(2) Who Wins When San Diego Revitalizes Its Civic Center?

 

Follow the Money

A $14.4 billion "economic impact" headlines the road map. But only $7.2 million of it reaches the City's General Fund each year — less than two-tenths of one percent. The rest flows to developers, lenders, landowners, and construction trades. And the city's most pressing obligations — pensions, deferred infrastructure, and services already being cut — have first claim on whatever new revenue appears.

Part Two of a Series — San Diego — April 16, 2026

Bottom Line Up Front: 

The Prebys Foundation/Downtown San Diego Partnership roadmap released April 14, 2026 projects $14.4 billion in total economic impact from redeveloping six city-owned blocks in downtown San Diego. An analysis of the U3 Advisors economic impact study and the City's fiscal documents reveals that the direct beneficiaries of the plan's financial returns are, in order of magnitude: 

1. developers and their equity investors, who stand to capture standard-margin returns on $3.3 billion in private investment; 
2. existing downtown commercial property owners, who gain from catalytic appreciation on 6.9 million square feet of surrounding development, including the Prebys Foundation itself, which purchased the Wells Fargo Building for $40 million in 2025; 
3. lenders holding distressed downtown office debt — notably AllianceBernstein (holding the foreclosed Campus at Horton) and IQHQ (1.7 million square feet of largely unleased waterfront life-science/office space) — who benefit from any transaction that absorbs excess supply and re-establishes pricing; and 
4. the City of San Diego General Fund, which the study projects will gain approximately $7.2 million per year in new ongoing revenue. That last figure — against an FY 2027 projected deficit of $88.8 million to $110 million — would not measurably restore library hours, reopen recreation centers on Sundays, or repair roads. 

Under the City Charter, the pension system's Actuarially Determined Contribution (ADC) has first claim on undedicated General Fund dollars, and the Proposition B unwinding has added tens of millions in new pension obligations. The road map does not identify a funding source for the $75–$150 million in likely upfront acquisition cost. The implicit financing vehicle — JPA bonds issued without voter approval — would add new debt service obligations to a city that is already borrowing to cover current operations.

The $14.4 billion question: impact for whom?

Economic impact studies measure gross activity flowing through a regional economy. They are a standard planning tool, and U3 Advisors uses the Bureau of Economic Analysis's Regional Input-Output Modeling System (RIMS-II) multipliers, which is respectable methodology. But economic impact is not the same as public benefit, and the distinction is critical.

When U3 reports $14.4 billion in total one-time construction-related impact ($5.3 billion on-site, $9.1 billion in catalyzed surrounding development), that figure captures the full chain of spending: developer payments to contractors, contractors' purchases of materials and labor, workers spending wages at restaurants and gas stations, and so on through successive rounds of indirect and induced spending. Every dollar in that chain is counted, and it all looks like "impact." But the vast majority of those dollars are captured by private actors operating in private markets. The City government itself does not see those flows except through the narrow apertures of its tax instruments.

On the ongoing side, U3 projects $428 million per year in annual economic impact once the project is stabilized. Of that, the City captures $7.2 million annually — roughly 1.7 percent. The remaining 98.3 percent stays in private hands, as it does in any functioning real-estate economy. This is not a criticism of the study's methodology; it is a criticism of the marketing framing that presents private economic activity as if it were public revenue.

Who captures what: a distributional analysis

Tier 1 — Developers and their equity investors. The Civic Center vision calls for approximately $3.3 billion in private construction investment. Standard developer margins on complex mixed-use urban projects — including development fees, promote structures, and equity returns — typically run 15 to 25 percent on total development cost in strong markets, and somewhat more in projects that benefit from publicly assembled and entitled land at below-market terms (which city-owned land conveyed through a JPA effectively is). On a $3.3 billion program, that implies $500 million to $800 million in aggregate developer-side returns over the build-out period. These returns accrue to whichever firms win the JPA's development agreements — firms that have not yet been identified. The selection process, governance, and conflict-of-interest safeguards for that procurement have not been outlined in the road map.

Tier 2 — Existing downtown property owners. U3 explicitly projects that the Civic Center redevelopment will catalyze 6.9 million square feet of additional development within a quarter-mile radius. This is a direct and quantified appreciation event for landowners in that radius. Under Proposition 13, existing owners capture the full market-value gain without commensurate tax increases until sale or new construction — at which point the reassessed value flows through the AB8 allocation formula, with the City receiving roughly 17 to 19 cents per property-tax dollar.

Among the most prominently positioned beneficiaries is the Prebys Foundation itself. In 2025, the Foundation purchased the 24-story Wells Fargo Building, located one block from the Civic Center, for $40 million — a price reflecting the distressed downtown office market. That building is one of the two most frequently cited candidates for a relocated City Hall. If the City chooses to lease or purchase the Prebys-owned building as its new headquarters, the Foundation — which is simultaneously funding the planning effort and would be a JPA partner — would be both advocate and beneficiary of the transaction. This dual role has not been addressed publicly in the road map.

Tier 3 — Holders of distressed downtown commercial debt. This is the structural context that the road map's proponents do not discuss, but that every commercial real estate professional in San Diego understands.

Downtown San Diego's office market is in acute distress. The vacancy rate averaged 35 percent in late 2025, roughly three times the citywide average. Office tower sales have averaged $118 per square foot, down from $350 per square foot in 2021. Not a single office building broke ground anywhere in San Diego County in 2025 — the first time that has happened since 1998. Major properties are in foreclosure or receivership:

• The Campus at Horton (formerly Horton Plaza): Los Angeles-based Stockdale Capital purchased the 10-acre site for $175 million in 2018 and invested over $300 million in converting the former shopping mall into a mixed-use office campus. The project failed to lease its 772,000 square feet of office space, and the developer defaulted. Lender AllianceBernstein took control through foreclosure in September 2025 for a credit bid of approximately $130 million — less than a quarter of total investment. The property is directly across the street from the Civic Center and is the second most frequently cited candidate for City Hall relocation.
• IQHQ's Research and Development District (RaDD): IQHQ purchased eight blocks of waterfront land from developer Doug Manchester for $230 million and built 1.7 million square feet of life-science and office space. The project was delivered with no pre-leasing and, as of mid-2025, had essentially zero committed tenants. Downtown life-science vacancy stood at 93.7 percent, according to CBRE data. The J. Craig Venter Institute subsequently committed to roughly 50,000 square feet — a start, but a fraction of the available space.
• Symphony Towers, Wells Fargo Building, and others: Multiple Class A downtown buildings have changed hands at steep discounts, and Hughes Marino (the brokerage firm, not to be confused with Jason Hughes of 101 Ash infamy) described the situation in August 2025 as one where "buildings that were once considered stable are now facing sales, foreclosures, debt restructuring and ownership turnover."

Any large-scale City acquisition of downtown office space — whether through lease, purchase, or JPA bond financing — injects demand into this distressed market. It puts a credit-worthy governmental tenant into space that currently has no occupant. It provides a price-validation transaction that lenders can use to mark their books. And it does so using public credit.

The question for taxpayers is not whether relocating City Hall makes operational sense — it probably does, given the CAB's condition. The question is whether this particular mechanism, at this particular moment, is structured to benefit citizens or to make underwater lenders and speculative developers whole at public expense.

Tier 4 — The City of San Diego General Fund. The study projects $7.2 million per year in new ongoing revenue, broken out as follows:

Revenue Source	Annual Amount	Notes
Property tax (possessory interest)	$2.5 million	Based on $1.5B assessed value at 1% rate, City's AB8 share only
TOT — General Fund	$2.41 million	400-room hotel at $400 ADR, 75% occupancy
TOT — Special Promotions	$1.75 million	Restricted use
TOT — Arts	$0.44 million	Restricted use; has been cut in prior budget rounds
Sales tax (ongoing)	$0.18 million	Based on $18M in estimated retail sales
Plus a potential one-time construction-phase sales-tax windfall of up to $9 million if developers designate San Diego as point of sale

Set against the City's FY 2027 projected deficit of $88.8 million (per the Independent Budget Analyst's review of the Mayor's Five-Year Financial Outlook, released December 2025), $7.2 million is 8.1 percent of the shortfall. In a city that has already closed libraries on Sundays and Mondays, cut recreation center hours from 60 to 40 hours per week, reduced arts and culture grants, and renegotiated its animal-services contract downward, the marginal contribution of this revenue to discretionary services is modest.

The pension vortex

San Diego's structural budget problem is not primarily a revenue problem — it is a compensation-and-pension problem. The City gave employees a 23 percent raise in 2022 (10 percent for police and fire), and those raises compound annually through the pension formula. The invalidation of Proposition B and subsequent reinstatement of pension benefits for non-police employees hired between July 2012 and July 2021 added a new cohort of members to SDCERS, increasing the Actuarially Determined Contribution by tens of millions per year. The ADC is a charter-mandated obligation under Article IX, §143 — it is not discretionary, and the City Council cannot redirect those funds to roads, parks, or libraries without violating the City Charter.

According to the City's Five-Year Financial Outlook (reviewed by the IBA in December 2025), the General Fund baseline shortfall for FY 2027 is $88.8 million, with the largest expenditure increases projected in employee compensation, fleet fees, and debt financing for capital infrastructure. The structural portion of that deficit — the piece requiring permanent, ongoing solutions — is approximately $52 million, per the Voice of San Diego's reporting of the City finance director's assessment. Revenue and spending are not projected to come into balance until approximately FY 2029, and then only because a large tranche of pension amortization debt matures in that year.

When new undedicated General Fund revenue appears — as the $7.2 million annually from the Civic Center redevelopment would — it enters the General Fund pool. It is available to cover whatever obligation the City faces in the year it arrives. As a matter of budgetary mechanics, the pension ADC, payroll, and existing debt service consume approximately 80 to 85 percent of General Fund expenditures before a dollar reaches discretionary services. New revenue does not create new capacity for parks and libraries; it reduces the depth of cuts required to meet existing obligations. The distinction matters.

The borrowing-cost problem

The road map does not specify how the City would finance the estimated $75 to $150 million in upfront acquisition and tenant-improvement costs for a City Hall relocation. The implicit mechanism is JPA bond issuance — likely Marks-Roos bonds, which California law permits JPAs to issue without voter approval.

Current municipal bond market conditions are not favorable. According to FMSbonds market data as of April 15, 2026, AA-rated municipal bonds are yielding approximately 4.0 to 4.5 percent for 20-year maturities. Charles Schwab's 2026 municipal bond outlook projects that intermediate- and longer-term muni yields will remain elevated even as the Federal Reserve continues gradual rate cuts. New issuance volume has been at record levels, with roughly $13.5 billion in new muni deals pricing in the week of April 13, 2026 alone — a supply dynamic that puts upward pressure on yields.

For a city already running structural deficits, adding $75 to $150 million in new bonded debt at 4 to 4.5 percent implies $3 million to $6.75 million in annual debt service alone — before accounting for principal repayment. That annual carrying cost would consume 42 to 94 percent of the $7.2 million in projected new revenue from the completed project. And the debt service would begin immediately, while the revenue accrues only after the project is built, stabilized, and fully assessed — a gap of five to ten years during which the City carries the cost with no offsetting return.

In interest-rate terms: the City would be borrowing at 4 to 4.5 percent to acquire a building in a market where office properties are yielding 6 to 8 percent cap rates because private capital has determined those buildings are too risky at current occupancy levels. The only reason the math "works" is that governmental credit commands lower interest rates than private equity requires — which is another way of saying the City would be using its tax-backed borrowing capacity to subsidize a transaction that private capital will not fund on its own merits.

The 101 Ash Street precedent

San Diego's most recent large property acquisition — the 101 Ash Street and Civic Center Plaza settlement — cost taxpayers approximately $132 million in 2022, plus an estimated $115 million in required remediation (per a 2020 Kitchell review), plus $2.4 million per year in ongoing maintenance, plus years of litigation costs. Broker Jason Hughes pleaded guilty in 2023 to a conflict-of-interest charge and returned $9.4 million. Developer Cisterra retained $6.2 million in profits from the Civic Center Plaza transaction.

The San Diego County Taxpayers Association subsequently articulated four principles it said must govern any future Civic Center deal: sustained transparency, robust public involvement at every step, a timeline sufficient to guarantee that involvement, and safeguards against 101 Ash-style outcomes. The current road map mentions none of these principles by name and does not reference the SDCTA framework.

Councilmember Kent Lee reminded the road map's authors in July 2025 that typical San Diego residents are not convinced this is a priority and that "the city has a challenged history when it comes to real estate."

The distressed-office thesis

Commercial real-estate professionals are frank about the dynamic at work. Real-estate consultant Gary London, commenting on the Campus at Horton foreclosure, told FOX 5 San Diego in August 2025 that the City could have acquired the property for $130 million — calling it a "golden opportunity" — and then added, with evident frustration, that the City failed to act at auction. The roadmap's proponents have repeatedly emphasized the "historically favorable" office market as a reason to act now.

There is an alternative reading. Downtown San Diego currently has over 35 percent office vacancy. More than 1.2 million square feet of new supply was delivered in 2025 alone. IQHQ's $230 million-plus RaDD project was 93.7 percent vacant as of mid-2025. AllianceBernstein is sitting on a $300 million-plus asset it acquired through foreclosure for $130 million. Private investors have collectively written off hundreds of millions of dollars in downtown San Diego office equity.

Into that distressed market, the road map proposes inserting the City of San Diego — the most creditworthy tenant available — as a long-term occupant of space that private capital has rejected. The transaction would establish a price floor in a market that has not yet found its bottom. It would provide occupancy to a building that would otherwise remain empty. And it would do so using public bonding capacity, backstopped by the full faith and credit of San Diego taxpayers.

This is not, on its face, a taxpayer-benefit transaction. It is a market-stabilization transaction in which the City serves as the anchor tenant that private developers and their lenders need to recover value from underwater investments. The fact that the CAB genuinely needs to be vacated does not change the distributional analysis — it simply explains why the timing is propitious for those who hold distressed downtown assets.

What would taxpayer-oriented governance look like?

If the City Council genuinely wished to structure this transaction for taxpayer benefit, several conditions would distinguish a public-interest deal from a developer-and-lender-benefit deal:

1. Transparent competitive procurement. The road map should identify a minimum of three to five candidate properties for City Hall relocation, with independent appraisals and condition assessments conducted by firms with no financial relationship to the Prebys Foundation, the Downtown San Diego Partnership, or U3 Advisors. The Wells Fargo Building's Prebys ownership and the Campus at Horton's lender receivership should be disclosed as conflicts of interest, not as conveniences.

2. Voter approval for new bonded debt. Marks-Roos bonds issued through a JPA without voter approval are legal under California law. That does not make them appropriate for a project of this scale in a city with San Diego's fiscal history. A general-obligation bond measure would give taxpayers a direct voice and impose market discipline on the project's financial assumptions.

3. Clawback provisions and developer risk-sharing. Any development agreement should include provisions requiring developers to share downside risk proportional to the public land and infrastructure being contributed. Standard "sweetheart" terms — in which the public contributes entitled, assembled land and the developer captures the upside — should be explicitly rejected.

4. Ring-fenced revenue. If the project generates new tax revenue, a portion should be dedicated by Council policy to infrastructure, parks, and libraries rather than absorbed into the undifferentiated General Fund (where pension obligations effectively claim it). Tax-increment financing, if employed, should include a sunset and a public-benefit floor.

5. Independent fiscal oversight. The JPA's board should include at least one representative of the San Diego County Taxpayers Association or equivalent independent fiscal watchdog, with full audit authority and public reporting requirements, consistent with the SDCTA's own four-principle framework.

The housing mirage: why office-to-residential conversion doesn't pencil out

Conversion can be done, but at costs substantially above market. The road map's promise of "nearly 2,300 new housing units" is central to its civic legitimacy. Without the housing component, the project is a commercial real-estate transaction dressed in public-interest language. But industry data — and the physical reality of the buildings involved — raises serious questions about whether these units will materialize at the costs and price points implied.

The fundamental design problem. Office buildings and residential buildings are engineered for fundamentally different purposes. Office floor plates are typically 20,000 to 40,000 square feet or more — deep, open rectangles designed for fluorescent-lit cubicle farms served by central restroom cores. Residential units require natural light in every habitable room (a building-code requirement, not a preference), distributed plumbing to individual kitchens and bathrooms, and floor-to-ceiling heights that accommodate the slope of waste lines (1/4 inch per foot of horizontal run). According to Gensler, the architecture firm that developed the industry-standard Conversions+ scoring system, a 40-foot plumbing run drops roughly 10 inches; add HVAC ducts and fire suppression above that, and a nominally 12-foot slab-to-slab office ceiling can drop to 7 feet 9 inches at the finished residential level — barely code-compliant and utterly unmarketable as anything but the cheapest housing.

The floor-plate kill factor. CBRE's widely cited research on office-to-multifamily conversions found that square office buildings larger than 14,000 square feet per floor "increasingly lose convertible square feet due to unlivable interior space." The solution — cutting light wells or atriums through the center of the building — can consume 30 to 40 percent of usable floor area, collapsing the project's financial feasibility. The Urban Land Institute's 2025 study of downtown conversions confirmed that the best conversion candidates are smaller, pre-war buildings with narrow floor plates and high ceilings — precisely the buildings that do not exist in San Diego's Civic Center complex, which consists of mid-to-late-twentieth-century concrete-and-steel structures designed as government offices.

The cost reality. Hard costs for office-to-residential conversion in 2026 range from $300 to $500 per square foot, according to industry estimates compiled by iScano and the Urban Land Institute. Soft costs (architecture, legal, zoning, environmental) add 20 to 30 percent. At 2,300 units averaging 800 square feet each — roughly 1.84 million square feet of residential space — the construction cost alone would range from $552 million to $920 million, before land cost, financing, or developer margin. For context, new ground-up multifamily construction in San Diego typically costs $350 to $450 per square foot. Conversion does not save money; it frequently costs more than building new, because the structural remediation, MEP replacement, and lost-area penalties exceed the savings from reusing the existing shell.

Goldman Sachs said the quiet part out loud. In a February 2024 research note led by chief economist Jan Hatzius, Goldman Sachs concluded that office acquisition prices would need to fall approximately 50 percent from then-prevailing levels for conversion to multifamily housing to be "financially feasible." At then-current prices, Goldman estimated a loss of $164 per square foot on a typical conversion. The firm found that only 0.8 percent of U.S. office inventory was priced at levels that made conversion viable — and projected the national conversion rate would increase only marginally, from 0.5 percent of office stock per year to 0.7 percent by 2028, producing roughly 20,000 new apartments nationally. That is a rounding error against U.S. housing demand of 4.2 million units.

San Diego's downtown office prices have fallen sharply but remain above the Goldman threshold for many properties. U3's own study reports average downtown office tower sales at $118 per square foot, with distressed transactions in the $75–$85 range. Goldman's model suggests breakeven acquisition at roughly $154 per square foot for a national average market. San Diego's distressed pricing is approaching that level — but conversion costs in a seismically active California coastal city, with state-mandated accessibility requirements, Title 24 energy code compliance, and union labor prevailing-wage mandates, are at the top of the national range, not the middle. The math remains adverse.

What "affordable" means in practice. The road map describes "a variety of housing types intended to serve a wide swath of the community, including affordable, market-rate, workforce, and student housing." It does not specify what percentage of the 2,300 units would be deed-restricted affordable, at what Area Median Income (AMI) level, or for how long. In San Diego, "affordable" housing produced through developer inclusionary requirements or tax-credit financing typically targets 50 to 80 percent of AMI — which in San Diego County currently means annual household income of roughly $55,000 to $88,000. Market-rate rents downtown currently run $2,800 to $4,500 per month for a one-bedroom. At conversion costs of $300 to $500 per square foot, the rents required to amortize construction and provide a developer return are inherently market-rate or above; producing genuinely affordable units requires deep subsidy — tax credits, land write-downs, fee waivers, or direct public funding — that the road map does not identify.

The 101 Ash Street building, separately, is being advanced for conversion to approximately 250 affordable housing units. That project is instructive: it was removed from the Civic Center vision's unit count precisely because the cost of converting a single asbestos-contaminated office tower into housing was so high that it required its own standalone financing plan. The road map's remaining 2,300 units face the same structural conversion challenges on the remaining Civic Center sites — but without 101 Ash's visibility or its separate political momentum.

The hard truth: in a market where Goldman Sachs says conversion doesn't pencil out, where CBRE says only the smallest and oldest buildings are candidates, and where Gensler's own scoring system would likely flag most of the Civic Center complex as poor-to-marginal candidates, the promise of 2,300 housing units is aspirational rather than engineered.

Conclusion

The San Diego Civic Center road map describes a genuine opportunity. The CAB is deteriorating. Golden Hall is underused. The downtown office market is, for the moment, buyer-favorable. The Civic Theatre merits renovation. And housing the City's civic functions in modern, efficient space would reduce long-term operating costs.

But the economic-impact framing — $14.4 billion, $325 million in savings, 80,000 jobs — is a developer's pitch dressed in civic language. The actual return to taxpayers is $7.2 million per year in new revenue, against a structural deficit measured in the tens of millions. The "savings" require upfront capital the City does not have and would need to borrow at 4 to 4.5 percent. The primary beneficiaries are private developers, institutional landowners (including the planning effort's own funder), and lenders who need a creditworthy governmental tenant to stabilize a distressed commercial market. And the City's dominant fiscal obligation — pension costs that consume the vast majority of any new General Fund dollar — ensures that roads, parks, and libraries will not see meaningful benefit for years, if ever.

San Diego has been here before. At 101 Ash Street, a "once-in-a-generation opportunity" became a $250 million-plus debacle. The mechanisms proposed in this road map — a JPA with bonding authority, no voter approval, a nonprofit intermediary managing procurement, and a foundation that both funds the plan and owns candidate real estate — are structurally different from the 101 Ash lease-to-own deal. But the asymmetry of risk is familiar: private actors capture the upside; taxpayers absorb the downside; and the promise of public benefit remains, as ever, contingent on decisions not yet made and money not yet found.

Sources

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