Thank you for subscribing to the City of San Diego Development Services Department's (DSD) Construction Insider, a seasonal newsletter containing a collection of articles to keep you up to date on new department programs and other helpful industry news.

Mayor Todd Gloria secured approval from the City Council on his $293 million plan to fund critical infrastructure projects across the City, including major road repairs and park improvements. Read more.

Brian Schoenfisch has been selected as the new Deputy Director of its Urban Division. Schoenfisch brings more than 20 years of citywide project management and planning experience, most recently as a program manager with the City’s Planning Department overseeing the Housing, Implementation and Policy Team.  

Schoenfisch will oversee DSD’s Urban Division, which is responsible for a multitude of planning, permitting and implementation functions in downtown San Diego. This includes reviewing all downtown private development proposals, the planning and implementation of public infrastructure projects such as new parks, promenades and greenways, and updating regulations and policies to shape the future of downtown. The division is also charged with implementing the Downtown Community Plan, which aims to create and develop a dynamic downtown, accommodating growth as a regional employment center and residential neighborhood. In 2020, downtown housed about 46,000 residents and 82,000 workers. By 2050, it is expected to grow to accommodate nearly 90,000 residents and 167,000 workers. 

Some of Schoenfisch’s notable achievements include developing the Complete Communities Housing Solutions that create citywide incentives to build homes near transit, increase mobility choices and enhance opportunities for places to walk, bike, relax and play. He also helped develop the City’s landmark 2015 Climate Action Plan and the General Plan Housing Element. In addition, he was instrumental in numerous citywide housing reforms and community plan updates, among many notable accomplishments throughout the City. 

Featured Project: The Post Urban Office Campus and Post Point Residential Project

Courtesy of Cushman & Wakefield

To further the #DigitalDSD transformation, DSD's Innovation and Technology Division welcomed Tram Truong to its team to support the department’s initiative to modernize all workplace systems, increase productivity and improve service delivery to customers.

Tram brings more than 25 years of experience managing innovation technology (IT) programs, governance, portfolio and IT service delivery. She has held roles of increasing responsibility with the San Diego Data Processing Corporation and the City's Department of IT that supports the technology needs of one of the largest workforces in the region, with more than 11,000 City workers and consultants.

In late 2018, DSD's Code Enforcement Division (CED) received a complaint regarding the substandard conditions of a Mesa Hills Drive property. An inspection confirmed the property was in substandard condition, containing mountains of excessive storage both inside and out, and lacking basic habitability requirements such as a functioning bathroom, kitchen and required emergency egress from the dwelling. 

Unfortunately, the property owners could not clean up the property. With the help of the Nuisance Abatement Unit, a specialized unit within City Attorney Mara W. Elliott's Office devoted to enforcing public nuisance, land use and environmental laws, the San Diego Superior Court was successfully petitioned to appoint a receiver to oversee the rehabilitation of the property. 

The City of San Diego is seeking public input on nearly a dozen housing-related items as part of Mayor Todd Gloria’s "Homes for All of Us" proposal aimed at incentivizing and promoting new citywide housing opportunities that San Diegans of all income levels can afford. Read more.

Former City of San Diego Chief of Homelessness Strategies and Housing Liaison Keely Halsey has accepted a position with DSD as the Assistant Director, where she will serve as the department’s land use and housing advisor, legislative advocate and policy analyst, working to find implementation solutions for solving the region’s housing crisis.

Starting Sept. 1, Halsey's foremost responsibilities will include research and development of data-based housing policy solutions, external relations such as meeting with local policymakers and other high-level housing policy stakeholders and housing builders on the federal and state level. She will also lead DSD in developing transformational housing policy in San Diego with implementation strategies for DSD employees to meet the housing goals established by the State of California in the Regional Housing Needs Assessment. Specifically, the position will be tasked with:

In her previous position as the Chief of Homelessness Strategies & Housing Liaison for the City, working in the Office of the Mayor, she led the Homelessness Strategies Department and coordinated the City's efforts on homelessness across all City departments. She also worked with numerous agencies, including the County of San Diego, the San Diego Housing Commission and the Regional Task Force on Homelessness, to help create a path to safe and affordable housing and services for people who experience homelessness.

Halsey led these efforts during a rapid expansion of homeless programming, heading initiatives on shelter, outreach and long-term housing solutions, among other projects and programs. She was also responsible for drafting and implementation of the Community Action Plan, the City’s strategic plan on homelessness and served in the command structure for the humanitarian operation known as “Operation Shelter to Home,” which included the conversion of the Convention Center into a mass emergency shelter and other efforts to protect the homeless population during the pandemic.

The San Diego City Council officially declared the San Diego Sports Arena redevelopment area as surplus land, which begins the process to rectify a flawed real estate deal from the prior administration and ensure affordable housing is prioritized in the development of the site in accordance with state law. Read more.

Mazen Abugharbieh is the Business Intelligence Analytics Program Coordinator in charge of creating dashboards and analyzing and processing data to improve department performance and services cost-effectively, all part of #DigitalDSD.

Collaborating with the City's Performance and Analytics Department, Mazen and his team made great strides to positively impact how DSD utilizes data, expanding business intelligence tools to support #DigitalDSD further. These resources include a growing library of dashboards for management to monitor department metrics. These include geospatial tools to visualize data geographically and a data pipeline to provide more frequent updates to the data provided within the department dashboards and the City's Open Data Portal.

His advice for anyone new to working with data is to take it one step at a time; becoming a data whiz didn’t happen for him overnight!

As City staff moves forward to continue to rebuild the City's economy and address its housing needs, it is developing amendments to the Land Development Code to make it more adaptable to the changing environment around us. One such proposal is amending the Downtown Employment Overlay Zone, contained within the Centre City Planned District Ordinance, which provides land use regulations for Downtown San Diego.

The proposed amendment will continue to encourage the development of employment uses within the overlay zone while allowing flexibility to address the City's housing needs simultaneously. In addition, the regulations will ensure that this area remains the heart of Downtown's urban core with dense buildings and active street-level commercial activities. 

City staff worked closely with the Downtown San Diego Partnership Planning & Public Policy Committee in developing this proposal, which will be presented to the Downtown Community Planning Committee at its August meeting. Following that, the proposal will be included as part of the 2021 Land Development Code Update, which is anticipated to go to the Planning Commission, Land Use & Housing Committee and the City Council later this fall.

Please visit DSD's webinars page to find the webinar link and call-in information, view video recordings of past webinars and view other upcoming webinars.