The foundation, which prioritizes grants to advance health care, medical research, the arts and youth development, ended 2023 with $1.13B of assets, in a year that saw it award more than $53M in grants and charitable gifts.

Regarding the real estate transaction, Oliphant said, “we are looking at trying to be a presence in the continued rebirth of downtown, and we are able to be a player in that for the longer term.”

The sale of Wells Fargo Plaza, which occupies an acre of land at B Street and Fifth Avenue, sets a new baseline market value of about $80 per square foot in San Diego’s struggling B Street corridor.

Newport Beach-based Irvine Co., the largest office landlord in San Diego, has been offloading several downtown office towers in the city. This represents a strategic shift of focus to a mixed-use community in University City, where the developer plans to build 30,000 residential units.

In September, Irvine sold the iconic, 34-story Symphony Towers at 750 B Street for about $46M, or roughly $84 per square foot, nearly 70% less than the $134M the company paid to acquire the property in 2003. The buyer was Formosa Ltd., a Taiwan-based international conglomerate.

The 488,000-square-foot Wells Fargo Tower, which opened in 1985, is 75% leased. When offices being marketed for sublease are included in the total, it has nearly 253K square feet of available space.

This comes as office vacancy in downtown San Diego has skyrocketed in 2025 to its highest level on record to nearly 35%. That's double the pre-pandemic level of 17%, according to CoStar data.

Last week, state-owned Alaska Permanent Fund Corp. gave the keys back to its lender for 550 West C Street, a 20-story office tower known as Five50West, in a deed-in-lieu of a foreclosure transaction.

The lender, asset management firm Barings, loaned the pension fund $68.5M in 2017. According to the deed in lieu, the Alaska pension fund was in default on the loan and owed Barings, a subsidiary of Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance, more than $71M.

The 363K-square-foot Five50West, which opened in 1989 and occupies a full city block, is nearly half empty. In 2023, the Alaska fund spent more than $13M on a Gensler-designed remodel of the building, adding a lobby bar, an upscale gym with spa-style locker rooms, and an outdoor café.

In February, the lender behind Stockdale Capital Partners’ 1.3 square-foot Campus at Horton, a seven-block downtown development between First and Fourth avenues, started a foreclosure process to recoup $351M in unpaid debt backed by the mega-project.

In 2020, Los Angeles-based Stockdale secured a $330M construction loan from AllianceBernstein to redevelop the area surrounding Horton Plaza, a 1980s-era mall, into a mixed-use development with 772K square feet of office space and 300K square feet of retail.

Last year, Stockdale began talks with the city of San Diego, which was negotiating with the developer to acquire the lion’s share of the Campus at Horton’s office space to replace its City Hall complex.

The city delivered a crushing blow to the project in December when it scrapped its ambitious redevelopment plan for the aging downtown Civic Center as it confronts projected municipal budget deficits of nearly $1.5B over the next five years.