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Wealth Creation San Diego Style: Illumina, Inc.

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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…]

‘Honey, Don’t Worry about Me. We’ll Find a Place Soon.’

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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…]

A Tale of Two Stabbings in San Diego

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Media use of the term “transient” — when and why

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…]

City of San Diego Ballot Proposals Promote Police Transparency, Human Services

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Women Occupy San Diego address Citizens Review Board on Policy Practices inadequacies (again); Democratic Woman’s Club advocacy for City of San Diego Department of Public Health and Social Welfare

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…]

Peering into the Heart of Darkness: Why I Oppose Mayor Faulconer’s FY’17 Budget

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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…]

City Attorney Candidate Forum and San Diego’s Fault Line

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Land use, wealth and the smart city

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.

  [Read more…]

From Hippies in Ocean Beach to Law Day in City Heights: How San Diego Libraries Reinvent Themselves

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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…]

Housed to Homeless in San Diego: Could It Happen to You?

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Quick— imagine a homeless person. Did you conjure up the image of an utterly ordinary looking seventy year old white woman attending classes at SDSU? or a neatly dressed young Latino waiting at a bus stop? or a pregnant African American woman passing by your house? or a neighborhood kid who disappears and reappears and seems disconnected, rootless?

We don’t hear much about these men and women, young and old, who are homeless. Instead, we read about the uptrodden who have to deal with homeless people crapping on the sidewalk in front of their expensive condos downtown or the bad optics and shabby aesthetics of the tents and battered pieces of cardboard where the homeless visibly bed down every night, also downtown.

The reflexive stereotyping of the homeless demands little of us individually and collectively. It is therefore no surprise that our civic efforts in housing the homeless in San Diego have been such a dismal failure.   [Read more…]

Se Habla Something Else: Have You Learned a Second Language?

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The wretched, wonderful path to bilingualism is strewn with flashcards

A recent conversation with my neighbor Mari turned to the subject of rats. Big rats had suddenly appeared in her yard and were even bold enough to eat Chavo’s kibble while the chihuahua helplessly looked on. I ventured that the rats had fled the apartment on the corner when it was fumigated. But no, I hadn’t seen rats. “Our cats won’t keep hungry adult rats away, but they do kill the maids. They have left a few on the porch.”

Mari quickly corrected me–“They kill the young.” I laughed. Mari laughed.   [Read more…]

The Face of Homelessness in San Diego – Part 2

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I met Suzie at Panera Bread in Liberty Station. She is homeless but not vehicle-less. She used to have a nice home in Point Loma, had lived in the Point Loma – Ocean Beach area for years. She has been homeless since last April when her boyfriend kicked her out of his apartment. When that happened, she got on Craigslist and bought an RV. There are many levels and degrees of homelessness, and Suzie is on one of the better off levels. Some homeless persons live on boats in the harbor. So for some, homelessness verges on an alternative lifestyle, the key being whether or not they are forced into the situation or whether their situation is freely chosen.

Suzie grew up in Tennessee in a fairly affluent home. Her father and mother were both college graduates – he an electrical engineer, she a nurse. Her grandmothers were both nurses. Suzie is the second oldest of 5 siblings; she’s 59.She went to college in Dalton, Georgia and became a nurse graduating in 1984. Although she hasn’t worked in 5 years due to health problems, she still considers herself a nurse, keeping her registration current, taking classes, reading articles and helping people when she can.   [Read more…]

Socially-Blind Urban Planning

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By Murtaza Baxamusa / Rooflines

The contrast between prosperity and poverty is most dramatic in the harshness of inclement weather. In San Diego, while the recent storms resulting from El Niño lashed at the city, I drove through East Village, a neighborhood that contains one of the largest concentrations of homeless in the region. It is also the epicenter of Downtown’s new construction boom.

Amidst the broken tree branches and debris, scattered and soaked in the storm water were large black trash bags that homeless people had used to protect themselves. I saw helplessness in the eyes of an elderly couple as the rain whipped at them from every direction, drenching their belongings. An orderly line of about a half dozen people waited on the sidewalk for their turn to use the portable bathrooms, seemingly numb to the pouring rain. A series of blue tents clustered under the freeway bridge, sharing a tarp, and a young woman was braving the gusty winds to stand at that intersection, her hands clenching a soaked cardboard sign that simply read, “Homeless, Hungry.”
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Want to Know How Much Water Your Neighbors Use?

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City of San Diego residents– look at your water bill

We were told last year that our water rates in the City of San Diego would go up on January 1st of 2016. That prompted me to look a little more closely at the most recent bill which includes December and January. This year’s bill for the winter months, when outside watering was unnecessary, broke a hundred dollars.

Yes, the rates have gone up. But in addition to the amount due other information on the bill caught my eye.   [Read more…]

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