By Anna Daniels
The first of two storms expected to move through the San Diego region this week arrived last night with steady moderate rainfall here in City Heights.
It was sixty degrees on the porch at 6:00 am this morning. The cats had taken shelter there and were curled up in loosely strewn bedding. I was still bed warm and savoring the first cup of coffee. Then I remembered this:
Over 140k ppl have now viewed this video of @CityofSanDiego throwing away a homeless person’s tent before the rainstorms hit this week. pic.twitter.com/QMY3KK8Pfp
— Michael McConnell (@HomelessnessSD) December 22, 2016
This is a video of city workers throwing away a homeless person’s tent before the rainstorms hit this week. The bulging bottom of the tent is obviously that person’s belongings. Michael McConnell posted the video and over 140 thousand people have viewed it.
Viewing the video is not good enough. We can do better.
Call to Action!
Women Occupy San Diego is circulating a Change.org petition calling upon Mayor Faulconer to confront the nightmare of homelessness. They are demanding Emergency Humanitarian Action to stop criminalizing homeless people in San Diego. Over 500 people have signed the petition. Have you added your name to it? Have you forwarded it to friends?
There is no guarantee of course that a petition can make a difference. But consider this–what is guaranteed is that some of our neighbors in the streets who have had their only shelter and source of safety destroyed by the city will face another colder, windier storm that is expected to arrive tonight.
Can you imagine that?
Anna Daniels
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I am trying to understand why they can not keep their tents. they have come up with a solution and deserve to have a warm place to sleep even if it is a tent. I keep trying to understand how this city can be so “concerned about nothing and let people live on the street.
It’s a crime, a crime against those who can not defend themselves.
OMG Anna, I love you. As a citizen of America’s so-called Finest City and a native San Diegan, at that, I was deeply saddened by this video. As a city employee, it makes my blood boil that this is “okay”? Well, not in my name. Why is deplorable the word of 2016?
Has a mayoral recall been attempted, if not, how can it get started ?
Why can’t the City designate an area in which it is OK to have a tent? You’d think they could even provide one or two amenities there too like a couple of port-a-potties.
THANK YOU for continuing to write about the things that truly matter.
Downtown development (gentrification) destroyed more than 9,000 units of low-income housing, making at least 9,000 people homeless.
“Renovations,” another form of gentrification, spends millions of dollars of low-income housing funds to destroy more low-income housing and to force more people into homelessness by turning their housing into high-stress, highly toxic, punitive environments run more like prisons than like housing.
Anyone who destroys even one unit of low income housing is a criminal because they made another person homeless just so that they could increase the property value and profit by making people homeless.
It is the city leaders and real estate developers who have created the homelessness problem in San Diego. They’ve made billions of dollars by destroying low-income housing and replacing it with unaffordable housing, to force out local residents and replace them with wealthy people from elsewhere.
It is a crime to make people homeless. It is the city leaders and real estate developers who are the real criminals. They’re the ones who deserve to be homeless and penniless because prison is too good for them.
The San Diego Housing Commission, according to its President and Chief Executive Office, Richard “Rick” Gentry, housed 6,500 homeless people last year, or at least he was quoted as saying that in a recent U-T article. But they only created fewer than 600 new units of low income housing. So 6,000 existing low income tenants had to have been made homeless so that their units could be rented to new tenants, in order to bolster Gentry’s numbers and justify the millions of dollars of low-income housing funds misspent.
Look at the recently renovated Hotel Churchill. Twenty million dollars were spend on the renovations, resulting in 20 fewer low-income housing units than before. For every million dollars spent on low income housing San Diego gets one less unit of low-income housing. The wealthy city leaders and real estate developers aren’t stupid–they know exactly what they’re doing. They’re using low-income housing funds to REDUCE the availability of low-income housing, which increases homelessness. If they weren’t the ones making the laws, they’d be the ones being criminalized.
Mark, your analysis is correct. We are essentially publicly funding homelessness by way of our Housing Commission, that does not track the loss of affordable housing, per Gentry, because their charter doesn’t require them to, which is felony stupid. Change the damn charter. We are creating homelessness when vouchers are handed out for affordable housing that doesn’t exist in lieu of subsidies to people like the elderly blind woman who is now in the streets because she can no longer afford the rent and eat on her fixed income.
We are publicly funding homelessness when the city does not enforce its own ordinances regarding the removal of housing stock with no replacement.
We are publicly funding homelessness through public private partnerships which benefit the private partners but not the public interests, which should be tantamount.
Are we ready to exert all the moral pressure that can be brought to bear on these publicly funded entities?
Rick Gentry lied that the San Diego Housing Commission (SDHC) does not have to track the destruction of Affordable Housing Units of Last Resort. The main goal of the SDHC is Preservation and Conservation of existing “At-Risk” Affordable Housing and SRO units.
State law and our Housing Element 2013-2020 requires the (SDHC) to track destruction and demolition of “At-Risk” Affordable Housing Units and Single Room Occupancy (SRO) Hotels, and turn in results to the State every year.
http://tinyurl.com/20130304b See Pages 70-96.
The SDHC, the City’s Development Services Department (DSD), Civic San Diego, and the Planning Commission are all in charge of preserving existing affordable housing through the Permitting Process. All City leaders should not have issued Demolition Permits, without the required 3.5 years of Relocation assistance.
Well, La Playa Heritage, from what you say and from what I’ve learned, it seems that Gentry is doing more to put low-income housing at risk than to preserve and conserve it.
I’ve been told, but have no way of confirming, that Gentry’s background is investment advice. It makes me wonder if the city officials who let him handle city decisions with regard to low-income housing, might just happen to be beneficiaries of his investment advice. If they are somehow profiting from his decisions, they would have no reason to intervene and every incentive not to.
As for frail, elderly, low-income tenants whose lives are undoubtedly shortened by being subjected to the extreme stress of living in a building during a year of major renovations and then being subjected to a harsh and restrictive new management regime, causing many of us to end up homeless and/or sicken and die, I guess nobody is tracking us, as the city leaves that up to Gentry, and Gentry believes that it isn’t his responsibility.
Thank you, Anna. But I have reason to believe that moral pressure may not be sufficient because the real estate industry appears to exert undue influence over San Diego elections and appointments. As far as I have been able to ascertain, nobody takes office in San Diego without the blessing of the real estate industry.
A few months ago I stopped by the office of Leonardo Alarcon, whose title is HUD Programs Administrator – Project Manager for the City of San Diego’s office of Economic Development, to ask him if any city funds had been used in the renovation of a particular senior building. He told me he didn’t know, so I asked him how it was possible that he wouldn’t know if his office had approved funds for a specific project. His reply was, “We let the Housing Commission handle that for us.”
Housing Development Partners (HDP) of San Diego is an affiliate of the Housing Commission. It is a non-profit corporation that carries out many renovations on senior buildings. HDP is a legally separate entity from the SDHC, although Rick Gentry appears to be the head of the board of directors for both. From my perspective, it looks very much like Gentry has the power to award low-income housing contracts to a corporation he personally controls, without any interference from the city.
In the case of San Diego Square, the project-based HUD-subsidized senior building where I live, HDP carried out unnecessary renovations, increasing the floor space of apartments that were already among the largest available to low-income tenants. By needlessly increasing the floor space of each unit, HDP was able to double the market value of each unit, thereby doubling the HUD subsidy it receives. The purpose of the renovation was announced as being to secure low income housing for the tenants, however the increased HUD subsidies have the effect of depleting scarce HUD funding at a time when Congress has been steadily slashing HUD funding, thus endangering low-income housing rather than securing it. As HUD funding is cut, HUD has no choice but to stop subsidizing some housing, and it is the most expensive units that are likely to go on the chopping block first.
In the interests of full disclosure, I want to say that I am in the process of suing Housing Development Partners.
My lawsuit does not ask for money or any other form of compensation, although I have suffered greatly from the stress of renovations and from the punitive management regime they imposed.
All I ask is that the status quo be maintained and that they not be allowed to inflict any more stress or impose any new restrictions.
They have retained counsel and are vigorously defending their right to carry out their stated intention to impose new restrictions and inflict further stress.
The San Diego Housing Commission, of which Housing Development Partners is an affiliate, is, according to a recent newspaper article, one of the top housing commissions in the country when it comes to expending legal fees.
They are certainly spending money on this litigation, where there is no money at stake whatsoever. The only consequence if they were to lose the case, would be that they would not be allowed to inflict further stress on me and on other tenants in this building. Apparently, from their point of view, this is too much to ask and an infringement on their right as a landlord.
It is my personal belief, although I have no way of proving it to a court, that the real reason HDP is so protective of its right to inflict stress on tenants is that they desperately need the ability to force existing low-income tenants out of existing low-income housing, so that they can rent our units to new tenants to bolster Gentry’s impossible numbers. There’s no way that he can have actually housed thousands of homeless people by creating a few hundred new units of low-income housing, except by forcing out thousands of existing low-income tenants and re-renting their units. To do this, he needs the right and ability to inflict as much stress as possible on existing low-income tenants, so that we’ll sicken and die or become homeless by choice in an attempt to escape the stress he inflicts.
According to KPBS city of SD did not open shelters last night (Friday 23) despite saying they would. Where does the buck stop on this gut wrenching act of cruelty? Call Mayor Faulconer on Monday. 619-236-6330