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The Great Eastern Expansion: Where Is The Plaza?

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By Barbara Zaragoza

City staff and developers envision a city that will include professors, engineers, highly trained athletes and international tourists. There will be new boutique shops, gourmet restaurants and a transit system to bring even more people to visit this bustling downtown. An explosion of binational trade is anticipated, since the border is only 2 miles away and executives will be able to go across the Tijuana bridge directly in and out of the Tijuana International Airport.

While talking to city officials and developers, I have found their excitement to be authentic. The hotels are certainly something community members in eastern Chula Vista have been waiting for, along with abundant local jobs and public transportation. But I’m a writer, not a marketer, and I have to ask myself: is there something wrong with this picture?   [Read more…]

Bank of North Dakota Soars Despite Oil Bust: A Blueprint for California?

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Despite North Dakota’s collapsing oil market, its state-owned bank continues to report record profits. This article looks at what California, with fifty times North Dakota’s population, could do following that state’s lead.

By Ellen Brown

In November 2014, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Bank of North Dakota (BND), the nation’s only state-owned depository bank, was more profitable even than J.P. Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs. The author attributed this remarkable performance to the state’s oil boom, but the boom has now become an oil bust, yet the BND’s profits continue to climb. Its 2015 Annual Report, published on April 20th, boasted its most profitable year ever.

The BND has had record profits for the last 12 years, each year outperforming the last. In 2015, it reported $130.7 million in earnings, total assets of $7.4 billion, capital of $749 million, and a return on investment of a whopping 18.1 percent. Its lending portfolio grew by $486 million, a 12.7 percent increase, with growth in all four of its areas of concentration: agriculture, business, residential, and student loans.
  [Read more…]

Oligarchy Rocks at the Desert Trip Festival

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This easy life knows no pity.

Recently Nelson D. Schwartz of the New York Times did an interesting feature on luxury tourism on cruise ships, “In an Era of Privilege, Not Everyone is in the Same Boat,” that described the experience of travelers as “a money based caste system” catering to the rich rather than the unwashed masses. While there is clearly nothing novel about elite travel, the story noted that “What is new is just how far big American companies are now willing to go to pamper the biggest spenders.”

The remarkable thing about this trend is not what it says about cruise ships but what it reveals about where we are currently with regard to economic inequality and the way it has come to shape the way we live, work, and play—separately and unequal.   [Read more…]

A Twofer: Carbon Tax Solves Both Climate Change and Plastic Ocean Pollution

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For more than half a century, cheaply-priced fossil fuels have come to define the American dream. We travel freely in gasoline powered vehicles and rely on coal, oil and natural gas for heating, cooling and operating electrical devices.

In addition, everything possible is now fashioned from plastic polymers derived from petroleum or natural gas. We’ve abandoned the “reuse and repair it” mindset of the pre-WWII era and embraced instead a “throw away” plastic consumer culture.

The most urgent environmental crises today are undeniably global climate change and the buildup of plastic waste in the world’s oceans. Both are harmful externalities of the fossil fuel industry: impacts, like pollution, not reflected in the cost of the products but paid for instead by some third party.

In this case, the third party is the global public that suffers the health and monetary consequences of both climate change and ocean plastic pollution.   [Read more…]

San Diego’s Crisis of Compassion: Scorn, Indifference Don’t Solve Homelessness

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It doesn’t take the recently released Point in Time Count report to know that the number of unsheltered people in downtown San Diego is exploding. Seeing every vacant lot encircled with blue tent and tarp encampments propped against chain-link fencing, has ceased to evoke alarm. It’s now the norm.

Last week, homeless advocates, including myself, confronted the mayor for authorizing installation of a $57,000 rock bed under an overpass where homeless people frequently camped. On social media, we were accused of being bleeding hearts who were giving aid and comfort to creatures who don’t deserve our concern. They called the ugly barrier that was built without a shred of effort to be attractive, a “rock garden”! When one of our group spoke at City Council about the inhumanity of using pest-control tactics to repel human beings, two councilpersons actually giggled!

When did we get to be so heartless and mean? When did it become acceptable to scorn those who are less fortunate and mock those who are compassionate?   [Read more…]

Make Earth Day Every Day: How to Fight Climate Change Year Round

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By Hutton Marshall / SanDiego350

Last month’s annual Earth Day reminded people all over the globe of the importance of our planet’s health to everyday lives and to survival of future generations. Locally, thousands swarmed Balboa Park to celebrate the popular Earth Fair San Diego.

Earth Day plays a larger role than sending a powerful message about the necessity of environmental protection and sustainability. More directly, it attracts countless volunteers in San Diego and beyond to spend the holiday working toward creating a healthier planet and pushing back against forces that are rapidly changing our climate.

Unfortunately, for many volunteers, Earth Day may be the only day of the year we get out and work to combat climate change, despite widespread understanding of the need for action.   [Read more…]

The Millenia Project: San Diego County’s New Downtown

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By Barbara Zaragoza

Last week, I spent a lot of time explaining the vast expansion taking place in eastern Chula Vista. Eleven villages total mean about 60,000 new residents will move into the area within the next twenty years. So far, villages 1, 5 and 7 are built out. Village 2 is underway. That leaves villages 3, 4, 8, 9 and 10 still under development.

According to the Otay Ranch General Development Plan, the idea of the village was to “provide a sense of community and social cohesion in a “small town” way, and reduce dependence on the automobile for local trips.” (pg. 10)

Today, I want to go over the heart of the development called “Millenia.” This will become the center piece of Otay Ranch plan, a new downtown with an office & retail district.   [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…]

The Death Gap

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The richest Americans now live 10-15 years longer than the poorest.

By Sam Pizzigati / OtherWords

Rich people live longer than poor people. No big news there — we’ve known that health tracks wealth for quite some time now.

But here’s what we haven’t known: The life-expectancy gap between rich and poor in the United States is actually accelerating.

Since 2001, American men among the nation’s most affluent 5 percent have seen their lifespans increase by more than two years. American women in that bracket have registered an almost three-year extension to their life expectancy.

Meanwhile, the poorest five percent of Americans have seen essentially no gains at all.   [Read more…]

The Great Eastern Expansion Into Chula Vista

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Chula Vista Is Set To Have An Influx Of 60,000 Residents

By Barbara Zaragoza

For decades community groups such as Crossroads II have noted that the City of Chula Vista is nothing more than a bedroom community. They explain that developers came into the region, created a mass of housing, but didn’t provide residents with essential amenities, such as jobs, adequate big box stores such as Walmart, smaller retail shops, restaurants, parks or hotels. In Crossroads II’s 2016 Annual Report, they wrote, “Because of the lack of commercial development, Chula Vista is second from the bottom in terms of sales-tax revenues per resident in San Diego County.”

The Chula Vista City Council has attempted to change this bedroom community into a bustling city where local and international tourists come to shop, eat and play. They’ve done it by attracting developers to the open stretch of land located in eastern Chula Vista known as Otay Ranch. Now, within the next twenty years or so, Chula Vista anticipates more than 60,000 new residents will flood into the area, including university students, Olympic quality athletes and Google-type executives. Their goal is to transition eastern Chula Vista into becoming a dense urban environment that is state-of-the-art in technology and also environmentally sustainable.

Excited? Convinced?   [Read more…]

Carlsbad Council Outsources City’s Future Again

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This Time It’s a Florida Consulting Firm

Over the last two years Carlsbad residents have watched city leaders squander more than $1 million to outsource the future of their Village by the Sea.

They fell in love with L.A. billionaire developer Rick Caruso’s promises to transform the site of the Agua Hedionda Lagoon into a shopping mall magnet for $2.6 million in annual tax revenue, preserve strawberry fields already saved by Prop D, and build scenic trails, all at no cost to the city. After a citizens-led referendum overturned the City Council’s unanimous support of the project, the Council ponied up $650,000 for a special election that allowed voters to send Caruso packing.

In March 2014, while Caruso courted council members, the city signed a $380,000 contract with Dover, Kohl and Partners, a Florida consulting firm, to create the Carlsbad Village and Barrio Master Plan to update the Carlsbad Village Master Plan and Design Manual, the one that was written by city planners and approved in June 2013. The 2016 plan is currently under review by the city’s Planning Commission.   [Read more…]

Working Without a Net

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By Tom Sullivan / Digby’s Hullabaloo

David Dayen shares scenes from his life in the “gig” economy, or what he calls “the 1099 Economy.” They are tales a lot of freelance writers can relate to, I imagine, as well as anyone working for themselves and receiving no benefits. Perhaps the most startling bit of data from research by Princeton’s Alan Krueger and Harvard’s Lawrence Katz is that the growth in those sorts of jobs accounts for pretty much the entire growth in the job market over the last decade. It is one key reason, Dayen argues, why voters are angry:   [Read more…]

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