/>INFORMATION FOR JUNE 5 2018 PRIMARY HERE.
Here are some frequently asked questions about election day voting in San Diego County. In order to vote, you must be a U.S. citizen and you must already be registered to vote. There is no same day registration in CA.
Seventeen hundred dollars. Seventeen hundred dollars has become the standard monthly rent for a two bedroom apartment in City Heights. Over the past six months many residents who were paying around fourteen hundred dollars a month for a two bedroom apartment saw their monthly rents suddenly increase– by hundreds of dollars.
The increase in rents does not reflect a sudden investment by the property owners in additional amenities associated with gentrification. Property owners are raising the rent simply because they can. It’s the same housing stock, sometimes poorly maintained, at rental prices that are out of reach in a community with an average household income of thirty-three thousand dollars per year. [Read more…]
Art and life seamlessly merged a few weeks ago at Border X Brewery in Barrio Logan. It was the site of a launch party for Emmy award winning filmmaker Paul Espinosa’s latest project, a full length documentary about San Diego activist and musician Ramon “Chunky” Sanchez. It was a career milestone for both Espinosa, who is probably best known in San Diego for his critically acclaimed production of The Lemon Grove Incident and Chunky whose music has been a voice for social justice for over thirty years. [Read more…]
Around this time last year, the city of San Diego signed an Economic Development Assistance Agreement with Illumina, Inc. It was approved on August 7th as a “Consent Item” without pre-hearing noticing. The ten year deal included a promise to rebate $1.5 million in sales and use taxes in return for retaining “over 100 middle-wage manufacturing job opportunities” in San Diego.
SDFP editor Doug Porter wrote at the time Illumina is in the genomics business, and it is exactly the kind of company the city should be encouraging to put down roots and prosper here. This deal made by the Faulconer administration, however, is exactly the kind of governance the city doesn’t need.
So how is Illumina doing one year later? What has the public received in return for its largesse? [Read more…]
Yesterday, August 17, twenty of San Diego’s media outlets participated in a focused effort to call attention to the tremendous human, financial and societal costs associated with homelessness in San Diego. If we were writing about another country, we would be referring to the humanitarian crisis posed by a growing number of Internally Displaced Persons (IDP), but this is sunny San Diego.
It remains to be seen whether the well greased wheels of San Diego politics and commerce are altered in any way after yesterday’s concerted effort, but I can speak with some certainty about a few things that haven’t changed today. [Read more…]
Halina is dead.
The effervescent petite blonde with the ebullient smear of sky blue eyeshadow above her sky blue eyes died in a residential hotel earlier this year.
I met Halina over a decade ago while I was working at the information desk of the old Central Library downtown on E Street. She was in the library searching for information on how to replace a lost ID. On a return trip she was looking for the address of her daughter Jessica.
She was a memorable presence—that sky blue eyeshadow, the girlish laugh, her genuine gratitude with the assistance she received. Halina would return to the library to simply say hello or to request all over again information on how to replace her lost ID or find Jessica’s address. [Read more…]
The local news recently carried two short articles about stabbings that had taken place. The headline of one article identified a woman as the victim while the other identified the victim as a transient.
Why did 10News choose to use gender in one description and the victim’s lack of housing in the other, instead of using a gender description in both? Does this journalistic decision matter? [Read more…]
Keep an eye on some of the new ballot proposals that have been filed recently with the San Diego City Clerk. These proposals reflect focused citizen participation that offer correctives to the city’s Citizen Review Board on Police Practices (CRB) and the county’s meager health and human services. These small “d” democratic efforts also happen to be spearheaded by women. [Read more…]
Last year at the San Diego Free Press third birthday celebration at Border X Brewery in Barrio Logan, an extensive collection of the first iteration of SDFP, circa 1968, was on display. Bud Sonka had kept these paper copies in an oversize folio box these past decades and brought them out to the surprise and delight of all of us. The term “archivist” could now also be added to Bud’s lifelong accomplishments as an agitator and intellectual. And mahjong player.
Bud passed away last week. We have not had time to pull together the celebration of his life that he deserves because we were out organizing and agitating in response to Donald Trump’s appearance in San Diego. We think Bud would have approved of how we spent our time. [Read more…]
I have attended close to a decade of budget hearings, always as an advocate for our library system.
But this year is different. I stand here before you as a person of conscience who has been witnessing first hand a burgeoning and permanent underclass of the dispossessed in City Heights and San Diego.
A growing population among us cannot find affordable places to live or jobs that pay a living wage. This is a crisis that we cannot ignore. Once people are reduced to living in the streets or their cars or a canyon the human and financial costs spiral out of control, becoming yet another crisis. [Read more…]
The League of Women Voters and community radio station KNSJ hosted a city attorney candidate forum at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law in downtown San Diego on Saturday May 14. I had been asked to participate as a media representative on the panel asking questions of the candidates.
The 94 freeway exit that my husband and I took downtown to the event dumps cars on a surface street on the fringe of East Village. We drove through a convulsed urban landscape created by CalTrans engineering, deteriorating Victorian era houses, new apartments and temporarily re-purposed vacant lots. This entry point reflects how San Diego’s decision makers have approached land use and development in the area over many decades and to wildly different effect.
Weekends in San Diego are always chock full of events that provide often competing opportunities to be entertained and informed and to spend time with friends and family. Two upcoming events on Saturday April 30 are particularly noteworthy because of the diverse topics and the venues–two City of San Diego public libraries in two unique communities.
Frank Gormlie, local political muckraker and gadfly, editor of our sister publication OB Rag and editorial board member of SDFP, will lead an hour discussion about Ocean Beach Hippies and how Ocean Beach became San Diego’s Haight-Ashbury, circa 1967. [Read more…]
