Roberts’ Social Awareness Shaped by Own Experiences

Years before he became an architect--or, for that matter, even knew what architecture was--San Diego City Council candidate Ron Roberts received his first lesson in what “architecture was not” when his family moved here in the early 1950s.

Unable to find work in Roberts’ native Massachusetts, his father moved his Italian-American family of six to San Diego in 1952 to accept a machinist’s job at Convair, settling in a federal government housing project in Linda Vista, then the largest of its kind in the nation.

The houses in the project, Roberts recalled, were flimsily constructed Masonite structures often referred to by neighborhood residents as “the cracker boxes” to distinguish them from “real” houses. Heated by kerosene in an open trough, the houses were known for their quick burning capacity, a characteristic sometimes displayed with fatal consequences during the two years that Roberts’ family lived there.

Never Felt Poor

“Not a style I’d be inclined to duplicate,” the 45-year-old Roberts says wryly. “But I have good memories of those years. Money was tight, but I don’t ever remember feeling poor or lacking in anything essential. Most families there were within a narrow range of incomes, so you didn’t see other homes with two or three cars sitting out front.”

Later, Roberts’ family was able to move out of subsidized housing, first to a rented duplex and then to a small two-bedroom house in Linda Vista, where Roberts’ mother still lives.

The eldest of the four children, Roberts excelled at mathematics at Kearny High School, where he also played baseball and wrestled. Through contacts that his father had established while campaigning for then-Rep. Bob Wilson (R-San Diego), Roberts was all but promised an appointment to the Air Force Academy and planned to become a pilot.

During his junior year at Kearny, however, Roberts decided against attending a military college, rebelling against what he saw as “other people planning out my life.” With his father feeling that he was “throwing away a major opportunity,” their relationship was strained to the point that Roberts spent the first several nights after he made his intentions known at a friend’s house.

Father Killed Himself

The father-son breach never completely healed, a fact that, in light of a tragic event that occurred several years later, still has Roberts pondering the what-ifs of life. When Roberts was a senior at San Diego State College (now SDSU), his father, depressed over being out of work and “at a point in life when he just felt nothing was right,” committed suicide by pouring gasoline over his car and setting it on fire--with him in it--in Tecolote Canyon. (While driving to work that day, Roberts had seen smoke coming from the canyon and heard a news report about the incident on his car radio. Later, his wife found him at his supermarket job and broke the news to him.)

“You always wonder whether you should have been able to detect something or done something different,” Roberts said, his voice thick with emotion. “But I guess you only get one chance.”

When he enrolled at San Diego State, Roberts had no firm career goals. Options afforded by his aptitude in math were quickly precluded by his growing recognition that he had little in common with “these guys with the slide rules hanging from their belts.”

“I didn’t feel superior, I just felt different,” he said. “I realized we weren’t laughing at the same things, we weren’t doing the same things on weekends.”

At the same time, his abiding interest in history and a burgeoning social consciousness forged amid the civil rights and anti-war protests of the mid-1960s--he and his wife, married in 1964 during their senior year at San Diego State, joined the Southern Christian Leadership Conference--drew Roberts in the direction of what he saw as more creative vocations.

Decided on Architecture

As an undergraduate, Roberts was befriended by a local architect, Richard Lareau, an alumni adviser to his fraternity who was to become something of a mentor. After graduating in 1965 with a social science degree, Roberts followed Lareau’s advice and enrolled in UC Berkeley’s master’s degree program in architecture.

During most of their three years in the Bay Area, Roberts’ wife, Helene, taught school while he attended classes. The Free Speech movement and anti-war demonstrations were then at their peak at Berkeley, and Roberts recalls “being immediately aware that we were in a far different world than the fun and games we’d been having at San Diego State.”

In December, 1968, Roberts graduated and moved back to San Diego. The same month--the same week, in fact--the first of the couple’s three daughters, who now range in age from 9 to 18, was born. The couple now lives in Mission Hills.

For the past 17 years, Roberts has worked for SPGA Planning & Architecture, where he played a major role in helping the company grow from modest origins to a 100-employee firm with offices in San Diego and San Francisco that has designed shopping centers and other retail projects nationwide. Locally, the firm designed the acclaimed Promenade in Pacific Beach, Pacific Plaza, and Campus Plaza on El Cajon Boulevard. It currently is redeveloping the former College Grove shopping center, which will be renamed Market Place at the Grove.

Organized Workers

Though he is now a partner with a hefty six-figure income, Roberts’ introduction to architecture was anything but financially lucrative; his starting salary was only $2 an hour. Distressed over having made more money bagging groceries at Alpha Beta as a teen-ager than as an architect with a master’s degree, Roberts--with the blessing of his boss--became a quasi-labor leader and set out to remedy that inequity by founding a 300-member employees’ organization that, over time, helped increase pay and job security within the industry.

“At the time, architecture wasn’t a very organized profession,” Roberts said. “The AIA (American Institute of Architects) was basically an owners’ organization out to protect their interests. The whole emphasis in the business was to start your own firm so you could hire these people at $2 an hour and exploit them, just as you were being exploited. Then, when business slacked off, you just fired them until things picked up again. That whole attitude was offensive to me.”

Significantly, Roberts’ perspective did not change as he rose through the management ranks, as reflected in the fact that SPGA, unlike those firms where much of the income was concentrated in a few hands, has nearly two dozen partners. If elected, he will sell his stock in the firm to his partners.

Led Planning Commission

Roberts’ public service began in the late 1970s, when then-Mayor Pete Wilson asked him to serve on an Old Town plan review board. In 1982, Wilson named him to the Planning Commission, where he served 5 1/2 years, including two as chairman, before resigning last June to concentrate on his campaign.

Often the commission’s lone vote against what he characterized as “insensitive development of canyons and hillsides,” Roberts chaired Mayor Maureen O’Connor’s growth-management task force and helped write the Interim Development Ordinance passed by the council last summer that established strict temporary limits on residential developments.

In his campaign, he has received tens of thousands of dollars in contributions from development interests, but he also has been endorsed by environmental groups such as San Diegans for Managed Growth--demonstrating, he argues, his balanced approach to the politically volatile growth issue.

If he had been allowed to script his own future, Roberts’ next decade would have looked like this: several more years on the Planning Commission, followed by a hoped-for appointment to the San Diego Board of Port Commissioners and then perhaps a City Council campaign sometime in the 1990s. Political fate, however, dramatically altered that scenario.

As recently as last April, when he made reservations for a family summer vacation in Hawaii--a trip never taken--Roberts had no intention of trying to launch a political career this year. But when Councilman Bill Cleator announced that he would not seek a third four-year term in the $45,000-a-year job this fall, both Cleator and O’Connor--opponents in the 1986 mayoral race--encouraged Roberts to seek the 2nd District post.

Initially disinclined to run because of the financial sacrifice--at a time when he soon will have two daughters in college--Roberts finally decided that the prospect of an open council seat was too tempting to pass by.

A serious runner who starts most mornings with a run at Mission Bay, Roberts is an above-average three-hour marathoner who finds similarities between the testing 26.2-mile races and the rigors of the 16-hour days common on the campaign trail.

“In both, you do a lot of hard work, pointing toward a single goal, and have to know how to pace yourself,” Roberts said. “When you cross the finish line in a marathon, it’s an incredibly exhilarating experience. And I’m hoping to feel the same way on Nov. 3.”