Anna Daniels

Thumbnail image for Budget Matters: The One Minute Citizen Goes to City Hall

Budget Matters: The One Minute Citizen Goes to City Hall

by Anna Daniels 05.22.2013 Activism

…because it is important to say “Yes.”

By Anna Daniels

Final Public Hearing on the Fy’14 Budget
Wednesday May 22, 2013 6PM- 9PM
202 C Street, City of San Diego Public Administration Building
12th floor City Council Chambers

Wednesday May 22 is the last day to provide public testimony about Mayor Filner’s budget before the San Diego City Council. This is the third and final public budget hearing. Inside I’m going to give readers a few reasons why they should make an appearance.

The past decade has been a tough one for San Diego residents. The Wall Street meltdown in 2008 was piled on top of the city’s long term structural deficits. In addition, there has been an effort to make government so small that it can be drowned in a bathtub. City Heights is one of a number of San Diego communities that was thrown out with the bath water.

Those of us who provided testimony at past budget hearings were there to say “no” to the budget presented by then Mayor Sanders. This year we have the opportunity to say “yes” to a budget.

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Thumbnail image for Do We Have the Will to Invest in Our Children? City Heights Youth Take the Lead for Free Mid-City Student Bus Passes

Do We Have the Will to Invest in Our Children? City Heights Youth Take the Lead for Free Mid-City Student Bus Passes

by Anna Daniels 05.15.2013 Activism

By Anna Daniels

Adults have historically established the parameters and content of public policies as they relate to children. The results in recent years have been ghastly as local and state governments have been starved of revenues by virtue of the economy. Conservatives are using the spending cuts necessitated by a weak economy to advance their ideology of small government, hoping to impose a permanent state of austerity on governmental entities.

One in five kids in this country lives in poverty. The ticket out of poverty has been access to quality education and the availability of jobs that provide economic security. Neither of these conditions are currently being met. The kids living in poverty now may very well spend their whole lives in poverty.

There has been an astounding sea change in City Heights as youth themselves have taken an informed and powerful lead in shaping public policy that affects their lives and their families. Mid-City CAN has been pivotal in mentoring and providing a platform for that leadership.

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Thumbnail image for The Continuing Long Hard Slog for Streetlights in City Heights

The Continuing Long Hard Slog for Streetlights in City Heights

by Anna Daniels 05.10.2013 Activism

By Anna Daniels

There isn’t any mystery as to why residents expect to have streetlights in their respective communities. It’s important to be able to see where you are walking at night; streetlights are an essential element of crime deterrence; and they contribute to our perceptions of personal safety.

City Heights is a transit dependent community and residents don’t tend to work bankers hours. Many of my neighbors go to work while it is still dark or return home when it is dark. Many of these commuting workers are women working in the hospitality and food service industries or providing in home personal care.

This is also a community that sustains elevated incidents of assault, robbery and break-ins. City Heights should be one of the best lit neighborhoods in the City of San Diego simply on the basis of need and yet it is unfunded $26 million for streetlights.

The City of San Diego does not get a free pass on this issue because of the economy. City Heights was starved of streetlights twenty five years ago when I moved here and it is still starved of that critical infrastructure investment. That real story here has little to do with the economy.

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Thumbnail image for Book Review: In Praise of Tomatoes A Year in the Life of a Home Tomato Grower

Book Review: In Praise of Tomatoes A Year in the Life of a Home Tomato Grower

by Anna Daniels 05.10.2013 Books & Poetry

A Golden Hill Vegetable Chain Letter that Knits the Neighborhood Together

By Anna Daniels

…It is Shepherd’s passion for growing tomatoes, resulting in his tomato patch close to the sidewalk in one of San Diego’s mid-city neighborhoods, that provides the framing “story” for his book. The story encompasses numerous connections that begin with soil and seeds and soon include family, neighbors, friends, a neighborhood and strangers past and present whose interests have also been ignited by the tomato.

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Thumbnail image for The New Arms Race? 3-D Printed Guns and the Power of the NRA

The New Arms Race? 3-D Printed Guns and the Power of the NRA

by Anna Daniels 05.07.2013 Activism

Will the Dawn of the WikiWeapon Threaten the NRA’s Sugar Daddy, Gun Manufacturers?

By Anna Daniels

The gun debate is about to going to get even more interesting. A video was just released of a 3-D printed gun, the Liberator, successfully firing a .380 caliber bullet. The gun, almost completely constructed of plastic, exploded into pieces however when a higher charge rifle cartridge was used.

The Liberator isn’t quite ready yet for prime time–staving off tyranny here at home, standing ground against kids with Skittles and bringing more blood and mayhem to our streets and homes. It’s efficacy is as yet unclear for suicidal purposes.

But the Liberator is big. This video captures the Liberator’s promise of something so big that it deserves a big heroic musical score, images of bombers in flight and a tumescent sun rise. “Fucking-A!”

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Thumbnail image for What My Mother Said: “Derby Day! Time to Sow Seeds!”

What My Mother Said: “Derby Day! Time to Sow Seeds!”

by Anna Daniels 05.04.2013 Culture

By Anna Daniels

My mother loved the horses. She grudgingly attended sulky races at The Meadows race track in western Pennsylvania, but it was flat racing that captivated her heart. She and my father would argue for days about the line up for the Kentucky Derby and lay bets with the local bookie; only the stupid or insane would dare to carry on a conversation anywhere close to the television set during the broadcast of this event.

Mom was also a devoted albeit quirky gardener–confident in her abilities to grow abundant vegetables and flowers and contemptuous of those who over-think the process. “Grow where you are planted” was delivered as an edict, not cajolery. Her gardening philosophy mirrored in many ways her philosophy on child rearing.

My younger sister and I were sitting in Mom’s kitchen a few decades ago discussing gardening. We had both thrown ourselves completely into turning our yards into beds for flowers, bushes and trees. We were comparing notes on the use of root toner when transplanting and whether to use fungicides on dahlia tubers. Seed catalogs passed between us for close review.

Mom stood at the table listening. “You two sure have more money than brains,” she pronounced. This was one of her favorite all-purpose phrases. “Do you know what I do? On Derby Day I go down into the basement and bring up the seeds I saved from last year and I throw them out into the beds. That’s it. What’s wrong with my gardens?”

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Thumbnail image for The Incredible Lightness of Being Able to Understand Mayor Filner’s 2014 Budget

The Incredible Lightness of Being Able to Understand Mayor Filner’s 2014 Budget

by Anna Daniels 05.01.2013 Activism

Community Power Affecting Budget Decisions that Impact Our Neighborhoods

by Anna Daniels

It is highly unusual for a group of strangers to smile broadly at each other and enthusiastically confess that the workshop they had just attended on how to read the City’s Capital Improvement Budget had been really interesting and very worthwhile. That is exactly what happened a few weeks ago when I got into the elevator with a group of people with whom I had just attended the Community Budget Alliance‘s hands on budget workshop held in City Heights.

It’s budget season! The total City Of San Diego budget is a whopping 2.7 billion dollars, with 1.1 billion dollars allocated to the General Fund, which is where the rubber meets the road in providing core services to residents- police and fire, libraries and recreation. Another 363 million dollars is allocated to the Capital Improvement Program.

This is the annual budget exercise to determine how well our need for safe, sustainable and livable neighborhoods will be met. Mayor Filner has made neighborhood services a top priority, which includes the revitalization of our neighborhood infrastructure. As residents, we should do much more than wait and see what happens– we should be informed and involved.

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Thumbnail image for Protest in City Heights of Controversial Ethiopian Consulate Meeting

Protest in City Heights of Controversial Ethiopian Consulate Meeting

by Anna Daniels 04.29.2013 Activism

Local Ethiopian Community Invited to Attend Meeting, Allege They Were Kicked Out for Protesting Ethiopian Government’s Human Rights Abuses

By Anna Daniels

Lines of taxicabs were parked along Fairmount Avenue in City Heights yesterday afternoon–Sunday April 28. Police cars were parked in front of the Golden Hall East African Community and Cultural Center where approximately sixty people were holding a protest that spilled into the adjacent parking lot. Signs with “Stop Human Rights Abuses” were visible among the group waving Ethiopian and American flags.

According to protesters, the Ethiopian Consulate from Los Angeles was barricaded inside the cultural center with an undetermined number of members of the San Diego and Los Angeles Ethiopian Community. The Consulate was attending a widely publicized meeting to promote the purchase of bonds to build a controversial dam in Ethiopia that threatens the livelihood of thousands of indigenous peoples.

Protesters maintained that flyers advertising the meeting had been left in City Heights Ethiopian markets and restaurants. One woman told me that when the protesting group entered the cultural center they were met with invectives, hostility and intimidation before being dispersed from the meeting which had been publicized as open to the public.

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Thumbnail image for A Freeway Runs Through It: A City Heights-Barrio Logan Conversation

A Freeway Runs Through It: A City Heights-Barrio Logan Conversation

by Anna Daniels 04.24.2013 Activism

Resistance, Vision and Community

By Anna Daniels

Chicano Park exists in Barrio Logan because of the construction of the San Diego-Coronado Bridge and the loss of property and displacement of lives that it caused. The community responded in a powerful, unique way. Residents couldn’t stop the construction, but they did lay claim to the land beneath the immense concrete pillars that enabled travelers above to make their way across the Coronado Bridge, oblivious to the transformation occurring below them. The land that was being readied for a California Highway Patrol substation was re-claimed as a long promised park. The reclamation began as a twelve day occupation that involved hundreds of people.

City Heights was likewise changed forever when eight city blocks along 40th Street- people’s homes and businesses–were scoured from the face of the earth in the early 1990′s to make way for the last connecting link of I-15, which extends from Canada to Mexico. City Heights would become a scorched earth community divided by an enormous ditch in keeping with Caltrans signature construction style.

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Thumbnail image for Why Do You Have a Fence in Front of Your Home?

Why Do You Have a Fence in Front of Your Home?

by Anna Daniels 04.10.2013 City Heights: Up Close & Personal

Thoughts on defensible spaces and private places

By Anna Daniels

A few days ago I realized that every single piece of residential property on my City Heights block, save one, has a fence and or a gate between the residence and the street. The business at the end of the block is also completely fenced.

I only became conscious of this fact after spending a number of hours last month walking along the side streets north of University Avenue a few blocks east and west of 30th Street in North Park. This area looks in many ways like the City Heights side streets off of University Avenue, farther to the east, where I now live. There are the same generic craftsman style detached houses and two story multi-unit apartments and condos, for the most part built more recently.

But these North Park side streets look different aesthetically in terms of the colors of paints utilized and kinds of landscaping; and they look different in terms of overall appearance than the area where I live. I was really struck by the fact that so many of the residences in this part of North Park, close to a busy commercial area, still do not have fences in front of the property.

So why are there so many fences in some parts of San Diego, and less or so few in others? Why are there so many more fences in the mid-city areas than there were thirty years ago, when I moved here? Do fences make good neighbors? Do fences make good neighborhoods?

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Thumbnail image for San Diego Street Trees: My Love-Hate Relationship with Palm Trees

San Diego Street Trees: My Love-Hate Relationship with Palm Trees

by Anna Daniels 04.03.2013 Activism

A requiem for the palm at the end of the mind

Street trees in urban areas are important. They provide a human scale to our surroundings and soften the mind numbing linearity of vast expanses of concrete. They clean the air we breathe and provide much appreciated shade. On an often unconscious level they impact our feelings about a street or neighborhood’s economic status and safety, which is to say its desirability as a place to walk or live.

A specific iconic tree can define where we live on a particular street or in the city of San Diego itself. For many residents of Ocean Beach, that iconic image is of a Torrey Pine. I can remember a spectacular late afternoon descent over the downtown cityscape which had been turned into a massive violet bouquet of blossoming jacaranda. And of course, there are the eucalyptus in Balboa Park and lining Park Boulevard.

But the ultimate iconic image in San Diego is of palm trees. A line of sixty foot palm trees silhouetted against the sky is a stirring sight, but it can only be appreciated from a distance and therein is the palm tree problem. Walking under or close to them day in and day out is a sure way to kill your palm tree passion.

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Thumbnail image for Springtime and the Art of Wisteria Hunting in San Diego

Springtime and the Art of Wisteria Hunting in San Diego

by Anna Daniels 03.27.2013 City Heights: Up Close & Personal

People in the eastern part of the country tend to think that Southern California is the land of no seasons and perpetual sunshine. Those of us who live here can produce rubber rain boots and hefty heating bills as proof otherwise.

This is my twenty-sixth spring in our little house on 45th Street in City Heights. Every February I start sniffing the air like a winter crazed creature until one day I can smell….It! “It” is an almost imperceptible whiff of a delicate green freshness rising from the moist cold earth and carried on the wind. I can hear Colette’s words– “To sing of spring would never do for me; I must go to meet it when it first strikes out through the long shadows, feeling its way…”

By mid- February the immense jasmine vine outside my window is filled with slender claret colored buds. It will burst into a cloud of fragrant shooting stars within a few weeks if the weather is warm. Spring, like all of the other seasons, is unpinned from calendar reckoning.

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Thumbnail image for Ten Years On: A Dying Mother, The Invasion of Iraq, and Samsay on the Porch

Ten Years On: A Dying Mother, The Invasion of Iraq, and Samsay on the Porch

by Anna Daniels 03.20.2013 City Heights: Up Close & Personal

Memory is a capricious thing- it shuffles all of those cards that signify the days, weeks and years of our lives and lays them out in a manner that doesn’t necessarily cleave to chronology– or even the truth.

 

I cut the deck, turn two cards face up on the table- the Queen of Hearts and the Jack of Clubs. It is March 13, 2003. I say that with certainty even though I do not trust my memory.

I have finished zipping up my suitcase and am nervously walking around the house stroking the cats and staring at the art on the walls as if it were for the last time. I will be taking a red eye flight to Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. My brother and sister have persuaded me that our mother is close to death. I would have one more chance at total denial of that indisputable fact.

My normal propensity for high drama was heightened significantly by the war drums that had been sounding for weeks, the rumblings that we were about to go to war, to invade Iraq. The sheer loathsomeness of Bush-Cheney had turned into something much darker, frightening and utterly incomprehensible. I was going to be 3,000 miles from My Beloved and my home while George W. Bush was explaining why war was necessary and inevitable.

So there you have the setting- The Queen of Hearts. The Jack of Clubs. But now one more card- The Joker. City Heights is always the Wild Card, the Joker, that becomes part of the mix. This place that I have called home for longer than anywhere else is a shape shifting character that looms large in my life, and so it was on March 13, 2003.

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Thumbnail image for A City Heights Response to the State of the Union Address (and the Responses to the State of the Union Address)

A City Heights Response to the State of the Union Address (and the Responses to the State of the Union Address)

by Anna Daniels 02.13.2013 Activism

I crawled groggily out of bed this morning and ambled out to the kitchen. My Beloved turned to me and said “I don’t know how many more State of the Unions I can handle.” Last night we listened to President Obama’s hour long speech, then Republican Savior-in-Training Senator Marco Rubio’s, followed by Congressman Rand Paul’s, as the voice of the Tea Party, which is the other white meat of the Republican party. Afterward, we smoked.

The Designated Survivor One odd little factoid that was revealed during the pre-speech(es) buildup was that Energy Secretary Steven Chu was selected to skip this year’s address.

Because the president, vice president, lawmakers, Cabinet secretaries, Supreme Court justices and members of the military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff are all sitting together in a confined space in the Capitol, one Cabinet member is chosen to skip the speech every year.

The concept of a designated survivor is an interesting one.

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Thumbnail image for Graffiti and Shattered Glass on 45th Street: Unknown Causes, Unclear Remedies

Graffiti and Shattered Glass on 45th Street: Unknown Causes, Unclear Remedies

by Anna Daniels 02.06.2013 Activism

A few days ago I was sipping my morning coffee and heard loud voices in front of our little house on 45th Street in City Heights. I walked outside to find two neighbors gathered around the broken windshield of a car parked there. Their voices were strained and angry. Then they would go quiet for a few shocked moments before resuming the conversation.

This is the third time that the windshield of this particular car has been smashed. James poked around in the plants outside my fence and found a large triangular rock that fit the bill for the weapon used to smash the windshield. I learned that this particular car has also been hit in the past with graffiti and its tank filled with sugar.

The conversation changed to one of speculation about motives. Was there something about the owner of the car that engendered these acts of vandalism? This is City Heights, so the first question is whether the vandalism was gang motivated, right?

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Thumbnail image for The Inexact Cartography of the Heart: Going Home

The Inexact Cartography of the Heart: Going Home

by Anna Daniels 01.30.2013 City Heights: Up Close & Personal

When neighbors in City Heights talk about going home, that home may be as close as Los Angeles or Tucson, or as far away as Vietnam, Eritrea or the Philippines. My neighbors have family in Mexico and make an annual December pilgrimage to Mexicali or Oaxaca so that their children can spend Christmas with their grandparents, their abuelos.

Distance, which translates into time and money, and unstable political circumstances in one’s home country are limiters on whether the wish to return home for a visit is ever realized. But beyond those considerations, can you go home if your home no longer exists?

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Thumbnail image for A Different Kind of Listening: John Cage on 45th Street

A Different Kind of Listening: John Cage on 45th Street

by Anna Daniels 01.23.2013 Activism

It is only half past January and I have had it up to here, estoy harta, with the right wing rage and whining that followed the election; enough, basta already, to the manufactured misery of the fiscal cliff and debt ceiling threats that immediately shut out the voices of citizens who made their intentions and desires known in the November election. There is a ringing in my ears from the dreadful noise, and I worry about my ability to hear what is really important and stay focused. …

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Thumbnail image for Dear Mayor Filner: Can We Talk about Gun Violence and City Heights?

Dear Mayor Filner: Can We Talk about Gun Violence and City Heights?

by Anna Daniels 01.16.2013 City Heights: Up Close & Personal

Dear Mayor Filner: The Sandy Hook school massacre last month has opened a national conversation about gun violence in this country, and well it should. The lives of twenty-six human beings, the majority of whom still had their baby teeth, were snuffed out in the amount of time it took to discharge a high capacity magazine from a gun that was developed for the military’s conduct of war.

It didn’t take much time and the devastation was total, consistent with the military’s expectations in the conduct of war, and so not consistent with our assumptions of what it means to send our children in safety to elementary school.

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Thumbnail image for The Celebrations Continue: Three Wise Men and a Rosca, Orthodox Christmas and Rusyns

The Celebrations Continue: Three Wise Men and a Rosca, Orthodox Christmas and Rusyns

by Anna Daniels 01.04.2013 City Heights: Up Close & Personal

This was a wonderful year for Christmas lights in my City Heights neighborhood. They cheerfully, often exuberantly, illuminated the night from the day after Thanksgiving until the day after New Year’s. It is sad to see them extinguished, put away, for yet another year, although ours stay up in the house year round. You can never have enough illumination in the darkness…

But that is not to say the seasonal celebrations are over- far from it. Sunday January 6th is the Three Kings Day celebration in Mexico and other Spanish speaking cultures; it is also Orthodox Christmas Eve for those religious traditions based upon the Julian calendar, as opposed to our Gregorian calendar. What that boils down to is that I have to order my rosca de reyes so that I can take it to our Orthodox Christmas Eve dinner.

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Thumbnail image for The Euclid Tower and the Ghost of Christmas Past

The Euclid Tower and the Ghost of Christmas Past

by Anna Daniels 12.29.2012 Activism

I’m sure that there are a number of us who can still remember the Euclid Tower before it was re-imagined with bright paint and a dazzling design. In 1988, when My Beloved and I moved into our little house on 45th street, the Euclid Tower jutted above the streetscape like a grey missile poised for launch. Its graceful art deco architecture and lovely leaded glass lotus windows couldn’t redeem it from a peeling cold war paint job.

I can also remember not only the grey paint job, but the smiling face of Old Saint Nick providing some inscrutable message of good cheer for a number of years over the neon signage of the Tower Bar. There was nothing quite like the 4th of July and looking up at the peeling Tower with Saint Nick beaming down upon us. This was how I knew I was home in my thoroughly mixed up community of City Heights. And stone cold sober.

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