Q&A: Redesigning ‘America’s Finest City’

Todd Gloria is a man of firsts.

By Zac Petit

The first mayor of color in San Diego. The first person of Native American and Filipino-American heritage to be elected to the role. The first openly gay mayor to lead the city.

So it should perhaps come as no surprise that Todd Gloria is also the first politician the Catalyst team has ever talked to who’s said that if he could do it all over again, he’d become an architect.

“I like the land use part of my job the most. I like that potential of upgrading and improving the aesthetics of it, making statements — the people-scaled nature of that work,” Gloria says. “Now, I couldn’t do the math that’s involved in it, let’s be really clear …”

First elected in 2020, Gloria has had a particular focus on housing and homelessness while encouraging his constituents to dream big — all of which he touches on in the following interview. It tips a hand at his vision for the future of San Diego, and just might offer replicable insights for leaders shaping the future of their own communities at large.

You’ve utilized design thinking and design solutions to approach different issues. Where do you think that has had a particularly powerful impact on your list of priorities?

It’s had an impact on all of it. Take the example of homelessness. Everyone wants to solve that problem, but you really have to design a system that’s dynamic enough to deal with what I would describe as the most complex problem that there is. Every person’s individual path to homelessness is unique. The contours may be similar — job loss, divorce, addiction — but their paths are unique, and in public policy what I’m generally doing is creating rules that apply to 1.4 million people the same. And that doesn’t work so well. So we’re trying to create a system that’s more human-focused and has better results. When I took over as mayor, we had about 1,300 shelter options, and today we have roughly 2,600. It’s not just an increase in volume, it’s also a diversification of the portfolio: We have congregate and noncongregate. We have senior only, women only, LGBT, youth, safe sleeping, safe parking. We’re creating a spectrum of offerings so that when an outreach worker makes contact with an individual, hopefully what we have is an option that will fit that person’s unique circumstances and reduce the chances of them declining assistance, knowing that many do decline assistance. It’s about taking that human-centered approach and affixing it to a public policy problem, and that has benefits for everybody.

Turning to housing at large, where do things currently stand in the city, and where would you like to grow from here?

We’re doing better than we have. Historically we averaged less than 4,500 new home permits per year. Two years ago we almost hit 10,000 new units, and last year, despite high inflation and high interest rates, we got close to 9,000. So, from 4,500 to 10,000 and 9,000. That’s good.

That has to deal with policy reform, regulatory reform, permit reform, trying to create a circumstance where the limited capital that is out there would choose San Diego over another city because we derisked the regulatory environment. We’ve created a certainty of process that people can rely on, and we can issue you a permit in a matter of days, and not weeks or months. That’s causing us to be highly successful even in a difficult environment where people are pulling back on capital and maybe taking a more wait-and-see look. As a result, in portions of our city we see rents going flatter or even going down, which is great for tenants and great for housing consumers. Still, that’s not mission accomplished. We really ought to be closer, in my judgment, to about 15,000 new homes per year. I think that, sustained over an appreciable period of time, would yield a more functional housing economy, and gives consumers real choices. The area where we’re really falling short at the moment is in middle-income housing and in for-sale product. All those new homes I just mentioned to you are generally market-rate luxury stuff or the deed-restricted affordable. We want to advance new policy proposals this year and next year that will try and tackle middle-income housing, hopefully with the same success that we’ve had for rental units over the last few years.

You’ve long had a focus on sustainability. Does that extend to your goals with the built environment?

No question. When I was working on the city’s climate action plan, which was 10 years ago or so now, a lot of that conversation was about habitat preservation and clean water and clean air and solar energy and alternatives. I’m a housing guy. That’s why I do this job. I pick up the garbage once a week in exchange for the opportunity to work on housing policy. I’m very much impassioned that housing policy is environmental policy.

I’m not always aligned with my environmental friends who don’t always see the housing piece as being a part of what we must do. I think when I started this work I was very much an outlier. Today a critical mass of people understand that the built environment, construction, architecture, design, has to be a part of our environmental solutions. I don’t know that I cut a ribbon on anything recently that didn’t talk about its LEED status or its environmental features.

How can the city continue to foster the development of a vibrant arts and culture scene, and do you see downtown playing a role in that?

I think this is a renaissance period for art and culture and sport in San Diego. We have built a new football stadium, Snapdragon Stadium in Mission Valley. We’ve opened [or revitalized] The Conrad, The Joan, The Shell, Jacobs Music Center, Mingei, a new contemporary art museum in La Jolla. All this was done in the last five years, which is extraordinary and really representative of what I think our city’s capable of doing when empowered by its philanthropic and public-side partners.

Regulatory leadership is pretty darn important. I think after that we can play a helpful role, and you mentioned downtown. There’s a theater district that we could create downtown. The arts spaces I’ve just described to you are there and they’re doing well and, in many cases, have undergone a $70 million to $200 million renovation. That capital has been expended, but perhaps around it there’s still work to be done.

I don’t think I’ve talked to anybody about this yet, but I’ve also got a notion for a military heritage district that’s more on our waterfront …

You’ve said that San Diego has thought of itself as a small city for too long. Are projects like this a reaction to that?

As a native San Diegan there’s a tremendous amount of charm and feeling as though we’re a small city, a small town, a sleepy military town. There’s a romanticism behind that, but it ignores the reality, which is that we’re the eighth largest city in the country. We’re a city of 1.4 million people in the metro area, and when you throw in Tijuana, of over 8 million people. When you conceive of yourself as a small town but you’re really a big city, some of the challenges become worse because you don’t really recognize them for what they are. So, my administration has been very much about trying to reposition in San Diegans’ minds that we are a big city and that we should compete on a national and global stage. When we do, we tend to be successful.

If you had to put it in a word, what is the future of the built environment in San Diego?

Beautiful.

I recognize that change is scary to people. Change is hard for folks. So when you’re talking about a lot of things that I want to do, it is change, and particularly from a housing perspective. People have understandable concerns. One of the ways I try and engage with people is to tell them, Listen, I’m the city’s first gay mayor. I’m not going to let them build anything ugly in your community. It generally gets a laugh, which is an intentional effort to try and bring down the temperature.

When you talk to people, they understand things are going to change. They may not like it but they want it curated in a way that they believe will make their life and life in their community better. The word beautiful is intentional. The goal is that you go out your front door and you see things that bring you joy, and that fills your soul. That is really the challenge to people in the architectural community — to do interesting work and to try and exceed the bounds of the limitations of the code ... to come up with something that’s iconic and signature and doesn’t look all the same in all the communities. I think when we hit those marks, people really embrace what is done. You could build an amphitheater on our waterfront … or you could build The Shell. The Shell is now on every postcard about San Diego, and it’s only a few years old. I think we could use some more beauty in our lives — and I think that goes a long way to getting people to embrace change.

Zac Petit is LPA’s new editorial director. Previously, he was a contributing writer for Fast Company and the editor-in-chief of the National Magazine Award–winning publication PRINT, among other magazines. His articles have also appeared in National Geographic, Smithsonian, MSN and many other outlets.