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Us He Devours: Government by Crisis, a Shutdown in Wartime

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By Anna Daniels

It is easy to imagine that the Republican hostage taking in Congress is little more than a great deal of sound and too much fury that signifies nothing to ordinary people living ordinary lives outside of the Beltway. The words “shutdown” and “default” don’t enter into conversations very often here, John Boehner is an unknown and that is perfectly fine with the madmen and madwomen who are much more concerned about being disrespected, waiting for the end time and the perfect photo-op.

The people who live here on 45th Street keep talking about the same things they have been talking about for the past five or six years– they are looking for full time work that pays a livable wage, affordable housing, health care and enough money to get the car fixed and buy school clothes for their kids. There is also an urgency for the children who were brought into this country without documents to receive legal status through the Dream Act.

It is easy to imagine that these two worlds don’t intersect, but that is not the case at all.   [Read more…]

Travelers on the Street of Dreams

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“My challenge is to finish high school as a teenage Mom”

By Anna Daniels

Once a year Teresa Gunn, artistic director and founder of Street of Dreams, stands before a full house in the City College Saville Theatre and opens the student performance with these words:

We have the highest prison population that we have ever had in the history of the country. At Street of Dreams we are not willing to put another generation of people in prison because we lack the humanity to produce a creative solution. The solution is education and community collaboration. Street of Dreams is part of the solution.

Street of Dreams has been part of that solution since its founding in 1998, when Teresa Gunn recognized that the power of story telling and arts education could provide a path out of poverty and inter-generational incarceration and addiction for young mothers who had found themselves in the juvenile justice system.   [Read more…]

Surviving an Active Shooter Event: Run-Hide-Fight is the New Duck and Cover

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Because we take public safety seriously

By Anna Daniels

Americans have apparently decided that events like those happening today in DC are acts of God like the Colorado floods or hurricanes in the Atlantic. There’s nothing we can do to prevent it. Mass shootings are the American Way. Digby Hullabaloo

Homeland Security provided funds for this Texas Public Service Announcement so that citizens are better prepared to deal with an unhinged shooter in their school, workplace, church/mosque/temple, movie theater or any of the other myriad public places in which they erroneously assume that they should be able to gather without the fear of being murdered.   [Read more…]

King Tut in City Heights

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Egyptian Revival Architecture on Euclid Avenue

By Anna Daniels

It is difficult to imagine the excitement and personal interest in Egyptian antiquities that Howard Carter’s discovery of King Tutankhamen’s 3,000 year old tomb engendered in 1922. A series of sealed chambers were filled with so many funerary objects that it took days to remove them on stretchers. The final chamber which included the nested sarcophagi of the “Boy King” was filled with dazzling gold and blue adornments and objects provided for Tut’s journey into the after life. Carter had hit the archeological mother lode.

The discovery of the tomb was significant for Egyptologists and it also caught the imagination of the European and American public. Travels to Egypt to view the antiquities became even more popular. Jewelers recreated designs found in the tomb. Scarab rings and brooches became fashionable.   [Read more…]

City Heights Prepares for Obamacare: How Outreach Will Affect Enrollment

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By Anna Daniels

While Republicans are busily obstructing and attempting to de-fund (but not replace) Obamacare, California has been gearing up for the day when a significant number of its 7.1 million uninsured residents under the age of 65 can sign up for health insurance on the State’s health care exchange. That day is October 1, 2013. The insurance itself will go into effect on January 1, 2014. All Americans must be insured by tax time next year or face a penalty – 1 percent of their annual income or $95, whichever is higher.

There is a great deal at stake here in City Heights for making the enrollment period a success. There is a great deal at stake here in City Heights for making the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) a success. There is a higher percentage of uninsured adults and children in City Heights than the county and state averages. There are fewer working adults in City Heights with insurance coverage–only 49% compared with 65% of county residents. This translates into lower levels of preventive and routine health care access– the very things that Obamacare will provide. “All new health plans must cover essential health benefits such as doctor visits, hospitalization, emergency care,maternity, pediatric care for your kids and prescriptions,among other services. ”   [Read more…]

Who in the World Lives in City Heights?

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Karen, Kachin and Shan join South Sudanese, Vietnamese and Mexicans

By Anna Daniels

Over forty percent of City Heights residents are foreign born. La Maestra, which operates health clinics in City Heights, recently provided a memorable introduction to some of our foreign born neighbors when over a dozen residents took to the fashion runway wearing traditional clothing. Their poise belies the fact that many arrived in this country with little more than hope and determination. It is easy to understand why the fashion show is described as the highlight of La Maestra’s gala fundraiser.   [Read more…]

Summertime City Heights: Variations on a Planetary Theme

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Perfumed Nights, Skunks, Spiders, Clouds, Bird Calls and Kittens

By Anna Daniels

Spring is all about sex and sugar. The birds, skunks, opossums and cats were doing “it” while the vegetative world turned green, tendrilled and flowering. Summer on the other hand is about flight and foraging, storing up and going to seed, with more sex thrown in just because that’s how it works for spiders. And that’s how it works for cats, to my great dismay.

All this happens here in City Heights, in this flat, densely populated, concrete covered place. This summer has held surprises, variations on the planetary theme of long warm sunshine filled days. Even here in the city we live within a natural world that is shaped by the cycle of seasons.   [Read more…]

City Heights, Where the Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round

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Transit Dependent Communities, Social Equity and Environmental Justice

By Anna Daniels

There is no trolley route through City Heights. This deficiency is not for a lack of trying. In the early 1990’s residents were advocating for significant mitigation to the construction of I-15 through the community. The proposed mitigation included the construction of a trolley line in the center of the freeway that would efficiently carry City Heights residents north and south to their jobs and concentrated employment centers.

The short story is that the steep freeway incline/grade made a trolley route infeasible. So while the heavily transit dependent community of City Heights does not have a trolley, it does have buses and will continue to rely upon buses. If you can get past trolley envy, buses become the workable solution to transit needs.

For decades, the highest bus rider ship in the whole Metropolitan Transit System (MTS) has been on the Number 7 bus. This one bus route carries a whopping 3,903,109 passengers annually. To put this in perspective, the Green and Orange trolley lines each record around seven million passengers annually. The Number 7 bus is a plodding workhorse, definitely not a racehorse.
  [Read more…]

Welcome to City Heights!

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By Anna Daniels

It is hard to make generalizations about a community with over 75,000 residents. It is even harder to make generalizations about a community in which 41% of the residents are foreign born and those residents were born in over thirty different countries. City Heights must be understood in bits and shape shifting pieces.

To understand City Heights, it must be rolled across the tongue and savored in the local markets and restaurants. It must be heard in the cacophony of buses, street vendors, garbage trucks, music from quinceañeras and children’s voices. It must be felt on an early morning canyon walk.

The San Diego Free Press focus on City Heights will be delivered up over the next month as a fragmented incomplete narrative. Twenty-one percent of the residents here speak no or little English. It is a daunting challenge to provide a way for myriad disparate voices to be heard. In the upcoming weeks we’ll be covering a variety of topics and people.   [Read more…]

Mayor Bob Filner and the Shame that Has No Name

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By Anna Daniels

When Bob Filner was campaigning for mayor last year, he was a visible presence in City Heights. He showed up to support public transit initiatives; he attended the rally calling for George Zimmerman to be charged with murder in the death of Trayvon Martin.

Filner listened to mid-city youth advocating for a skate board park and free bus passes for low income students to get to school and work. He listened to taxi drivers advocating for livable wages and safe working conditions and called for additional library hours. He recognized the importance of streetlights and supported the needs of vets and the homeless.

These are all tangible meaningful issues in City Heights. For the first time in my memory, a mayoral candidate acknowledged not only the importance of our government in addressing these needs, but our government’s ability to do so–right here in City Heights.   [Read more…]

“Dad, Are You Happy?”

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A Baby Boomer Daughter’s Conversation with Her Depression Era Father

By Anna Daniels

I am sitting with my eighty-two year old father in the back yard of the house I had grown up in. It is summertime and we are sitting in lawn chairs talking and drinking sweet tea.

“Dad, are you happy?” I ask. He sits silently for a while, as if he were carefully pondering something he had never considered before.

“Well, yes, I’m happy,” he finally responds. “I put a roof over my family’s head and food on the table. You are all educated and have your own homes and families. You bet I’m a happy man.”

It was now my turn to fall silent.   [Read more…]

Tying Up Loose Ends: Around City Heights, Jacaranda Weather, Too Many Cats and This Very Old House

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By Anna Daniels

I’m taking a month off from writing my weekly column and will return July 10. Next week I will start working on projects that have piled up inside and outside our aged house–more on that below–and nothing will get done once the weather turns hot.

City Heights News–the very good, the good and too soon to tell… City Heights will be getting its first skate park plaza! The Central Avenue Mini-Park and Skate Plaza in City will include a tot lot, a playground for older children, small open turf area for passive recreation, a plaza with games, landscaping, and relocation of trees.

This is the very good news-construction will begin in October 2014 and the park will be open to the public in November 2015. Congratulations and thanks to the amazing skateboard community, Mid-City CAN, Council members Marti Emerald, Todd Gloria and Mayor Filner.   [Read more…]

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