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In a Tiny House Village, Portland’s Homeless Find Dignity

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As cities search for solutions to homelessness, Portland’s Dignity Village offers 60 men and women community and safety.

By Marcus Harrison Green / Yes! Magazine

On a frigid January morning in Portland, Ore., a tour through Dignity Village follows the same path its residents are required to travel. All were, or are, homeless.

Newcomers to this homeless refuge huddle in the warming station, a small portable with photos of smiling former residents and where they are required to stay during a 60-day probationary period.

They hope to graduate to a small makeshift home like Karen, a three-month resident whose boisterous laugh carries through the village.

Should it become a permanent home, they may find themselves in the position of Rick Proudfoot, a longtime resident who works in the site’s main office, keeping track of finances.

If they’re really lucky, they may end up like Lisa Larson, Dignity Village’s CEO.   [Read more…]

Carlsbad Lagoon Foundation No Friend of Nature

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Backs Caruso Mall, Measure A

A billionaire L.A. developer came to town planning to transform one of Carlsbad’s three lagoons into a magnet for tourist dollars. After winning the approval of local officials, he encountered a group of protesters bent on preserving the lagoon the right way.

No, that’s not the story of Rick Caruso’s plan to build a shopping mall next to the Agua Hedionda Lagoon. It’s about another L.A. developer’s failed attempt to build an amusement park, Nemo’s Secret Harbor, surrounding the Batiquitos lagoon in 1972. The L.A. Times carried a retrospective story about the fiasco on March 31, 1985.

The size and scope of the 1972 project dwarfs Caruso’s. But the developer’s aim was the same, to make money off the site’s beauty while putting it at risk. There are, however, two important differences:   [Read more…]

Hide and Seek on the Commons: Selling More San Diego

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The public is left out of the decision making, the City Council is not fully engaged

Today, Wednesday February 10, the City Council Smart Growth and Land Use (SG&LU) Committee will be asked to recommend approval to the full City Council of the marketing for sale of six City-owned properties that the Real Estate Asset Department (READ) has declared surplus and excess to the needs of the City.

Prior SDFP articles on the topic called into question the efficacy, advisability and propriety of how these properties have been declared surplus and why. We published the list of properties that was brought forward last summer as an “informational” item by READ.

Here is an update and status report with some editorializing.   [Read more…]

North of the Fence: Americans Flee Across Border, The Pope and Chula Vista Elections

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Is there an onslaught of American immigrants coming to Mexico? The story isn’t new. For decades Americans have been moving to Tijuana where the rent is cheaper. For local Tijuanese, this means Americans drive up their housing prices and create housing shortages.

How many Americans live in Tijuana, and in Mexico at large? The number is unknown. Guesstimates run the gamut from 5,000 to 500,000 Americans (in Tijuana alone). That’s a pretty big spread. Why don’t we know?   [Read more…]

San Diego Water: Pissed Away, Pricey and Less-than-Perfect

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For many months now the Big Story about water in California has been about the drought–as in we don’t have enough. On Tuesday, the State Water Resources Control Board voted to extend water restrictions thru October 2016.

Here in San Diego, according to Voice of San Diego, we’ve got so much water that the County Water Authority has dumped a half billion gallons of recently desalinated and other treated drinking water into the Lower Otay Reservoir near Chula Vista.

In case you haven’t looked at you water bill yet, you’re being charged more for doing such a good job of conserving water last year.   [Read more…]

Tiny Village of Tiny Shelters for San Diego Homeless: Small is the New Sexy

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No question about it—being involved in a coalition to build a tiny village of tiny shelters for people who are without a place to live, is damn exciting! I can’t put my finger on exactly why this is taking over my brain activity—from waking up in the morning ready to get online and share ideas, to dreaming about it at night. Maybe it’s what someone at our community meeting last week said about it—tiny homes are sexy!   [Read more…]

Trans Pacific Partnership Signing Brings on International Protests

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Representatives of the United States and eleven other Pacific Rim nations are gathered in Auckland, New Zealand this week for discussions and a largely symbolic signing ceremony of the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement. Activists around the world have been staging protests to drive home the point that reshaping international trade cannot be limited to protecting the interests of transnational corporations and their investors.

Events in San Diego, Los Angeles and other cities will echo the Capitol Hill appearance of AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka and Democratic Rep. Rosa DeLauro, joining with MoveOn.org to deliver 1 million petitions calling on Congress to reject the agreement. Protests at the signing ceremony in New Zealand are expect to be muted, given the efforts by local police to visit “known activists” in recent weeks.

The deal still has to be ratified by at least six of its member nations, a process that can take up to two years and must include Japan and the United States. In the US, ratification has been (unofficially) put off until after the November elections meaning it will be voted on by a lame-duck congress. Under the terms of the TPA Fast-track legislation, a yes or no vote with no amendments allowed must take place within 90 days of its introduction in the congress.   [Read more…]

Some Market Thoughts on Short-Term Rentals in San Diego

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The topic of short-term rentals in San Diego continues to be debated and potential rules / changes to rules will be a hot topic in 2016. After ending 2015 with a well attended Planning Commission meeting in December it looks like the next official meeting / hearing will be in late February or March at the City Council. It is sure to be a long hearing, with hundreds of San Diegans attending and providing commentary both for and against short-term accommodations in San Diego neighborhoods.

In the meantime, I wanted to jot down some thoughts about short-term rentals in San Diego from a market economy perspective, which follow.   [Read more…]

Hoteliers Not-A-Tax Scheme Headed to Trial

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San Diego’s big hotel barons have suffered a significant defeat as their two percent self-assessment/fee/not-a-tax surcharge is headed for its day of reckoning in the courts. Superior Court Judge Joel R.Wohlfeil handed down a ruling late Friday afternoon allowing attorney Cory Briggs and his clients to proceed with a lawsuit challenging the basis on which hotels are allowed to collect this fee.

This self-assessment/fee/not-a-tax was an attempt to make an end-run around the requirement of two-thirds voter approval on taxes dedicated for a specific use. The city and the Tourism Marketing District tried and failed to derail a lawsuit challenging its legality by arguing only hoteliers had standing to challenge it in court.

Monies collected under this scheme have been set aside for a single purpose, namely financing advertising and promotional materials for the local tourism industry. The city’s politicians bowed down to the wishes of the corporate tourism industry, agreeing on–as Briggs puts it: “a ‘management plan’ that allows the ‘self-assessment’ to be added to a guest’s bill as long as it is ‘separately stated from the amount of rent charged and any applicable taxes’—as if separating it on the bill means that the guest is not paying it.”   [Read more…]

Pinyon-Juniper Forests: BLM is a Ranching Industry Tool

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By Will Falk

Public lands ranching is destroying the Western United States. It has pushed native plant species to the brink of extinction. It causes soil to erode so quickly the land cannot keep up. Livestock are poisoning and depleting water supplies, killing perennial stream flows, and are making it increasingly difficult for surface water to accumulate. Stockmen and the animals they raise have devastated populations of iconic American animals like bison, elk, pronghorn, and sage-grouse. Ranchers, ever jealous of the trees their stock cannot eat, encourage the clear-cutting of forests.

I cannot decide whether writing this essay in the wake of Ammon Bundy’s arrest and Lavoy Finicum’s death at the hands of the FBI and Oregon State Police after their occupation of Northern Paiute land at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge is good or bad. It could be good because this story has finally forced public lands ranching, or “welfare ranching,” and the policies of federal agencies like the Bureau of Land Management and US Forest Service into the public’s consciousness.

On the other hand, there is the risk that while Bundy and his angry white men waved their rifles in the faces of law enforcement complaining about federal agencies like BLM and the Forest Service, the public developed too much sympathy for those Bundy threatened. These agencies might look like the good guys against Big Bad Bundy while the agencies’ own atrocities go over-looked.   [Read more…]

The Lessons of Porter Ranch

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By Nicola Peill-Moelter, Ph.D. / SanDiego 350.org

The massive leak at the Southern California Gas Company (SoCalGas) Aliso Canyon natural gas storage facility is a stark example of why natural gas is a significant health and safety risk and not a bridge fuel to our clean energy future. The facility, the second largest in the U.S., stores vast amounts of natural gas at high pressure in underground wells once used for oil extraction more than fifty years ago.

On or about October 23rd a rupture in a 60-year old injection well pipe a thousand feet underground initiated the leak. At its peak the leak had an estimated rate of one-hundred twenty-five thousand pounds of methane per hour. To date, the cumulative emissions from this single source is equivalent to 25% of the state’s annual methane emissions from major sources like agriculture and landfills, equivalent to the annual climate pollution of almost half a million cars.

  [Read more…]

Nuclear Shutdown News – January 2016

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By Michael Steinberg / Black Rain Press

On the last day of last year San Diego’s NBC 7 TV ran a story “Portions of San Onofre May Be Contaminated.”

The San Onofre nuclear plant unexpectedly and permanently shut down in 2013. Southern California Edison is the major owner, with San Diego Gas and Electric its minority partner.

According to NBC 7, the utilities have been leasing the shoreline land from the US Navy. The lease is supposed to end in 2023, but Edison and SDG&E want to end it earlier now that San Onofre is shut down for good.
  [Read more…]

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