ACT I - SITE SURVEY

Justine Nielsen (VISIT): I always like to share with people when we're looking at this site that I think as of yesterday there were 11 cranes in downtown San Diego and six of 'em are here on our site.

Brian Narration: The site – currently under construction – is The Research and Development District or RaDD on the San Diego waterfront. This life science mixed-use development, slated for completion in the spring of 2024, covers eight acres of oceanfront property. That’s almost 8 football fields!

Justine Nielsen (VISIT): It's a lot to take in.

Brian Maughan (VISIT): Yeah.

Justine Nielsen (VISIT): Because it's a lot of space that's all going up at the same time.

Brian Narration: 5 buildings that will be home to labs, office space, retail stores and restaurants, underground parking and acres of open space across the entire site. All of this $1.6 billion complex is being developed on land that belongs to the US Navy. We visited the site in the fall of 2022, and all over were machinery, materials, workers...

Justine Nielsen (VISIT): The feeling right now is one of progress, right? I mean, we've got a lot of noise and a lot of activity going on here on the site.

Brian Narration: A lot of construction activity now, that will hopefully lead to a lot of activity for employees and the public when it’s done. But what will it look like, in a space this large? Well, we’re here to find out…

Brian Narration: I’m Brian Maughan, chief innovation and marketing officer with Fidelity National Financial, and this is Built – The podcast where you’ll meet creative leaders in the commercial real estate industry and hear how they do what they do. In this case, how they are building a whole new district designed to foster discovery and scientific advancement and open more of San Diego’s waterfront to the community.

Brian Narration: It was a warm day in November 2022 with clear skies, and a slight breeze when we met Justine Nielsen, a land use attorney and the Senior Vice President of Development for IQHQ, the developer of RaDD.

Justine Nielsen: I specifically oversee all of the entitlements for our 10 million square foot portfolio across the nation.

Brian Narration: Justine was also our tour guide for the day. I was excited to see a development this large, so close to the water and so close to a downtown district. As you walk south on North Harbor Drive, you see on the right cruise ships, the USS Midway and the most incredible ocean view. And to the left there are cranes, holes, skeletons of buildings, and construction everywhere.

Justine Nielsen (VISIT): we're getting in the, uh, RaDD golf cart to go ahead and take a, a perimeter tour of the entire project site. This project site consists of eight blocks total.

Brian Narration: IQHQ is a life sciences real estate development company with sites in the United Kingdom, San Francisco and Boston as well. In real estate the term "life sciences" refers to buildings constructed and designed to support the research and development of healthcare and medicine. This market includes sectors like pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, genomics, manufacturers of medical devices and so on.

Justine Nielsen: IQHQ was formed in 2019 and RaDD was one of the very first projects that they acquired and really went after in earnest. I was involved as their land use council in connection acquisition. So I've been involved from the very beginning on the project.

Brian Narration: The site has a preeminent location next to Seaport Village, one of the city's top tourism destinations, and is strategically close to San Diego International Airport. It’s massive… the golf cart was very necessary to get around.

VISIT: we're driving down Broadway right now, coming up on North Harbor Drive. And We're flanked on either side by very tall rows of palm trees, which really kind of lends to the overall vibe and feel of this particular area of town.

Right here on our left is the location of the future park.

Brian Narration: At the moment, the site looks very un-park-like: it’s a giant hole. The team is working on the underground car parking. There will be over 2,000 spaces, all of them in one continuous parking structure underneath the RaDD buildings and the park.

RaDD will have five separate buildings. They’ve all been “topped out” — meaning they have reached their height structurally — and the team is now working on the interiors and exteriors.

From the park, a little to the south is the "Alley" building.

VISIT: this is gonna be our primary sort of retail building that's gonna have the public alley going right through the middle of it. So coming off of the Embarcadero, all in your right, you've got a robust and very active, um, sort of boardwalk area that's fronting the Midway.

Brian Narration: The Alley building will house a rooftop restaurant with stunning views. Just inland from it, Rise will be a 17-story building of labs and office space.

Next to Rise to the south is a new West Coast Navy Headquarters building – which is technically not part of RaDD – but more on that later. Running north to south through all the buildings is a pedestrian mall.

VISIT: This is the grade level. You can see the width and the sort of scope of it is, uh, significant, right? It's going to be a massive sort of public thoroughfare playing on either side by retail, with outdoor cafes and, and seating opportunities and things along those lines.

Brian Narration: The leasing team is working hard to curate the retail experience with a mix of national and local tenants.

VISIT: We can walk actually this way a little bit. We can just walk around.

Brian Narration: Moving south from the Alley building there's the Core building. It’ll be eight stories of lab and office space directly on North Harbor Drive – overlooking the waterfront. Next is a building aptly named: Edge. The footprint for Edge is curved to follow the parcel line and the steel for this building had to be curved for it to fit in the space.

VISIT: the Edge building is a really uniquely designed building because it sort of provides for a single facade that spans, you know, 180 degrees along North Harbor Drive as it curves into and toward the city.

Um, so the top two floors are designated for our event space and there's this massive sort of outdoor terraces that are part of that space that will be sitting right on top of the waterfront looking out.

Brian Narration: And finally, to the east of Edge is the 9-story Vida, with 60,000 square foot floor plates; it’s also 50-50 lab and office space… which will allow it to appeal to different companies.

Brian Narration: I had never been here before, so I was curious what this huge parcel of land looked like before construction. We asked locals walking nearby what they remembered.

Eric: It's funny cuz I kind of remember it, but it's like one of those things you see and then you kinda forget about it.

Jesse: Yeah, it was nothing but sand and old buildings.

Joy: it was a big parking lot and at that end was the Navy building and there'd be flags up

Jose: It was, uh, the Naval Supply Center. 

Susan: it was massive and ugly

Brian Narration: And yet, the site was of strategic importance decades ago, and its history plays into what’s going on now. There were actually 2 Navy Buildings on the property. One from the 1920s, and the other one built in the early 1940s to support the Navy’s needs in the Pacific during World War II.

Diane: It was a great big, long white warehouse building and an executive building on the end. So it was time to replace. We’re moving up. We're getting more buildings, more businesses, new waterfront park.

Brian Narration: The site has a naval history that began before the War.

Justine Nielsen: In like the 1920s, the voters of San Diego voted to give this land to the navy for military purposes. The city said the Navy needs this land, we'll give it to them, and at the time for many years, the Navy used the land for warehousing purposes.

Justine Nielsen: Actually in the 1980s, the Congress decided that this land should be used to try to raise revenue or for better purposes than just warehousing and in order to facilitate the private development of this site, Congress actually had to authorize the Navy to do so.

Brian Narration: The Navy could then talk with the City of San Diego about a partnership.

Justine Nielsen: They said, okay, we need help in facilitating and implementing the overall development. So City of San Diego, let's come to the table. Let's make an agreement about what you wanna see on this site, how it's gonna be built out in the future, how it's gonna be implemented from a zoning and permitting perspective.

And let's do a development agreement, and that's what they did in 1992.

Brian Narration: That resulted in a framework referencing the land use, zoning and other rules for way-in-the-future developers, like IQHQ.

Justine Nielsen: Obviously it's a massive project. And it takes a lot of resources to bring that to fruition. 

ACT II: THE CHALLENGES

Brian Narration: A lot of resources, and a lot of time. A developer, Manchester Financial Group, was chosen in 2006.

Justine Nielsen: In addition to just the sort of typical development financing type of issues that you need in order to pull something like this off, there was significant litigation between the federal government, the developer, and the California Coast Commission and private groups that opposed the development. So litigation ensued for nearly a decade following a selection of the developer and the approval of the concept plan for the site.

Brian Narration: Finally, with all of the lawsuits settled, Manchester could build. They started with Navy Building One, a new 17-story Navy headquarters. Once the building was completed, the old 1900s structures were demolished. Manchester also proposed a luxury hotel on the northern part of the site.

And with Manchester’s focus on the hotel and the new Navy building, they made an off-market deal: IQHQ bought the six other parcels of land from Manchester.

Justine Nielsen: We inherited a development agreement and essentially the development agreement between the city and the Navy that was negotiated and approved back in 1992, serves as the entitlements for the projects.

So we didn't have to go through a traditional entitlement process for RaDD because it was already done, and all we had to do was make sure that our design and our conversion from office to research and development uses and laboratory uses was consistent with the overall framework provided in that development agreement.

Brian Narration: The conversion from office to R&D also gave them a chance to think about other people who may want to be near the waterfront...

Justine Nielsen: One of the beautiful things about RaDD that IQHQ did when we took over the project is we reimagined it from the public's perspective.

We said, now let's really think about this as a San Diego citizen. What would we wanna see? Well, we wanna see walkability. We wanna see retail opportunities.

You know, we want to be able to park at RaDD and take our kids for an ice cream and go to an event and spend the day at the park. It really is a lifestyle destination for the public and for all of the tenants.

Brian Narration: And the tenants doing research in the buildings next to the park will have very different needs from those in traditional desk & computer work.

Justine Nielsen: We have scientists in laboratories doing real actual science. They need exhaust equipment. They need all sorts of mechanical equipment in order to enable them to do the work that they do. So, unlike traditional office buildings, we're building out significant interior infrastructure to support the ultimate user in those buildings.

Brian Narration: IQHQ doesn’t have to experiment when it comes to finding the right people to design these buildings. Design and architecture firm Gensler joined IQHQ on RaDD in 2020. Here’s architect Kenneth Fisher, principal in charge of the project. He knows what being a scientist is like…

Ken Fisher: I remember being late at night in the basement of Newtson Hall at UCLA working on something completely isolated. And you're really separated from community and interaction.

Brian Narration: Ken logged long hours in a physics lab at University of California Berkeley and then at a PhD program at UCLA. He now has over 30 years of experience in forward-thinking science and educational environments. With IQHQ, his work brings science out of those “basements”.

Ken Fisher: their focus has been on urban development, on transit oriented development supporting the life sciences, but integrated into the culture of the communities that they're in.

Ken Fisher: The San Diego life science community is mostly located north of the city in more suburban development, in isolated research parks.

Brian Narration: But this will be different.

Ken Fisher: So this in fact, is an experiment to suggest that you can create a very vibrant place within the city that supports both, transformative research, as well as creating community and a place for intersection of the tenants of the buildings and the community itself.

Ken Fisher: We've learned that large problems are solved with multiple perspectives and diverse thinking.

Brian Narration: They know from big experiences, literally – Gensler architects designed the Shanghai Tower – the tallest building in East Asia. They are also behind the Illumina Array Campus in the United Kingdom and did the interiors of the Moderna Headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Ken Fisher: The other aspect of it is understanding the multidisciplinary nature of research and innovation and exploration. And so that needs to be supported in a physical way. These buildings have the flexibility to support a number of different disciplines, they're not monocultures in terms of their thinking or how you approach a problem, but they can bring a diverse group of thinkers together in that problem solving.

Brian Narration: Adding to this group is Steve Elliott, General Superintendent for Turner Construction, the company in charge of building RaDD for IQHQ. He also worked on the new Navy building.

Steve Elliott: So I've been on this site now for four years.

Brian Narration: Steve was born and raised in San Diego and has been in the construction industry for 35 years, mostly as a superintendent working all over the western United States. These days, he builds teams and runs projects, and RaDD is his biggest project so far.

Steve Elliott: I oversee right now 27 superintendents that are currently working on the RaDD Project. And the greatest thing about something like this for a person like myself is being able to train and teach people and give them the opportunities to see things that they may never see again in their entire careers.

Brian Narration: Turner Construction is currently the largest general contractor in the United States. It has a volume of about 12 billion dollars a year worldwide.

Steve Elliott: Turner just built SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles, and it's one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen.

Brian Narration: They are also building the Clippers Arena in LA

Steve Elliott: So we do these just massive mega projects, and those are the ones that usually get the attention. You don't typically hear about the RaDD projects because they're not usually as large as this one is. They're not usually in a location that is as desirable as this one is.

When I was assigned to this project, my partner, his name is Mark Turcot, he's the general superintendent for our region, he called me up one day and he goes, “welcome to the billion dollar Club.” I said, “what are you talking about?” He said, “there are not many, general superintendents anywhere in the world that have ever run a billion dollar project.”

When I realized what we were doing I said, “oh my God, this thing is massive.” I remember actually saying that to myself as I'm standing there looking at just a bunch of dirt, realizing that we had 750,000 cubic yards of dirt to get rid of 73 feet from the Pacific Ocean.

You have to understand that we have naturally occurring groundwater plus we have tidal flow with the Pacific Ocean just a hundred feet from us. So our dewatering system is like nothing you've ever seen.

Brian Narration: Dewatering involves eliminating subsurface water from a construction site. This process typically happens before excavations and it's crucial to keep building materials dry and maintain a safe working environment.

Steve Elliott: It's just insane what we do, 1,000,800 thousand gallons a day every day, 365 days a year. For four years now we've been doing this. If something goes wrong, we feel the pain immediately, the water comes in. So we've become experts in something that none of us were experts in.

Brian Narration: Environmental regulations require that they filter the water for all sediments prior to discharging it back into the ocean. Steve says it comes out of the ground a reddish brown and goes back in absolutely clear.

Steve Elliott: I've done many downtown projects and many downtown high rises with below grade parking. We've dewatered a little bit, you put some pumps down for a few months and put some concrete over the top of it and you're done.

Right? Not this one. It's so big. Plus it sat idle for almost a year with no digging. But we still had to dewater everything. So we had pumps running and filtration systems going the entire time, but there was no work going on.

Brian Narration: Eventually the digging started and the challenges went beyond the natural elements.

Steve Elliott: Every single aspect of what we're doing is challenging. I'm not kidding. I mean, this is, this is not, this is not an easy project to build. The logistics of what we have to work with are horrible. And you say, “oh, come on man. You got 14 acres.” Yeah, 14 acres we're trying to build all at the same time.

And so what we have is the lot line to our fence line average is about 12 feet. Can't even really get a truck in there. And we have all of the watering equipment in that 12 foot space. And we have a couple of areas that we have a little bit more room. So we have a single lane closure all the way around the project every single day.

So nearly 100% of all the material that comes or leaves. And we generate a lot of trash every day, has to come in that single lane closure.

Brian Narration: These construction hurdles intersect with bureaucratic ones.

Steve Elliott: We are surrounded on one side we have Harbor Drive, which is owned by the San Diego Unified Port District. On the other side we have Pacific Highway, which is a main thoroughfare in downtown, which is owned by the city of San Diego.

We are governed by the State Water Board. We are governed by the Coastal Commission. We have the storm water prevention departments from both the port and the city here every single day.

And we're trying to put in all of the utility infrastructure at the same time. Pacific Highway has in the neighborhood of 30 different utilities that are already in it, that we have to cross every time.

Some of those 230,000 volt power lines. It's a little mind boggling when you get into the real nuts and bolts of trying to dig a hole in a street that has been there for 130 years.

So when we were digging all the stuff out, gosh, we had thousands of old wood pilings from all the old piers that used to be there. We ran into two saltwater tunnels that had been built by San Diego Gas and Electric as cooling tunnels for a power plant that they had right up the street.

Now they had been abandoned, but getting rid of those things was a huge undertaking. We had to put divers in these tunnels to try to pack 'em full of concrete so we could keep the Bay out. We successfully did that.

Brian Maughan: Wow.

Steve Elliott: But I mean, every time we turn around, there's just something else that we have to deal with.

Brian Narration: Time, for one.

Steve Elliott: production is everything in construction. And if we're scheduled to hang 12 panels and we can hang 16 panels, that is a huge day for us. We just save time. Time is money. But we didn't know how to improve the process

Brian Narration: Giving Turner more control in such a unique environment is an AI construction optimization tool called CraneView, developed by Versatile.ai.

Steve Elliott: Really what it is, it's a package of sensors and cameras and all kinds of neat little innards that hang, in between the hook of a crane. And then they have their own hook down below that.

Brian Narration: The system collects and analyzes data on the flow and handling of materials, production rates, and crane utilization. Teams can observe lift sequences at any time thanks to a camera that records all crane action. With machine learning, the device classifies each item picked, captures its weight, and records the cycle time of the lift so the team can fully understand how a crane is being used. By using this technology, Turner realized that they could improve their workflow.

Steve and his team learned about CraneView back when they were working on the Navy Building – and used it in beta.

Steve Elliott: So we started and they would take pictures every five seconds of what we did. The trucks would come in and. The riggers would rig up these panels and then they'd have to flip it over, unhook it, hook it back up, because of the way that they come in on the truck. So the first thing we found out is let's load the trucks differently. That by itself saved a ton of time. We saved 17 days with what we learned in our erection sequence for the precast panel. 17 days is a ton of money.

Brian Narration: Steve's team helped improve this technology and a new version of CraneView is being used for RaDD.

Steve Elliott: I have this device, and they're much improved from the beta test that we did back at Navy, on all six cranes. So we're gathering just massive amounts of data,

I can see in real time every single day, live, noon, two o'clock. It doesn't matter. what has been erected, how long it took by who and a hundred other pieces of information at any time of the day. And If you can use email, you can use this device.

Brian Maughan: I love the fact that you've got this life sciences campus that you're developing. And in doing that, you've fused this idea that, hey, we're gonna do this more efficiently. We're gonna leverage some new technology.

Once this development is complete, I think it's a beautiful back and forth because it doesn't mean that innovation has to only be in the final project or in the final occupant. It can be in the development, in the construction of it.

ACT III The Future: what it’ll be like coming here day to day

Brian Narration: Let’s look to the future, when the buildings are ready for tenants. IQHQ is working with Retail Insite to lease the retail spaces and Cushman Wakefield for the office and life science space. The views and weather should be enticing: it’s comfortable all year and you can look over the Coronado Bridge pass into Mexico.

And remember – this isn’t just for tenants. It’s for locals, too. Starting with the park we rode past at the northern end of the parcel.

Justine Nielsen: It's going to be designed as a relatively flat, grassy area as required by the development agreement, but we've really enhanced it with really unique sort of performing arts features, you know, a little stage and a little amphitheater.

We've also broken it up into smaller nodes for different activities, so we can have a yoga class going on every single day. We can also use it for private events, so we really think that it's gonna be a great compliment to both RaDD itself as well as the community.

Brian Narration: The five acres of green spaces don't end at street level.

Ken Fisher: And so one of the things that we made very sure of was creating indoor outdoor environments as well,

Brian Narration: Architect Ken Fisher again

Ken Fisher: and those happen not just at the ground plane, but as you move up in the building through balconies and terraces.

Brian Narration: And that beautiful California light plus lots of windows can create high heat loads and energy efficiency challenges. But these workers won’t have shades to contend with…

Ken Fisher: One of the interesting features of the design of the buildings is that we've incorporated dynamic glazing or electrochromic glass.

Brian Narration: In other words – smart glass. IQHQ chose SageGlass, a global manufacturer of this smart glass that changes its level of tint when driven by an electrical signal.

And the premise is that you can go from clear to opaque and back again with the flip of a switch.

Steve Elliott: I have put this stuff in in, in conference rooms. But this on our project goes way beyond that scope.

Brian Narration: Most of the exterior glass on the 3 largest lab buildings will have SageGlass.

Ceremony: Mr. Del Rio, make the call.

Brian Narration: The RaDD team topped off the last building - Rise- after our visit last November with a ceremony that took place on the historic aircraft carrier and museum USS Midway.

Ceremony: Ladies and gentlemen, if you look at the 2B building on the northwest corner, that's where the beam is gonna be set.

Brian Narration: This is Steve topping off the Rise building, AKA 2B

Ceremony: It is painted white. It is signed by most of the workers on site. It has an American flag and a Christmas tree on it. This is traditional and happens on every steel job that's erected. Doesn't matter whether it's in the United States or in Indonesia, it's still honored for a topping off party on a steel project. [claps] Ready?

Steve Elliott: To do something like this, it's no small undertaking and, it's definitely not for the faint of heart.

Brian Narration: 4 of the buildings are slated to come online at the end of 2023 and the last building should be ready for occupancy by Spring of 2024 opening up the city to its waterfront and serving as a new economic engine to activate downtown San Diego. In other words, this area will be filled with new life – scientists, innovators, and hopefully families getting ice cream or spending a day enjoying art in the park.

But before that happens, the people behind RaDD reflect on some of what has brought them here.

Ken Fisher: My focus has always been to pursue what you love. And there's something extraordinarily gratifying and rewarding in creating environments that people thrive in and focusing on that I think carries you through a lot of the tough days.

Justine Nielsen: do not under-appreciate the value of relationships and maximizing network opportunities where you can, relationships at every and any level are key to success.

Steve Elliott: understand that construction has been around a lot longer than we have, and although we have a lot of new tools, a lot of the old school mentalities and methods still. And I'm not talking the old fist pounding superintendents that used to yell and scream at everybody.

Steve Elliott: I'm talking about tried and true methods of being the first one on the job site, working your butt off all day long and being the last one to leave. That type of mentality in any industry will take you very far.

Brian Narration: I’m Brian Maughan. To see photos from our visit to the Research and Development District in San Diego, visit builtpodcast.com

Built is a co-production of Fidelity National Financial, PRX Productions, and Goat Rodeo. From FNF, our project is run by Annie Bardelas. This episode was produced by Sandra Lopez-Monsalve and edited by Genevieve Sponsler. Additional production support from Megan Nodolski and Jay Venables. Audio mastering by Rebecca Seidel. Our location producer is Dave Drexler. Boston Tape Sync by Roski Freeman.

The Executive Producer of PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzales.

Special thanks to our guests, and to Eric Gomez, Jesse Santiago, Joy Charlotta, Susan Snyder, Jose, Diane and everyone else who spoke to us in San Diego.

This was our third season of Built – tell a friend in commercial real estate about us! We’ll be back for season four in a couple of months. Thanks for listening!