San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
SAN DIEGAN OF THE YEAR PETER SEIDLER
As much as anyone’s, Peter Seidler’s focus and finances have changed the conversation around what’s possible in San Diego in recent years — and in 2022 especially. His big dreams and demands legitimize everyone else’s.
Padres chairman Peter Seidler knows it’s darkest before the dawn. He often goes on hourslong walks in San Diego’s beach communities late at night, even at midnight, clearing his head and contemplating what would make both his team and the city he’s lived in since buying the Padres in 2012 world-class. It’s a word he uses a lot.
When he sees homeless people on city streets, as we all increasingly do, he thinks about helping them. He knows how difficult that is, as this population has exploded around Petco Park and countywide because of the pandemic, a bad economy, perpetual addiction and mental health issues, exorbitant housing costs, a rotating roster of leaders working (or not working) to address homelessness and any number of other complex problems.
He sees homeless people not as problems, but as people. That’s another word he uses a lot.
As much as anyone’s, Seidler’s focus and finances have changed the conversation around what’s possible in San Diego in recent years — and in 2022 especially. His dreams of a Padres championship make everyone else’s seem more real. And his demands that homelessness be better addressed make that seem attainable, too. He wouldn’t say this himself, but Seidler is a world-class person.
The San Diego Union-tribune Editorial Board is naming Peter Seidler our 2022 San Diegan of the year for his outsized contributions.
In choosing prior persons of the year, the editorial board has gone in different directions. In 2017, we singled out the 20 people who died because of a hepatitis A epidemic that was grossly mishandled by public health authorities who wouldn’t even name them. In 2018, we celebrated Dana Sabraw, the San Diego federal judge who stood up to the Trump administration’s cruel and illegal policy of separating migrant children from their parents. In 2019, we saluted then-assemblymember Shirley Weber for her extraordinary tenacity in winning approval of a state law that sets a stricter standard for when police may use lethal force. In 2020, we recognized Dr. Wilma J. Wooten,
San Diego County’s public health officer, for her courage and constructive resolve in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic despite ugly threats. In 2021, we lauded you — all of the 2.5 million San Diegans who ignored the conspiracy theorists and COVID-19 deniers and got vaccinated to protect themselves and our entire community against the pandemic.
In 2022, it was Seidler, who speaks softly and lets his players carry the big sticks. The man whose business acumen built a firm with an estimated $3.5 billion net worth is the central reason the team’s payroll is so big and fans’ hopes are so high. He knows San Diego has never had a major sports championship. But this year the Padres came close, bouncing the dreaded Los Angeles Dodgers from the playoffs before losing to the Philadelphia Phillies in the National League Championship Series, igniting and expanding a fan base in ways unseen in San Diego since the Chargers’ run to the 1995 Super Bowl and the Padres’ 1998 World Series appearance. The 2023 Padres are stacked, with superstars Manny Machado, Juan Soto, Fernando Tatis Jr. and Xander Bogaerts. They are among six teams oddsmakers say have the best shot at the 2023 World Series.
As a key part of the San Diego Padres ownership group since 2012 and as lead owner since November 2020, Seidler, a private equity firm founder, has electrified the team’s fans and put the rest of the nation on notice with his willingness to spend heavily and bring future Hall of Famers to a franchise that has been irrelevant and ignored for most of its 54 years of existence.
Seidler’s and general manager A.J. Preller’s aggressive stewardship led to the defeat of the arch-rival Dodgers — statistically one of the greatest teams in baseball history — in this year’s playoffs. The team’s transformation from footnote to top tier doesn’t just thrill fans. Manager Bob Melvin marvels at the feeling of “knowing your owner is that committed to giving you the best chance to win.” Such a sentiment may have been enjoyed by coaches, players and fans of teams in New York, Boston and Los Angeles over the years — but in San Diego, which has the 30th biggest media market in U.S. pro sports? The feeling was pretty much unfathomable. It’s not any more.
Yet Seidler has done at least as much for the region — and maybe more — by attacking homelessness.
As a key member of the Tuesday Group — business and civic leaders who meet each week to discuss how the private sector and the Lucky Duck Foundation can work with civic leaders to address homelessness — he has been an influential and unrelenting force on a deeply vexing issue. The foundation is a nonprofit co-founded in 2005 by philanthropists Pat and Stephanie Kilkenny, who match contributions of up to $1.5 million each year. Over the years, it has adopted as its central focus responding to the homelessness crisis — alleviating human misery in a long variety of ways. Thanks to the Kilkennys, Seidler, restaurateur Dan Shea and many other local leaders, the foundation has used industrial tents it owns to provide bridge shelters with 300 beds in the Downtown area for five years and, more recently, 150 beds in Midway. The foundation also funds several other shelter programs, as well as programs that provide work experience, job training, meals (1.5 million in 2022 alone) and water to homeless people. Its Community Care Kit program incentivizes constructive behavior by providing backpacks filled with protective clothing, hygiene necessities (including feminine products) and needed goods to homeless residents of bridge shelters after they seek and accept services.
Seidler and Shea have been passionate advocates of an approach to
homelessness that grasps the need to add relatively inexpensive shelter beds in tents and on underutilized government property as part of a larger plan that also calls for construction of permanent housing units. They helped persuade the city to make its 2019 decision to use Golden Hall as a homeless shelter after lobbying thenmayor Kevin Faulconer to do so for three years.
For Seidler, the crisis appears to affect him on an intensely personal level. An unforgettable 2017 story by the Union-tribune’s Bryce Miller depicted the two-time cancer survivor walking the streets at night, offering comforting words and encouragement to the down and out. Anecdotes from those who know him say such moments are staples of his life.
The contrast with the callousness shown intermittently by city officials is stark — for example, the Faulconer administration’s 2016 installation of jagged rocks below a freeway overpass to deter homeless encampments. That was done near Petco Park in advance of its hosting the 2016 All-star Game, though not at the suggestion or request of team management. It’s not fair to city officials, who have never stopped ramping up efforts to address the crisis, to overemphasize that example. But homelessness fatigue is palpable. Even as new initiatives and funding are announced, a sense of almost helplessness has taken hold as problems got worse in 2022, starting with a 61 percent increase in homeless deaths since 2020.
Seidler has no time for anyone with eroding resolve. “I’ve banned, in my conversations anyway, calling this a complex or overwhelming problem,” he told Miller in 2017. “It’s a big problem, but the scientists at research institutions trying to break the genomic code, that’s a complex problem. This just has a lot of components to it. It takes diligence and focus and execution.”
It is this unflagging compassion and commitment — and his central role in making the Padres an exciting, unifying force in the community — that led The San Diego Uniontribune Editorial Board to name Seidler as our 2022 San Diegan of the Year. He is talking the talk — and he is walking the walk.