By Paul Krueger / Times of San Diego / Nov. 17, 2025
Five years after Home Depot’s corporate office announced the construction of a new superstore in Mission Valley, the concrete behemoth is rising from the dust on Camino del Rio South just east of Texas Street.
You can see the project move toward completion as you zoom along Interstate 8. The steel-and-concrete girders closest to the freeway are the backbone of the store’s 155,000-square-foot parking structure. That’s actually bigger than the store and its garden center with 125,000 square feet of shopping space.
This colossus will become the dominant structure on the disappearing south rim of Mission Valley. But who exactly will it serve?
There is no housing of any kind along this stretch of Camino del Rio South or even close by. Home Depot executives reportedly believe the new superstore will be a magnet for customers who live up the hill in Normal Heights, North Park, Hillcrest, and adjoining neighborhoods.
But those communities are currently served by an existing Home Depot just a few off-ramps east on Fairmount Avenue and by a nearby Lowes off Friars Road.
Those stores are easy to reach. Getting to the new Home Depot will require more patience. The only access is from Texas Street/Qualcomm Way to the east or Mission Valley Road to the west. Those intersections feed Interstate 8. They are backed up with traffic throughout the day and heavily clogged during rush hour.
As for Camino del Rio South, a traffic study prepared for the superstore says its narrow frontage road already “operates at a Level of Service which reflects substantial congestion.” That same study predicts the new Home Depot will add more than 4,300 daily vehicle trips to that segment of Camino del Rio S., with a peak of 400 added trips per hour during busy afternoons.
The city hopes to accommodate the additional traffic by restriping the street with a two-way left-turn lane along the Home Depot frontage and a left-turn lane for westbound traffic turning into the new store. The street redesign will add bike lanes and remove on-street parking.
Home Depot will also provide bike storage for anyone fit enough to slog up the notoriously steep Texas Street hill with whatever hardware items they can fit in their saddle bags or backpack.
In theory, e-bikes can climb up the hill. Committed cyclists could theoretically rig flatbed trailers to their e-bikes to transport hefty items — ladders, lumber — that most people buy at home improvement centers.
For the really adventurous (and environmentally committed), there’s a bus that circulates on Camino del Rio South and North. It connects with the trolley, so you could conceivably schlep your bulky purchases home via mass transit.
Speaking of the environment, to make room for this superstore on its allotted parcel of land, construction crews leveled and terraced another sizable swath of Mission Valley’s retreating south slope. That portion of the hillside is now barren (so at least there’s no wildfire risk), and what’s left of it will be replanted.
Architecturally, what can we say about Home Depots? They’re too ubiquitous and generic to register anything more than a shrug from those of us who care about building design and appearance. We know better than to hope these corporate landlords would make any effort to improve the curb appeal of their buildings.
And we can’t look to nearby projects for aesthetic inspiration. Mission Valley was once a bucolic landscape of farmhouses, pastures and agricultural fields. It is now a barren mesa lined with ugly strip malls, hotels, fast food places, and car dealerships (including that cartoonish Carvana tower). Arguably, another nondescript superstore fronted by a concrete parking structure hardly matters.
But the Home Depot’s new neighbor is getting some well-deserved attention. The Scottish Rite Memorial Temple located just to the west was recently awarded an “Onion” by the San Diego Architectural Foundation. The judges wrote:
“This building misses the mark in every possible way — from the blunt massing and rudimentary detailing to the minimal landscaping and awkward orientation. What a colossal missed opportunity to create something special. And the highly visible site adjacent to the 8 freeway assures that this architectural mistake will be hard to ignore. This deserves a batch of undercooked onions.”
Another new development project, another new eyesore. Welcome to the ever-evolving but never-changing Mission Valley!
[Editordude: Paul’s post reminded me of a seminal piece I published 11 years ago on “How to Destroy Mission Valley”. Check it out here.]
Fairmount is such a dilapidated store with a bad roof I welcome another to siphon off traffic. But I’ve always though biking that 2×4, or if the bus added lumber racks to the bike racks would be entertaining.
Mission Valley was where the indigenous (Kumeyaay) people lived in the greatest numbers. When the Spanish arrived they enslaved many of them and drove the others out. Thus began the uglification of Mission Valley. It has gone downhill ever since.
Personally, I find the “wall” of new multistory buildings just north of the 8 and west of Fashion Valley to be much more aesthetically pleasing than the car dealerships and parking lots that were there before.
Mission Valley has never looked great throughout my lifetime. Hopefully things improve when SDSU West builds new facilities, housing, and a riverwalk park they have in the pipeline. As far as aesthetics go, all of these things would be better than the endless asphalt parking lots and aging stripmalls!
There was a time in the early 1970’s when cows and horses at pasture were still visible on the southeast side of Mission Valley. That was before the 805 was built and everything else that has followed. Hope springs eternal, though, and I’m looking forward to a riverwalk park!
Leave to you Paul to add logic to the equation. Thank you for the article.
Thank you, Paul, for an insightful article. As a kid growing up in San Diego, I have continually felt the same as you. This article rings so true.
It is an utter shame that this valley could have been so much more. Early on, when there was real opportunity, that opportunity squandered. Development flopped right out of the gate by turning its back on the Mission Valley’s biggest and most valuable resource – the San Diego River. For decades, “planners” and developers treated the river as a troublesome liability instead of a defining asset. Regretfully, under our current planning department and this administration, that same mindset continues to this day.
Tragically, the example of Mission Valley points to a much larger issue: the woeful lack of genuine urban planning in our city. San Diego, for decades now, has never seemed to be a champion of long-range, visionary planning. In the true sense of the profession, we simply do not have urban planners leading the Planning Department. Worse still, the heads of that department – like many department heads, as well as commissions in the City of San Diego – are handpicked by the mayor and council primarily for self-serving, short-term political convenience and gain, not long-term stability or sustainability for the people who actually hope to continue calling San Diego their home. In recent years, these planning department heads have been selected because they are [political] land-use attorneys masquerading as “planners” rather than professional, seasoned urban planners. Such appointments inevitably kowtow to the whims of the mayor. And anyone who attends the city’s so-called “outreach” community update meetings; planning Commission hearings, and/or City Council meetings can see it clearly. It is truly pathetic that the 8th largest city in the nation is so poorly run and so poorly guided—especially in planning, but also in nearly everything else.
So, we should all ask Mayor Todd Gloria: When you finish your term, do you honestly believe San Diego will be in any position to once again call itself America’s Finest City?