far from Houston or Dallas; it had a long history of courting federal fortress California dollars, as recounted in several earlier chapters. City business leaders desperately wanted to rebuild its downtown to accommodate its postwar growth. What gives?
Center City initiative
The need for downtown focus was evident enough that the chamber in 1952 spun off the San Diego Downtown Association (SDDA). The SDDA’s purpose was to organize/ coordinate downtown merchants to better compete with suburban malls. Downtown retail sales were SDDA’s benchmark, and virtually all its initiatives (Dollar Days, Recognition Day and Window Display Contests) focused on sales and making downtown a convenient, safe and attractive place to shop. SDDA members (235 in 1955) were primarily tenants with little concern for anything other than immediate cash register sales.
For corporate CEOs and CBD property owners this retail focus would not do the trick of competing with suburban malls. CBD physical redevelopment was for them a prerequisite for CBD revitalization. So SDDA established a committee, headed by a prominent business leader, Joseph Jessop Sr., to develop recommendations. Jessop did not have cooperation from either the city council or the mayor, both of whom did not trust business leaders and were reluctant to violate the area’s low-tax culture by spending money to rehab the downtown. With SDDA more an anchor than a help, in 1958-59 Jessop incorporated a second downtown EDO, San Diegans, Inc. (SDI). SDI pledged to address the “economic health of the entire community [which] rested upon an alive, vigorous, aggressive core area in the heart of the city”. Membership was restricted to key and powerful business leaders “who had the authority to speak on behalf of their organizations without having to report to a superior”. They met five times, prepared a plan of action and contemplated hiring a Chicago-based consultant to study the downtown. The sixth meeting was restricted to those members who “brought their checkbooks” (Reiner, 1990, pp. 1–2). San Diego had started its downtown revitalization (1959). SDI raised the money carry out the plan.
The consultant’s report was reconfigured into SDI’s Centre City initiative. The initiative, stressed an augmented downtown tourist and visitor strategy: it called for a new city hall, convention center and performing arts center cluster as the basis for an application for federal urban renewal funds. Conducting information meetings, traveling to UR projects in Sacramento and Mexico City, prepared the way for a formal UR request to the city council (1960). The first step in the UR application was a formal city plan, which the council agreed to fund in 1961: “Eight months later the City Planning Department unveiled a scale model of Centre City … the pivotal point … was the construction of a Community Concourse composed of a convention hall, a city hall, and a performing arts center” (Reiner, 1990, p. 4). So far, so good.
The city council purchased four CBD blocks and authorized a bond referendum to pay for the project. The referendum failed in 1962 (the fifth time San Diegans voted down a referendum financing a convention center); it also rejected establishing a redevelopment agency, and refused to authorize an application for UR funds. The key issue for voter rejection involved the city’s use of federal funds, which to them meant red tape, inefficient, more expensive and untimely construction of the project, and restrictions on how the money would be spent. This, on top of the traditional unwillingness to raise taxes to pay for the issued bonds, conveyed to voters a sense that urban renewal meant of loss of the city’s ability to control and manage the project. Reacting to the bond initiative’s failure, the city council borrowed from city pension funds, but fell seriously short of raising funds sufficient to proceed. City Centre appeared stillborn (Corso, 1983, pp. 332–3).
At that critical juncture, SDI formed a fundraising committee and raised the additional funds needed for the project to proceed ($1.6 million). SDI gifted the funds to the city on the pledge that construction of City Centre would proceed. Accordingly, construction of a new downtown civic center, Community Concourse, began in 1962. Almost immediately, $38 million of pent-up private CBD building projects broke ground simultaneously with the Centre City project—and the skyline of modern San Diego came into place over the next three years. No request for federal UR funding was ever made. But we have not completed our story.
San Diego UR at the cusp of ED change
Despite an aggressive annexation program (previous to 1965 the city had annexed over 305 square miles) suburbanization was accelerating, while the city grew by leaps and bounds (by the mid-1980s suburbs totaled 1.1 million). In the 1960s a cost-conscious central city voter and city council member was of two minds with aggressive annexation as the city’s chief anti-suburbanization strategy. CBD revitalization, on the policy back-burner with the completion of the City Concourse project, seemed to some a more attractive alternative.
So in 1965 a new business group, San Diegans for Progress through Planned Development, replaced SDI. City Planning came up with a new CBD plan intended for a federal UR application. The re-jiggered plan to fight “blight in deteriorated areas” in and around the downtown was accepted by the city council in 1965, and the whole shebang was resubmitted for voter approval. The voters dutifully and soundly rejected the second urban renewal application and city plan 66,000 to 29,500. In the same referendum, the voters approved a baseball stadium “heavily dependent on federal funds [transportation] to build freeways to the ball park”. Oh well!
Business leaders again regrouped, picked up the city plan and in 1966 submitted it to Mayor Frank Curran, who approved a new referendum—with one deletion. All references to urban renewal and federal funds were removed. The San Diegans for Progress hired a PR firm, developed collateral materials and conducted the campaign. In November 1966, the referendum was approved (Corso, 1983, p. 333).
The next year, subsidized by substantial federal funds ($2 million), San Diego launched a Great Society community planning initiative and hired planners to develop neighborhood plans. At the same time, a Citizens Committee of 100 led by Bea Evenson, a community activist, formed to pursue historic preservation, parks development and cultural enhancement (preserve the 1916 World’s Fair buildings, for example), with great success—almost all of these activities were substantially financed with federal funds. Two points follow:
- Urban renewal and CBD redevelopment were not the only economic development-related programs ongoing at this time.
- The community did not reject the use of federal funds per se, but rather was rejecting urban renewal program/funds.
San Diego economic development was in the process of being redefined into something new.
Still the 1967 city plan was a success: it provided a foundation for San Diego’s future growth management planning; but, as a spur to CBD redevelopment, little happened. The Community Concourse/Centre City Project, meant to jump-start CBD redevelopment, petered out after the initial construction burst. The CBD continued along its path of relentless decline. In November 1971, however, a young liberal Republican, Pete Wilson, was elected mayor. A redefined San Diego UR was about to accompany the new policy system he brought into office.
Ron W. Coan 