Child’s Play: ‘Homes for All of Us’ Workshop

By Kate Callen

When my sister and I were small, we spent hours creating make-believe neighborhoods with our Colorform vinyl sticker sets. We arranged little shapes of houses, trees, cars, and people on the design board, and we kept rearranging them.

On June 9, I joined a dozen other adults at a Valencia Park community workshop for “Neighborhood Homes for All of Us,” the latest of Mayor Todd Gloria’s land use initiatives. We spent an hour placing vinyl stickers of houses, trees, cars, and people on boards with neighborhood grids. That’s how we were instructed to share our preferences for future housing.

San Diego has had no shortage of mayors who have disrespected the public. But Gloria is uniquely unpopular because he has gone one step lower. He has sought to infantilize us. He treats San Diegans like children who are mollified by games and gimmicks.

Like the April 2025 trash fees “open house” that featured tiny bins and posters, the “Homes for All” workshop showed how City Hall tries to placate constituents with stage-managed events that shut out substantive dialogue.

San Diegans never express our views to elected officials because we never meet with them face-to-face. We “meet” with staff who guide us through structured activities, listen to us patiently, and have very little to say.

That gambit is wearing thin. Workshop participants at the Malcolm X Library forum emphasized their priorities for new housing: appropriate scale, open space, green landscaping, and adequate parking. All were notably missing from previous Gloria ventures like “Complete Communities” and the Bonus ADU Program.

And a leader from the influential Neighbors for a Better San Diego (NFABSD) educated city staffers on how state law preempts city initiatives and why housing design is of paramount importance.

NFABSD’s Geoff Hueter explained that the Homes for All official “palette of housing types” – a “Cottage,” a “Duplex,” a “Townhome,” and a “Small-Scale Multi-Family Home,” each with its own signature stickers – may be an exercise in futility.

“We don’t need another way to decide how to put more homes on lots,” Hueter said, “SB 1123 has taken that decision away from us. What we really need is to come up with designs we can encourage developers to use … design standards that ensure that when you add housing on these lots, they fit with the scale of the surrounding homes.”

Hueter questioned how the Planning Department came up with the palette designs. “I don’t understand why you didn’t open up the design part to the entire community,” he said. “Why did you have a few ‘consultant contractors’ doing this work? We don’t know who’s been sitting at a table in the background getting to participate in this.”

A squad of Gloria cronies called the “Technical Working Group” has been conferring privately on the “Homes for All” program. Danna Givot, Hueter’s NFABSD colleague, has submitted public requests for information that includes: Who are these people? How were they chosen? What are their qualifications? When, where, and how often do they meet? How is the public kept informed of what appear to be public meetings subject to the Brown Act?

“When the Planning Commissioners rejected San Diego’s SB 10 implementation proposal,” Givot said, “they said Neighbors For A Better San Diego and other community stakeholders should have seats at the table of the working group when the next iteration of infill housing in single-family zones was crafted.  Why isn’t that happening?  What is the Planning Department hiding behind closed doors?”

It’s a good bet the group is composed of the insiders who crafted the Bonus ADU program that permanently damaged neighborhoods citywide. If so, the public will not trust them. But we still deserve to know who they are.

After six years of mounting criticism from disgusted constituents, Gloria still can’t read the room. He continues to think a bright smile and a pleasing manner are all he needs to get by.

There is something childlike about that.