SAN DIEGO CHARGERS
Will the San Diego Chargers come up with an alternative measure to build a downtown stadium, after voters rejected a hotel tax hike intended to finance a $1.8 billion dual-purpose stadium with convention facilities? Or will it finally work with the city on plans for the current Mission Valley site? Or will it exercise an option to join the Los Angeles Rams at that team’s upcoming Inglewood stadium?
Lou Hirsh
KAISER PERMANENTE
Kaiser Permanente has built, but still hasn’t opened, a 321-bed hospital at 9455 Clairemont Mesa Blvd. The 565,000-square-foot building is supposed to open in 2017 – but then what?
Kaiser, like many in San Diego’s highly competitive health-care market, has forged agreements allowing it to station personnel and resources in affiliated facilities across the region. These alliances give it a geographical presence that may speak to its market-share ambitions.
Now that it has a large medical center to fill in central San Diego, the big question is which, if any, of Kaiser’s far-flung medical services will be consolidated to the new hospital.
So far the organization has declined to specify the degree to which it will pull back resources to fill the building. What is has said is the new hospital will have an emergency department, an intensive care unit and a neonatal intensive care unit, and that it will provide interventional radiology and maternal child health services.
John Cox
SEAWORLD SAN DIEGO
This could be a pivotal year in the half-century history of the Mission Bay marine park. SeaWorld San Diego has several new upcoming attractions designed to boost revenue and attendance, even as its parent company recently laid off hundreds of workers nationwide to trim costs, including 60 in San Diego. SeaWorld Entertainment Inc. continues to deal with fallout from the 2013 documentary “Blackfish,” which raised concerns about the treatment of captive killer whales. Those orcas will no longer be performing but will be spotlighted in an upcoming new education-oriented habitat at SeaWorld San Diego.
Lou Hirsh
UC SAN DIEGO CONTEXTUAL ROBOTICS INSTITUTE
The pieces have been falling together over the last several years. In 2013, a new chancellor arrived at the University of California, San Diego. Pradeep Khosla is an engineer with an interest in robotics. In 2016, the university founded its Contextual Robotics Institute, turning loose both technology specialists and social scientists to collaborate on problem-solving. One of Georgia Tech’s best engineers, Henrik Christensen, was tapped to lead the institute in July, and the hiring continues (for example, the university grabbed Todd Hylton from
Brain Corp.) Now it’s no secret: UC San Diego has designs on becoming a robotics powerhouse. 2017 may see the university lay a better foundation for self-driving cars, or robotic help for elderly people who live in regions where low birth rates mean human help is in short supply. When the innovations start happening, watch for them to migrate into business plans. Robotics is not going to happen in a vacuum.
Brad Graves
STARTUP COMMUNITY
The startup crowd, once a quiet and rather ignored subset of the business community in San Diego, upped its game in 2016. Leaders in the technology sector in particular rallied around the city’s fledging startup ecosystem, and it seems the effort is starting to pay off.
To start, the city’s annual Startup Week event saw a record attendance of 3,000 people in 2016 – a far cry from the first Startup Week 2012, when only a couple hundred devoted insiders showed up for the event.
The surge of entrepreneurs — and the clear demand for support and mentorship — has triggered a wave of new players to enter the startup ecosystem this year. Coworking spaces, accelerators, and incubators have boomed in popularity, including newcomers Downtown Works, WeWork, BioLabs San Diego, the Downtown Collaboratory, and the ScaleMatrix Launch Center.
To add fuel to the startup fire, organizations like Startup San Diego and Hera Labs earned nonprofit status in 2016, setting the groups up for more impact in 2017.
With more resources funneling into the innovation economy, it looks like 2017 could be an active year for starting up.
Brittany Meiling
HILLCREST DEVELOPERS
After years of planning limbo, this iconic and popular neighborhood near Balboa Park could see significant projects move forward, as the city finalizes zoning changes that are expected to allow denser and taller projects in certain corridors.
Lou Hirsh
ENDEAVOR BANK
A group of San Diegans are looking to open a new community bank. There has been a nationwide drought in de novo bank formation since the country emerged from recession, with only three new banks chartered since 2010. If Endeavor Bank, as the proposed financial institution is being called, gets regulatory approval, it would be the county’s first new local bank launched since 2008. A number of prominent San Diegans are listed on the application as directors and organizers of the bank, including one with experience forming a new bank: Christopher J. Woolley, a founder of Square 1 Bank, a North Carolina-based commercial bank established in 2005 that went public in 2014, then merged with Pacific Western Bank in October of 2015, less than a year before Endeavor Bank went public with its proposal. Getting regulators’ OK and raising the required capital to launch Endeavor could be the first step in a reversal of the trend toward banking consolidation in San Diego.
Sarah de Crescenzo
