Behind Closed Doors - How Hidden Negotiations and Zoning Decisions Ripple Through Decades
The Case of San Diego's Lost Downtown and Phantom Stadium
O ne of the curiosities of writing urban history is that the most consequential decisions are often the ones that leave the fewest paper trails. The May Company's push for Mission Valley zoning in 1958 made headlines; so did the Chargers' 2017 relocation announcement. But the moments that truly shaped San Diego's geography often happened in back rooms, in board meetings that no journalist attended, in conversations that left no official record. A word here, a handshake there, an assumption made and never questioned. These are the moments that determine whether a city thrives or declines—and yet they are the hardest to write about, the easiest to miss.
The standard narrative is convenient: "San Diego decided to allow commercial development in Mission Valley, which drained retail from downtown." But that construction of agency—that San Diego decided anything collectively—obscures what actually happened. A set of powerful private actors (developers, the May Company, later the Chargers ownership) made bids for public resources, subsidies, or favorable zoning. Those bids succeeded or failed based on calculations made by elected officials, many of whom depended on those same actors for campaign support, future business relationships, or simply because no one mounted effective opposition. The "decision" was not a polis deliberating on behalf of the commons. It was a series of asymmetrical negotiations, most of them invisible to the public.
The San Antonio Counterfactual: What If San Diego Had Built the River Walk?
Your observation about the San Antonio River Walk points to a genuine fork in the road. In the late 1950s, as the San Diego River Project Commission was gathering ideas, there was a clear alternative vision on the table: a linear park, comprehensively planned and publicly managed, along the San Diego River through Mission Valley. Consulting hydraulic engineer F.F. Friend proposed a 250-foot-wide vegetated channel. The Mission Valley Improvement Association, formed in 1940, advocated for bridle paths and open space. There was even discussion of modeling it after Mission Bay, which was then being developed as a regional recreation destination—a publicly controlled park system, not a sprawl of private malls and hotels. [1]
Why did San Diego not build the river walk? Not because the idea was rejected on its merits or because San Diegans voted for something else. It was never put to a vote. Instead, the decision-making process was captured by developers and property owners who found a 250-foot-wide, publicly-maintained vegetated channel economically incompatible with high-intensity private development. The alternative—piecemeal private projects built on scattered parcels, with distributed engineering that made each project individually feasible—was more profitable.
This is how cities are actually shaped: not through grand civic debates, but through the triumph of profitable alternatives over publically-beneficial ones. The River Walk in San Antonio exists because in 1921, a civic group, the San Antonio Conservation Society, fought to preserve the river as a public asset during a moment when the city was considering paving it over. They succeeded, and subsequent development—the river walk itself, built over decades with public-private coordination—was anchored to that preserved public commons. [2]
San Diego's developers never faced that moment of choice. The negotiations happened quietly. And when they were done, Mission Valley had been rezoned for commercial use, and the river walk had become a parking lot with a channelized river running beneath it.
The Downtown Collapse and the Mayor Who Lost a City
By the 1980s, downtown San Diego had entered precipitous decline. The retail core that had anchored the city's identity had hemorrhaged to Mission Valley and, increasingly, to suburban shopping malls throughout the county. Storefronts closed. Buildings stood vacant. The pedestrian streets that had once been bustling commercial centers became corridors of urban decay. The city fathers blamed many things: suburban competition, changing shopping habits, the rise of automobile culture. But the root cause was simpler: they had allowed the May Company to build a regional shopping center 10 miles from downtown, positioned on the freeway for maximum accessibility, and then acted surprised when downtown merchants lost their competitive advantage.
What's revealing is that city planners knew this would happen. The San Diego Planning Commission had advocated for a green belt policy in Mission Valley precisely to prevent this outcome. But the Commission had no enforcement power. When the May Company made its pitch to the City Council in 1958, the Commission's warnings were noted, then disregarded. The Council voted to rezone 90 acres. [3] A council member told the planning commission flatly that "the law of supply and demand should take care of land uses and zoning." [4] Translation: planning is irrelevant; whatever is most profitable will happen.
Now consider what happened next, and consider what was not written about it. From the 1950s through the 1980s, as downtown declined, city officials pursued various redevelopment schemes—pedestrian malls, convention centers, cultural anchors. These efforts cost the city tens of millions of dollars in public investment. Yet the underlying cause—the relocation of retail to Mission Valley—was never really acknowledged or confronted. Why? Because the people who benefited from Mission Valley development had political power, and the people who suffered from downtown decline did not.
In 1978, a San Diego Reader cover story observed that "Property owners seethe at the city's costly effort to inject new life into downtown through redevelopment; they are not only afraid that what once happened to downtown could now happen to them, but that a revitalized downtown will thwart their own plans for growth." [5] This admission—that Mission Valley property owners would resist downtown revitalization because it might compete with their own commercial interests—reveals the zero-sum game that was being played. Downtown and Mission Valley were not partners in urban development; they were competitors. And because Mission Valley's owners had made better deals with the city and the development community, they won.
The Chargers, Dean Spanos, and the $645 Million Miscalculation
The most recent and most instructive case of how closed-door decisions ripple through time is the Chargers relocation. The story is often told as a straightforward business negotiation: Dean Spanos, the owner, wanted a new stadium. San Diego taxpayers said no. So he moved the team to Los Angeles. End of story.
But that narrative obscures what actually happened, which is far more revealing about how San Diego's elites make decisions.
The Chargers began pushing for a new stadium in the early 2000s. Qualcomm Stadium, which had opened in 1967 to house the team, was by the 2010s outdated by NFL standards. It lacked luxury suites, club seating, and the revenue-generating amenities that modern stadium economics demands. [6] The team proposed various schemes: a privately-financed stadium at the existing site, a stadium in downtown San Diego adjacent to Petco Park, a stadium in Mission Valley where Qualcomm Stadium stood. Each time, negotiations between the city, the team, and the public got tangled in CEQA environmental review requirements, failed ballot measures, and what amounted to a standoff between ownership's demands for massive public subsidy and the public's unwillingness to provide it.
Here's where the closed-door dynamics become relevant. In 2016, as the Chargers' option to relocate to Los Angeles was about to expire, there were rumors—reported by insiders at the time—that NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and other league owners were prepared to offer Spanos enormous sums of money to keep the team in San Diego. Stan Kroenke, the Rams owner, was reportedly prepared to send money (possibly over several years) to San Diego to help finance a stadium, purely to prevent the Chargers from moving to Los Angeles, where Kroenke wanted to maintain his market dominance. [7]
But Spanos moved the team before these conversations could mature. And when he did, he triggered a $645 million relocation fee that the NFL imposed on the franchise—a fee so large that the remaining 29 teams each received distributions of tens of millions of dollars. [8]
Consider the economics: To stay in San Diego, Spanos would have needed to accept $300–350 million in public/private subsidies. To move, he paid a $645 million relocation fee. The move cost him nearly double what staying would have cost.
Why did he do it? The answer, given by a former NFL official Jim Steeg to the San Diego Union-Tribune, was blunt: Spanos had "made up his mind to move the team to Los Angeles. It just took him 10 years to do it." [9] In other words, the entire negotiation process from 2002–2016—the stadium proposals, the environmental reviews, the failed ballot measures, the city's expensive redevelopment efforts—was theater. Spanos had decided years earlier to relocate. He used the negotiation process to extract maximum leverage, but his mind was made up.
This is the key insight: Spanos did not make a rational economic decision to relocate. He made a political decision. He had come to believe (rightly or wrongly) that Los Angeles gave him greater prestige, a larger market, and a more desirable business environment. San Diego had become, in his calculation, insufficient. And he was willing to pay twice as much to move as to stay, because moving was about something other than money—it was about status, about belonging to the Los Angeles franchise ecosystem, about owning a big-market team.
What's instructive is what this decision was made behind. The public negotiations were public (failing ballot measures, civic campaigns, stadium proposals). But the actual decision—the one that mattered—was made in Spanos's office, in conversations with his lawyers and the NFL's hierarchy, in moments that no local media outlet captured. The San Diego City Council did not know, when they rejected Measure C in November 2016, that the Chargers' relocation was a fait accompli. They thought they were negotiating. They were not.
Why Kearny Mesa Became the Urban Center (And What That Says About San Diego's Future)
Your observation about Kearny Mesa is sharp and often missed. In most urban planning documents, Kearny Mesa is not described as the "urban center"—that designation still, technically, belongs to downtown. But in practice, Kearny Mesa functions as the regional commercial and office hub. Why? Not because planners designated it as such. Not because there was a grand vision. Simply because it offered the lowest-friction environment for capital investment: easy freeway access, large contiguous parcels, fewer environmental constraints, no historical preservation issues, no pedestrian-scale planning requirements.
Once Mission Valley was locked into shopping centers, the next generation of commercial development (office parks, tech campuses, corporate headquarters) gravitated to Kearny Mesa. And once office parks moved to Kearny Mesa, retail followed to serve the office workers. So Kearny Mesa became, by accretion and market logic, the de facto urban center—not through anyone's deliberate plan, but through the aggregation of thousands of individual decisions, each one rational on its own.
This is the second-order consequence of the 1958 Mission Valley zoning decision. By allowing commercial development to scatter across the metropolitan area, and by failing to maintain a unified regional center, San Diego created a fractured, automobile-dependent geography. Kearny Mesa's freeway-oriented development is not inherently different from Mission Valley's—both are car-centric, both are sprawling, both drain resources from traditional urban cores. But Kearny Mesa's newer development at least incorporated some recognition of transit (the Green Line reaches El Cajon, though Kearny Mesa proper is less well-served), and its office parks occasionally include modern amenities like fitness centers and cafés.
The tragedy is that none of this was inevitable. If downtown and Mission Valley had remained tightly connected by a linear park, pedestrian corridors, and strong transit connections, the subsequent waves of commercial development might have remained anchored to those centers rather than dispersing to Kearny Mesa and beyond. Instead, San Diego allowed the metropolitan region to decentralize—not through any conscious plan, but through the triumph of private profit motive over public coordination.
The Trolley as Afterthought: Trying to Fix Mistakes With Infrastructure
This brings us to your observation about the trolley. The San Diego Trolley's Green Line, which runs through Mission Valley on an elevated viaduct, was supposed to be the solution to the fragmentation created by decades of automobile-oriented development. The Mission Valley East extension, which opened in 2005, was designed to reconnect the valley to downtown via transit—to create a coherent regional geography where people could move between zones without driving.
And it has, to some extent, worked. The Green Line carries thousands of daily riders. People can walk from the elevated trolley stations to offices and retail. Your observation that you could work in Mission Valley, walk to your office from the trolley, and use the trolley to get to service appointments, captures what urban planners call "transit-oriented development." The trolley, in other words, is making the automobile-dependent sprawl slightly more livable than it would otherwise be. [10]
But notice the logical sequence: First, we allowed scattered commercial development to disperse throughout the region, creating car-dependent sprawl. Then, decades later, we spent hundreds of millions of dollars on a light rail system to try to stitch that sprawl back together. The trolley is infrastructure trying to solve a problem that was created by earlier decisions to forgo infrastructure (like a comprehensively planned park, like street-grid neighborhoods with mixed-use development).
This is the pattern in San Diego, repeated over and over: Private interests capture the planning process, extract favorable zoning or subsidies, and build what is most profitable to them. Fifteen or thirty years later, the aggregate effects—downtown collapse, traffic congestion, environmental degradation—become apparent. The public then invests enormous sums in infrastructure (trolley, downtown revitalization projects, traffic management systems) to try to fix the problems created by the earlier decisions.
The trolley is actually a success story—it works, it's used, it improves the walkability of Mission Valley. But its very existence is an indictment of earlier planning failures. A river walk, planned from the outset, would have been cheaper, more ecologically coherent, and more beautiful. But it was not profitable for developers, so it did not happen.
The Problem of Transparency and Political Power
What makes all of this possible—what allows powerful actors to make decisions that benefit themselves at the expense of the public—is opacity. The zoning decisions that created Mission Valley happened in public council votes, but the conversations that preceded them, the assurances made to developers, the political calculations that made certain decisions possible, were opaque. The Chargers' decision to relocate appears, in retrospect, to have been predetermined, but was conducted through a years-long public negotiation process that suggested alternatives were genuinely on the table.
This is not corruption in the traditional sense—not bags of money changing hands. It is something subtler and more systemic: a political economy in which elected officials and developers share assumptions about how the city should develop, in which the planning department's objections are noted but overridden, in which public goods are subordinated to private profit because that is how the system is structured.
The San Diego Reader cover story from 1982 quotes a planning department official, Angeles Leira: "There has never been a case [in San Diego] where the philosophical difference between developers and the city planning department has been so wide." [11] But "philosophical difference" is a euphemism. What Leira was describing is a city where developers have more power than planners. Where zoning ordinances can be changed to accommodate development interests. Where a 30-year battle over the river's future ends with the river in a channel, and development blooming across the floodplain.
The question for San Diego now—as it looks at SDSU's redevelopment of Mission Valley with explicit commitments to river restoration, habitat protection, and transit connectivity—is whether the city has learned anything from these decades of consequences. Has San Diego moved beyond the political economy where private interests shape public geography? Or is SDSU's approach simply a more enlightened version of the same process, where a sufficiently powerful institution (a university) can extract favorable terms because it has political leverage that individual developers or community groups do not?
Conclusion: Learning From Opacity
The curious thing about writing about closed-door decisions is that their effects are visible everywhere. You can see them in the freeway system that fragments neighborhoods. You can see them in the abandoned downtown office buildings. You can see them in the traffic congestion on I-8 at rush hour. You can see them in the homeless populations that congregate near the trolley stations—themselves a byproduct of urban collapse and the economic dislocation that follows when entire commercial zones become obsolete.
But the decisions themselves—the moments when a city's future was determined—are hard to capture. There is no single villain. No obvious moment of betrayal. Instead, there is a succession of individually-rational decisions that aggregate into a city-wide failure: the May Company's investment in Mission Valley, the city council's favorable zoning vote, Spanos's determination to leave, the failure of countless ballot measures seeking to keep the Chargers in San Diego.
What we know is this: If San Diego's decision-makers had chosen differently at key moments—if they had resisted the May Company's rezoning proposal and preserved the valley for mixed-use development and public amenities; if they had recognized that allowing commercial sprawl would destroy downtown; if they had understood that stadium financing is not an appropriate use of public capital—the city would look radically different today.
It is not too late to learn from these mistakes. But it requires understanding not just what happened, but how it was allowed to happen: through a system of political economy that privileges private profit over public coordination, that conducts crucial decisions in opacity, that allows powerful actors to shape the built environment in ways that benefit themselves while distributing the costs across society.
The water, in the end, is an honest teacher. It floods where it will flood, careless of zoning ordinances and developer agreements. The river knows the geography that humans have imposed upon it. And perhaps, as SDSU restores the floodplain and rebuilds the riparian zone, the river will begin to teach San Diego what planners should have known all along: that public goods are more valuable than private convenience, that transparency is more important than expedience, and that decisions made in closed rooms can echo through decades of urban consequences.
Sources and Citations
https://sandiegohistory.org/journal/1971/april/river/
Various San Antonio heritage sources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_Valley,_San_Diego
https://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/1982/nov/11/cover-all-the-way-to-the-banks/
https://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/1982/nov/11/cover-all-the-way-to-the-banks/
https://athlonsports.com/nfl/los-angeles-chargers/why-did-chargers-leave-san-diego-for-los-angeles
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Diego_Chargers_stadium_proposals
https://athlonsports.com/nfl/los-angeles-chargers/why-did-chargers-leave-san-diego-for-los-angeles | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Diego_Chargers
https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/nfl-city-of-san-diego-sued-over-chargers-move-to-los-angeles/2849126/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Line_(San_Diego_Trolley) | https://grokipedia.com/page/Green_Line_(San_Diego_Trolley)
https://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/1982/nov/11/cover-all-the-way-to-the-banks/
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