Before construction even began on the County of San Diego’s $63.5-million Southeastern Live Well Center, it had already become apparent to project owner, builder and architect alike that there was only one way to successfully deliver this project for the socioeconomically diverse and disenfranchised Southeast San Diego community it would serve: with deep and meaningful involvement of community members on every detail. After all, as one project team member humorously told ENR, “The community was all in our business through the whole process.”

Photovoltaic solar panels helped the building achieve its net-zero-energy rating.
Photo by Kristen Ridgers, PCL Construction Project Engineer

That personal interaction and resulting community connectedness would prove to be all for the good—and the glory—as representatives of the County of San Diego, contractor PCL Construction and lead design firm Steinberg Hart all attest regarding the process of crafting and delivering the 65,000-sq-ft, net-zero energy social services center into a community centerpiece.

That successful approach also earned the Southeastern Live Well Center accolades as ENR’s 2024 Project of the Year.

Before construction could begin, though, a county budget crunch would mandate downsizing the Live Well Center and trimming cost from the original $72 million total down to the final budget.

Here, too, the team’s nascent community connections proved helpful to its ultimate success, as local citizens serving on the project’s technical advisory committee provided feedback and reviewed and approved any needed design changes.

Photo by Haley Hill Photography

Central to the building’s design was a focus on features—such as expansive open spaces brightly lit via skylights and glass exteriors—that would help to provide users an increased sense of safety, trust, well-being, healing and privacy.

This emphasis on trauma-informed design, which is itself influenced by studies reporting that approximately 70% of Americans have experienced some type of trauma, would guide much of the architect’s efforts, says Lina Asad, senior project designer with Steinberg Hart.          

The county “really wanted to think through the design principles of trauma-informed design, and that has really shaped and reshaped the building,” Asad says.

Photo by Haley Hill Photography

Delivering a Vision

San Diego County’s focus on delivering an outstanding facility stemmed from its recognition that this community had long been underserved and even neglected.“ There was a lot of initial distrust of the county,” admits Marko Medved, director of general services with the County of San Diego.

To build back trust, the county committed to ensuring community members provided input in all areas. That included the selection of the facility’s exact location, resolving project site issues, the hiring of contractors, influencing and approving design and even providing all of the center’s ubiquitous artwork, adorning both its exterior and interiors.

“We were going to have to be true to our word about what was going to be there in the end, and how it operated,” Medved adds. “It was like a big trust-building exercise with the community.”

With the community being “underserved and not very trusting … it did take a lot of work and a lot of community engagement,” adds Steve Schmidt, the county’s deputy director of general services for capital construction before retiring last July.

Essentially, Schmidt says, the county wanted to know, “How are you going to bring local firms into the project and what are you willing to put at risk that you will meet these goals? That was a new thing for us, and it certainly was one of the big factors with how we chose the (PCL-Steinberg Hart) team.”

To that goal, the county’s solicitation for design-build teams included a component, comprising 25% of each entity’s score, requiring bidders to detail how they would involve businesses located in certain local zip codes. Importantly, this component would be scored by the project’s technical advisory committee, which included local community members.

Photo by Haley Hill Photography

“The design-build team made a commitment up front to spend $6 million with local contractors from the zip codes around this building, and they ended up spending over $8 million,” Medved notes. The design-build team exceeded its requirement of hiring at least 5% of the project workforce locally, nearing tripling that goal with a final rate of nearly 14%.

The PCL-Steinberg Hart team “just knocked it out of the park,” adds Medved. Hitting that proverbial home run required the PCL-Steinberg Hart team to develop a mindset of involving as many community residents and local firms as possible, regardless of size.

Says Pramodh Reddy, senior project manager for PCL Construction, “This could be a [project] that came in under budget and ahead of schedule, but if the community didn’t feel valued in it, it would have been a failure.”

Instead, “We also set the goal to hire as many local firms as we can, even if it’s a $10,000 contract [or] a $30,000 contract,” he adds. “It may not tip the scale on meeting what we’ll say was the criteria, but it met the intent, which is ensuring folks in the community felt like they were part of the job.”

Well-lit hallways, plentiful artwork, a meditation garden and parking garage with open stairways reflect trauma-influenced design.
Photo by Mike Torrey Photography

To this end, PCL readied a “huge database of potential vendors that we could utilize … of vendors, subcontractors, any sort of small mom and pop shops that we could uplift during construction of the project,” Reddy says, adding that the team held “at least 10 to 12 outreach meetings specifically for local businesses and to increase local worker participation.”

Challenging this goal was the fact that only one local DBE structural steel subcontractor—whom PCL had never worked with before—was located within the specified zip codes.

To that end, PCL facilitated coaching the subcontractor by arranging a training program in collaboration with the Black Contractors Association and Associated General Contractors. “This proactive support ensured that the subcontractor could meet the project’s quality standards and gain qualification from the owner,” PCL noted in its submission to ENR.

A two-part mural sunscreen by Doris Bittar on the building’s exterior honors the culture of San Diego’s historic neighborhood.
Photo by Mike Torrey Photography

Achieving a Positive End Result

Completed under budget and ahead of schedule in July 2023, the all-electric and zero net energy facility—which also achieved a rating of LEED Gold—was designed to offset at least 110% of energy consumption through renewables.

Another county goal was for the center to exceed the requirements of the California Energy Code, which the facility does by achieving 15% better than baseline performance. Elements aiding in that goal include photovoltaic solar panels, energy-efficient glazing, functional sunscreens and the strategic use of recycled materials to minimize environmental impacts, according to the project team.

One defining question for the architectural team was, “How do you make the interior of the building, in particular, feel safe and secure?,” Asad says.

Just as much as the team focused on energy efficiency, another goal was delivering a building that’s “warm and inviting, and safe and secure,” Asad adds. In addition to bathing the building in natural light to a great extent, the architect used warm colors throughout the facility’s interiors.

“That was really intentional,” she says. “Even the color of the stairs is intended to be warm rather than cool and institutional.”

Notably, the choice of the building’s exterior terra cotta color came about from a community meeting, where a local citizen suggested it and all present readily agreed, Asad reports. Also, art abounds along the building’s exterior and throughout its interior, with more than 50 pieces in total, all crafted by approximately 30 local community members.

“The depth of the public engagement on this [project] was something I’d never seen or experienced before,” says Asad. Ultimately, owner Medved credits the “soft stuff” for the project’s overall success.

“When the hard stuff works out, it’s usually because you got the soft stuff right,” he says. “You pick the right team, you set the right goals, you get the right environment, and give people the support they need. I think that’s why it worked.”