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Swaggerin’ Donald Reaches Out to the Free Press

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Donald Trump is finally reaching out to the readers of the San Diego Free Press in an attempt to cover all the bases and pick up Bernie Sanders voters. After all, they agree on many issues including fair trade rather than free trade. They both want to bring those jobs home. Here is what he had to say:

Hi true Americans. It’s the Donald here. I’m gonna make America great again. We’re going to have the strongest military and NATO is going to pay for it. That’s right. We’ve been giving them free protection for years so they can sit around in their bistros drinking lattes and eating gelato. They can whoop it up in their biergartens while we sit here paying a trillion dollars a year to protect them. From whom? From Russia? Give me a break.   [Read more…]

Is Affordable Housing In the City of San Diego an Oxymoron? Part 4

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Section 8 Rental Assistance is a Cruel Joke

By Katheryn Rhodes and John Lawrence

Approximately 46,000 households in San Diego are on a waiting list to obtain a federal Housing Choice Voucher (Section 8). The average wait time to obtain a housing voucher is 8 to 10 years.

Nobody’s housing needs remain constant over a period of time that long. Many people on the waiting list will have died before they are called for their Section 8 rental assistance voucher. Cruel irony.   [Read more…]

A Jazzy San Diego Weekend: Two Worlds Merged Rather Than Collided

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Flute Fusion with Holly Hofmann and Beth Ross-Buckley; Jazz @ the Jacobs with Gregory Porter

A packed house at the Mingei Museum in Balboa Park was treated to a flute duo billed as Flute Fusion featuring Holly Hofmann, inveterate jazz flautist and promoter, along with Beth Ross-Buckley, classical flautist and promoter. Both Holly and Beth have been long time music presenters in San Diego. Holly started at the Horton Grand and had a memorable gig for many years at the San Diego Museum of Art. Beth started a chamber music group called Camarada in 1994. This night they joined forces.   [Read more…]

Rent Going Up? Planning to Move? Welcome to the Street

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This article was originally published in the 1969 print edition of the San Diego Free Press. It follows on to our 4 part series on affordable housing in San Diego. So what else is new? Nothing except the price of real estate. [Items in parentheses are my updated comments.] 

The housing situation in San Diego, especially for people with low incomes, bears all the earmarks of a terminal illness. The condition is grave and seems destined to get worse. The City will tell you that 1968 was a year in which San Diego experienced a record boom in housing construction, but their figures are completely misleading. It is true that there were 12,525 units of housing begun in 1968, as compared with 6,100 units in 1967, and that while city building doubled, rural building was up 47% in 1968 over the previous year. Yet most of this activity was in the realm of plush apartments and condominiums which cater to middle and high-income groups, thus leaving people with low incomes at the mercy of soaring prices and a vacancy rate for the entire city of less than one percent.   [Read more…]

Is Affordable Housing in the City of San Diego an Oxymoron? Part 3

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The City Needs to Build and Own More Affordable Units

According to a recent Zillow report: “Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose, and San Diego are unaffordable for both renters and buyers. … Looking forward, the picture doesn’t look bright for renters. Rents will likely keep rising at roughly their current pace for at least the next few years, which will lead to a continued affordability crunch unless wage growth significantly improves.”

Enter the San Diego Housing Commission (SDHC) whose job is to redress the balance of unaffordable rents to make it possible for San Diego to be inhabited by other than rich folks.

The San Diego Housing Commission (SDHC) does a variety of projects to assist low and moderate income folks. From their website, it would seem that they are doing a lot, but is it merely tokenism or are they using all available resources to build affordable housing as quickly as possible? After all, there is a declared emergency in terms of the increasing numbers of the homeless population that aren’t being taken care of.   [Read more…]

Puerto Rico is the Next Greece

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It‘s the Same Old MO: Entice With Money, Then Foreclose

It’s deja vu all over again as Yogi Berra would say. Another country that went down the road of debt accumulation just to pay for essential public services. Since Puerto Ricans are born American citizens, you’d think that Puerto Rico could just declare bankruptcy as Detroit, Birmingham and San Bernardino did. But no, US law forbids that.

On May 2, a bond payment of $422 million was missed, and a $2 billion payment comes due in July. There’s no way Puerto Rico can pay. Puerto Rico is begging Congress for debt relief. But no debt relief is in sight.

Here are the facts: Puerto Rico is $70 billion in debt. 45% of the people live in poverty. The unemployment rate is over 12%.   [Read more…]

Is Affordable Housing in the City of San Diego an Oxymoron? Part 2

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Homeless Population Undercounted

The 8700 people identified by the Point-In-Time-Count are not anywhere close to the total number of homeless people in San Diego City and County. They didn’t count all the people sleeping in their cars nor the many that are staying with friends or couch surfing. Nor did they count the many that sleep “off the beaten track” in the many hidden gullies and the river bed. Nor did it count all those who slept in places unlikely to be found by the volunteers who did the counting who, after all, could not be expected to expose themselves to dangerous situations and environments.

Jeeni Crescenzo has come up with a more accurate count by studying the data for homeless children that each school district is required to maintain by the McKinney-Vento Act. There are some 22,000 children by this count and each has at least one parent with them. That’s at least 22,000 families and 44,000 people!   [Read more…]

Is Affordable Housing in the City of San Diego an Oxymoron? Part 1

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The City has squirreled away millions of dollars in off-budget funds which could be used for affordable housing and housing for the homeless

By Katheryn Rhodes and John Lawrence

In the City of Palo Alto, if you make less than $250,000 a year, you’re eligible for a housing subsidy. The city council has voted to study a housing proposal that would essentially subsidize new housing for what qualifies as middle-class nowadays, families making from $150,000 to $250,000 a year.

Here in San Diego the situation is not much better as teachers, police and government workers cannot afford to live in the city they work in. So if middle class, college educated professionals can’t afford to live here, how can anyone else lower on the economic ladder afford to live here either? In particular those on the bottom most rung, the homeless, can’t even afford a foot in the door.   [Read more…]

The San Diego Chargers Convadium – Part 1: 110 Pages of Gobbledygook

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On Saturday, April 2, the Chargers published a whole section of the San Diego Union-Tribune devoted to their proposal to build a football stadium for the Chargers combined with a non-contiguous expansion of the Convention Center. The title of this section was “Notice of Intent to Circulate Petition.” Right off the bat I found several things wrong with this proposal. But before I go into that I want to discuss the MAJOR thing wrong with this proposal.

You see the Chargers think combining a Convention Center Expansion with a new stadium will make it more palatable to San Diego voters especially if the tax that will be raised to pay for it will be a tax on visitors not on locals. This will make it possible to wring money out of hotel tax increases to pay for a third of their stadium. But not only that, the $1.15 billion in bonds that the City (actually a subsidiary of the City – a Stadium Authority) will issue will pay the entire cost of the convention center annex. I don’t think a better combination of a football stadium with $600 million of affordable housing ever even crossed their minds.   [Read more…]

RIP Joe Marillo, San Diego’s Godfather of Jazz

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Joe Marillo passed away Saturday, March 26. Born in Niagara Falls, NY, 83 years ago, he moved to San Diego in 1974 from Las Vegas where he had played in show bands for 10 years. He started out playing saxophone in Atlantic City, NJ while swinging from a trapeze.

He was dedicated to bringing straight ahead, mainstream jazz to San Diego for almost 50 years both with his virtuoso playing and his skills as a presenter and impresario. He received the San Diego Music Awards Lifetime Achievement Award in 2003.

After moving here from Las Vegas, Joe immediately started playing and performing in San Diego clubs. I first saw and heard him at Chuck’s Steak House in La Jolla where Joe lived “in the ghetto” for his entire life.   [Read more…]

Financial Parasites Have Become Neo-Feudal Landlords

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Classical economics divided income into two types: earned and unearned. Earned income came from productive labor combined with capital investment. Unearned income was considered parasitical and consisted of rent, interest and dividends. It was not considered as adding to GDP but as subtracting from it. It was money made by manipulating money much as feudal landlords made their money in what has been called a rentier economy.

Today, most of the money earned by the 1% driving the income inequality gap is being made in the financialized, rentier economy but is now considered earned income. New methods have been devised to make money not by productive labor and investment but by manipulating financial instruments. One such manipulation consists of stock buybacks.   [Read more…]

Why Are Innocent People Being Killed by Terrorists?

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Many people cannot understand why radical Islamists are killing innocent people as happened in Brussels recently. What did these people ever do to them to justify their being ruthlessly terminated as they were just going about their everyday lives in a peaceful manner?

It’s not as though many innocent civilians in the Middle East have not had their lives terminated as they were simply going about their business. As many as 12 civilians were killed in December 2013 in Yemen when a US drone targeted vehicles that were part of a wedding procession going toward the groom’s village. Since 2002, drones piloted by the US Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon have killed hundreds of people in the country, mostly members of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, but also dozens of civilians, including children.   [Read more…]

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