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.
PERFECT Kate! Very well said, and is the thoughts of the communities. I’ve not heard of a single community that has said, we need more drab, high priced apts. with no parking, but that’s what the Planning Dept. keeps giving San Diegans. I just read an article about the floor San Joaquin farm land in central Cali, has dropped 27′. The CA Aquifer and other canals have cracks in them and are loosing 20-30% of the drinking water being transferred to SoCal, from the reservoirs in NorCal, because of minimal rain/snow fall for so many years, but the Guv. and Mayors chose to ignore the decreasing water supply, and continue with the build baby build mentality. And, what they’re building so expensive young generations can’t afford to buy a house, and the rents are so high, they can’t save enough money to buy new or old houses. SD needs an intelligent mayor and city council members and some that can think on behalf of the residents. I hope those that voted for this tribe, are happy with who the voted for, because most people are not at all happy with the clowns and ring master.
And how much was spent on this WTF collaboration of misfit taxpayer waste? And you think things will change when Crosby gets in? Bwahahahah.
With the recent lowering of trash fees and the elimination paid parking in Balboa Park Council President Joe La Cava said he hoped for a reset regarding the relationship between residents and City government.
If he wants to continue down that path, he should call for the resignation of City Planning Director Heidi Vonblum, who orchestrates these perfunctory workshops.
RK, I doubt that will ever happen. She is tight buddies with Gloria and he appoints all the Dept. Directors. So she says, how high, when he says JUMP!
Add to that the fact that the San Diego PLANNING COMMISSION is led by a DEVELOPER. This Planning Commissioner
KELLY MODEN is in the news because as Owner of cREate Development (chosen by ToddGloria to redevelop 101 ASH ST) they’ve hit a “snag” in acquiring financing. It will delay the close of escrow and leave the City with the several million dollars per year to maintain the heap of steaming asbestos.
ETHICS COMMITTEE? Investigate CONFLICT OF INTEREST?
You know, urban planners used to utilize the design “charette” process to allow pubic input into design considerations for both long range planning and project design.
A charette is an intensive and inclusive design process that includes all the stakeholders in an attempt work out processes and problems in the urban design arena. It is intensive in that it usually takes place over a number of sessions at which various issues and solutions can be proposed and brought back at at later date for further refinement and consideration. It is inclusive in that all stakeholders, including the public (horrors!) are included at every stage of the process.
What the City, and other public agencies (including some I have worked for, to my shame) have completely bypassed the public in the design and land use planning process. Every “public meeting” is carefully choreographed with stations presenting to the public what the agency wants the public to hear. No one can address the participants in the meeting as a whole. They are designed to prohibit any one individual or faction to take control of any aspect of the meeting by never allowing anyone to speak to the meeting as a whole. No microphones is the general rule.
If alternatives are presented, they will be extremely limited and will probably be presented as two or three alternatives that everyone (including staff) knows is not acceptable to the general public. There is no opportunity for the public to states its desired goals or outcomes.
Personally, I refuse to take part in a planning process that is a charade rather than a charette.
I take it that the Playskool housing kit was lacking a Borg Cube, which is what most closely resembles the garbage being erected all over town. In 1990 I won a SOHO award for Urban Infill, adding two 2 bedroom units with parking to a 50×100 lot without damaging the existing 1915 duplex. The density was doubled, off-street parking provided, and heritage was preserved. Your story shows how we have regressed as a City in the past 36 years. I suppose the summary is that “Money doesn’t talk, it Screams”. There was a time when what a community desired actually mattered, and we see it in our adopted Community Plans. Not the Community Plan updates being foisted upon us. What we already had.
The Mayor and Council have insulted their constituents far too long.
After all is said and done, it is the developers with skin in the game who will carry on as usual within their profit-making criteria. Does it matter one iota what the residents on the block want when a developer comes in, applies for a demolition and construction permit? Contrary to elements in the Community Plan? The City is not building these homes.
good article Kate. Our council and mayor have actually become our adversaries in the last few years………. what a way to run a city!
I attended this “city workshop” which was clearly something that the City was required to put on to say they informed the community of what they are going to do to your single family neighborhood.
Then when you are shocked when a bulldozer shows up next door, wipes out the house and crams several townhouses on to 1,000 sq ft areas over that lot that was once 1 single home with parking and you complain they can say —“Well we held a workshop to inform you”.
When the started this ridiculous exercise they told us we could ask questions of the City staff there at the conclusion, including Seth Lichtney from the City.
Well the closed the 1 hour half workshop a half hour early then said if you want to ask us questions you can email them to our QR code.
Now that was some real horse manure from the City in my opinion.
Thank you Kate for highlighting the hypocrisy and deceit that has infected our City.