This Christmas, can you save San Diego by bringing the city the one gift its civic elite obsessively wants, but doesn’t get?

I’m talking deep obsession. Yes, Captain Ahab hunted his whale beyond all reason, and Javert pursued punishment against Jean Valjean.

But, St. Nick, I’ll bet you’ve never encountered a fixation as all-consuming as San Diego’s desire to expand its convention center.

After more than a decade of failed attempts at an expansion, San Diego’s preoccupation with this has become both sad and embarrassing. America’s Finest City seems stuck on the idea, unable to move on. In March, 2020, voters will once again be asked to approve an expansion—even though the measure seems likely to fail.

So, Santa, I beg of you, please find a way to give them more than 1 million square feet of new convention space, with all the ugly carpets and loading docks that their little hearts desire. That way, civic leaders can think about something else—anything else, really—again.

I realize that, from your vantage point on the North Pole, San Diego’s obsession with its convention center might seem silly. And yes, there are cities out there that lose themselves similarly in the pursuit of foolish things—like Sacramento and its endless efforts to hand subsidies to rich pro sports team owners.

But San Diego’s quest for a larger convention center is rooted in certain realities that keep the notion from being entirely ridiculous. The city’s economy and identity are very much defined by its role as a host—for the U.S. military, for one of California’s largest refugee populations, for tourists, and for great and important gatherings of people from across California, and around the world.

In this city of fun and gracious hosts, San Diego’s Convention Center has become an anchor, connecting the pieces of California’s most fun and fabulous downtown. The convention center is on the trolley system, in front of the waterfront, and is easy walking distance to the Gaslamp Quarter, Petco Park, and a dizzying array of restaurants, bars, and cultural attractions.

In our current era—when comic books and superheroes hold such entertainment sway—the convention center’s status as headquarters for the Comic-Con International convention has made it an American cultural capital.

That success, however, has put pressure on San Diego to keep expanding the convention center so it can hold onto all the Batmans and Wonder Womans who descend on the ever-expanding Comic-Con. San Diego’s failure to cope with that pressure has led it to some pretty strange places.

San Diego’s preoccupation with its convention center goes back a long way. The facility opened in November 1989, as the Berlin Wall was falling, and the Cold War was closing up shop. By 2001, the dawn of the post-9/11 era, an expansion doubled its size.

Just seven years later, in 2008, another expansion was proposed to accommodate more and bigger conventions. The center acquired the property to do it. Expansion made sense to the San Diego establishment; after all, the growth would bring more visitors and dollars to the city. What’s more, it could be paid for with a hotel tax paid by those same visitors.

But here it is, the end of 2019, and the promised expansion has yet to be delivered. The reasons involve a spectacularly maddening example of misbegotten California governance.

After the Great Recession briefly slowed momentum, a $500 million expansion proposal won support in 2012 and seemed likely to happen. But in 2014, a state appeals court ruled that the hotel tax to fund the expansion was unconstitutional.

The city decided not to go forward with a ballot measure to make the tax constitutional, or with a new financing scheme that would pass muster. In 2015, the project briefly seemed dead.

Proposals kept being made—and once made, they were changed. In San Diego, a ludicrous logic spread: If the convention center couldn’t pass legal or political muster on its own, perhaps it could succeed if it were linked to other projects as a package deal.

Most infamously, San Diego attempted to build a football stadium for the Chargers, who were threatening to leave San Diego and would eventually move to L.A., that was tied to an improved convention center. The goal was to build a combination center and stadium—a “convadium”—to convince taxpayers to support the investment.

But the public perceived that idea, correctly, as strange and foolish, since a similar proposal had failed in L.A.

Still, the city didn’t give up. In 2016, with the convadium idea in trouble, a third piece was added to the project—“a diversity-focused startup incubator and accelerator.” Local wags called this “innovadium” the “turducken” of projects. And San Diegans voted down two different schemes to finance the project on the November 2016 ballot.

At this point, less sunny places would have dropped the whole idea. But by 2017, San Diego was working to expand its convention center again, even though a hotel was already planned for the land the city wanted to use.

By last year, San Diego’s leaders, in their desperation, decided to launch a new ballot measure for this expansion. And to make it palatable, they decided to tie the expansion to the homelessness crisis. The ballot measure would tax hotels to raise $3.5 billion to fund more convention space (about 400,000 additional square feet, bringing the center to 1.2 million square feet in all), more services for homeless people, and popular road improvements.

As a nickname, may I suggest “Home-Con-Road”?

This proposal appeared to die—just like so many others—when the petition campaign didn’t get enough signatures to qualify for the November 2018 ballot. But city officials persisted. The measure then qualified for the November 2020 vote, before the city moved it to the March 2020 ballot, when the electorate might be more favorable to such spending.

It’s still likely to lose, since the measure likely requires two-thirds voter approval. (The “likely” is because California courts are fighting over standards for local taxation.)

Another defeat should be the end of the idea—except that San Diego simply can’t seem to stop itself. If we don’t devise a plan to get them a convention center with a beautiful bow on it this year, this perilous obsession could consume another decade of precious time and civic attention that San Diego could be devoting to other issues—its schools, its parks, its economic future.

The only way to end this obsession is magical intervention, and a gift of convention. Santa, please get yourself to this town.

The post Santa, Please Save San Diego! appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Östanfors, an old miners’ district in the town of Falun, Sweden, has a longstanding tradition of moving Old Saint Nick from house to house each day in December, so every family has a chance to “host” him. This means creating an elaborate Christmas-themed display in the front window. During this public advent calendar across our quarters, figurines of Santa and other seasonal characters like angels and reindeer find themselves in cotton-ball saunas, mock elections, even surrounded by festive guinea pigs. Host families open their doors on their special day to invite in friends, neighbors, and strangers for food and drink.

The intimacy of this ritual makes this one of my favorite times of the year. But out beyond Östanfors, it’s hard to ignore the claims of what I’ll call the Santa Industrial Complex. Countries around the world have clamored to fête themselves as the true home of Kris Kringle, so that they can steal a spot in the global cultural spotlight—and attract tourists. I can’t help but think that, in trying to pin down Santa in real life, a bit of the magic is lost in the process.

For centuries, Santa’s whereabouts were as unclear as they were legendary. He flew down to deliver gifts from the North Pole, and everyone left it at that. The mystery allowed countries to diversify his identity; Santa could look and act however different cultures wanted him to. He appeared as a black man in Amsterdam, a benevolent bishop in Munich, a pagan winter gnome in Finland’s Lapland. In Switzerland, where I was born, he visited homes every year on December 6 followed by a menacing figure called “Schmutzli” (the Swiss version of Krampus). There was little tension between these beliefs, because they existed so far apart from each other.

But today, it’s difficult for things to be so distinct. The Scandinavian-American artist Haddon Sundblom’s 1920s illustrations of a corpulent, jolly Santa drinking Coca-Cola pulled together pre-Christian winter traditions and the Catholic legend of a famous bishop and launched a global template for Saint Nick, which now even reaches predominantly Muslim countries. (I recently discovered no less than 50 portly Santa figures in a hotel lobby in Egypt.) Sundblom’s Santa still appears on Coke cans across the globe at this time of year.

So given Santa’s rising familiarity and Nordic countries’ proximity to the North Pole, why wouldn’t each of them lay some claim to hosting the jolly man? In the 1960s, Denmark launched the ongoing Scandinavian battle over Santa’s true home by moving it from the North Pole down to Nuuk, Greenland’s capital city, to make the global hero a Dane (Greenland was a province of Denmark at the time) and to promote tourism on the sparsely populated island. A gigantic mailbox was put up, inviting children from across the world to send their wish list to “Santa Claus, 2412 Nuuk, Greenland.”

After the mailbox was created, several employees of the Greenlandic postal service began to devote most of their working hours to answer the more than 100,000 letters the box receives every December. But one unfortunate consequence of trying to bring a fantasy story into reality is that reality sometimes butts in. As Greenland has become a quasi-independent state, local authorities have decided to cut all subsidies for this invention by the former colonial power. The consequence: Last year more than half of the letters to Santa never got a response.

Norway created its own famous destination of letters: the “Julehus” (Christmas Home), in the village of Drobaek, just south of Oslo. Around 1850, merchants from around the country started paying visits to a picturesque prayer house in the village, which adorned itself with increasingly elaborate decorations during the holiday season. Soon, past visitors began to send their children’s wish-list letters to the owners. Today, the house, now a museum, displays more than 250,000 such letters from across the world. However, as most children (and many of their parents) no longer know what a real stamp is, incoming wish lists have become rather rare, leaving the Norwegian Santa mostly unemployed.

Neither the Swedes nor Finns want to risk falling out of relevance in the same way, so they have invested in even more concrete Christmas infrastructures. Not far from my town in Sweden, a city called Mora decided in the 1980s to establish “Santa Town” (Tomteland), a small village on the shores of Lake Siljan. Here, too, the strains of reality on fiction are visible. First of all, local legend wants us to believe that Santa and Rudolf arrived in the town on a meteorite 377 million years ago. And while the town is full of Christmas workshops and cozy, open-fire houses for figures like dwarfs and trolls, a nearby failing ski resort has also had to become the home of several hundred Syrian refugees.

Further north, in 1998, Finland built an underground Santa cavern, meant to emulate the legend’s mythic abode in the region. Located near the city of Rovaniemi, on the Artic Circle, the “Santa Park” has everything from traditional Santa buildings to wild amusement park rides. It’s situated just a few kilometers away from Rovaniemi International Airport—nowadays called the “Official Santa Claus Airport”—which over the last decade would bring in more than 600 flights filled with Santa tourists each December. But recently, warmer weather has ruined its sleigh rides, and the economic crisis throughout Europe has kept visitors away.

Given all the holes that reality is poking in these fairytales, maybe countries should give up the idea of owning the “only real Santa,” as several national tourist agencies have claimed. Maybe it’s time to go back to a “democratic” Santa, for and by the people, whose story can be told in any way a group of people choose. That’s a big part of the magic of holiday legends, after all, isn’t it? The Santa displays in my neighborhood, for instance, are only at the mercy of our individual taste in decorations (and jokes). They’re never canceled because of political trends or global economic cycles.

If we want a modern spin, maybe we should just think of Santa now the way we think of him on the Internet. Santa is everywhere and nowhere—and there’s little need for reality to change the narrative.

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