Community Protests Ignited By Building in Point Loma
Point Loma Leaders Meet with Mayor’s Staff
By Don Sevrens / OB Rag
The City has come up with a proposed solution to strengthen and protect the 30-foot height limit on the Point Loma side of the peninsula, community representatives said Thursday, September 1st, after the second Mayor’s meeting on the issue.
Waves of community protest were ignited by the construction of four-story buildings at Emerson and Evergreen, capped by a town hall meeting attended by 250 persons.
Following the town hall, several community advocates attended the first Mayor’s meeting on the issue at City Hall at the invitation of Mayor Faulconer. [Read more…]
San Diego Sandbags Efforts to Shelter Homeless People
City snubs California law for emergency shelters
By Jeeni Criscenzo
If the City of San Diego really wanted to solve the ever increasing problem of homelessness, they might be willing to try something more innovative than eliminating 98% of the areas previously designated as suitable for emergency shelter without a Conditional Use Permit.
I first became of aware of a map in the City of San Diego General Plan, Housing Element called Figure 1 Areas Suitable for Emergency Shelters – November 2006. Amikas, a non-profit I founded with four other homeless advocates in 2009 to work with homeless women and children with a focus on veteran women, was considering the Midway Post Office as a potential site for veteran housing. The map was required by California Senate Bill 2 (SB2) also known as the Cedillo Bill.
This Statute became effective January 2008. Chapter 633 clarifies and strengthens housing element law to ensure zoning encourages and facilitates emergency shelters and limits the denial of emergency shelters and transitional and supportive housing. [Read more…]
We Can Do It Now! Tiny Home Demonstration part of San Diego Homeless Awareness Activities
By Amikas
On August 17, in coordination with San Diego Homeless Awareness Day, a model “Tiny Home” will be assembled on site at the North Park Community Park, on Oregon St. between Polk Ave and Howard Ave. and will be available for photographs and viewing throughout the afternoon.
At 12:30 PM, Jeeni Criscenzo from the non-profit group Amikas will join with a representative from the Open Architecture Coalition and former Assemblywoman Lori Saldaña to discuss the importance of using “tiny homes” to provide low-cost emergency housing and storage to vulnerable homeless people currently sleeping unsheltered in San Diego.
They will also discuss why the City San Diego needs to come into compliance with state law and provide shelter for thousands of homeless San Diegans to avoid a lawsuit. [Read more…]
Downtown San Diego’s East Village South Without a Stadium: An Alternative Vision
By Bill Adams / UrbDeZine
With the adoption of the Downtown Community Plan in 2006 it was determined that each designated downtown neighborhood would create a finer-grain plan, in the form of a Focus Plan, to make certain future development would honor the Community Plan and enhance the unique personality of each district. For several reasons, including the economic downturn and the elimination of CCDC, the Focus Plans for the four East Village quadrants were not completed.
In fall of 2015 a group of East Village residents, business, academic and community leaders and land owners discussed the need for a Focus Plan for the southeast quadrant as new development started rapidly taking shape throughout East Village. [Read more…]
San Diego Chargers Stadium: Q&A with Barrios Against Stadiums
“Our backyard has historically been neglected. People can call BASTA! NIMBY as much as they want but our backyard is full. Start storing stuff in yours.”
Interview by Jeffrey Siniard / Bolts From The Blue
Bolts From The Blue blogger Jeffrey Siniard reached out to interview SDFP columnist/editor Brent Beltrán to discuss why Barrios Against Stadiums, which he is a part of, opposes a stadium in the East Village. We reprint the interview here in it’s entirety with photos added from a protest against the Chargers stadium held on July 15 in Barrio Logan. [Read more…]
Raising the Bar for Healthy Communities in National City
Carolina Martinez / Environmental Health Coalition
Located in San Diego County’s second oldest city, Old Town National City remains a primarily low-income Latino neighborhood with evolving surroundings. Over the past 50 years, the community has changed from a mainly residential neighborhood to a mixture of auto-related businesses located around schools and homes. Auto-body shops in residential neighborhoods burden the health of the community by emitting toxic pollution into the air we breathe.
In 2005, our community decided to combat conflicting land use and bring health back to the community with a vision for a vibrant and toxic-free neighborhood. Our plans included affordable housing within walking distance of a transit center, construction that wouldn’t damage Paradise Creek and a healthy community park to replace polluted grounds. [Read more…]
Debate Over Future of Fiesta Island Continues: ‘Improvements Needed to Expand Access’
Editor: This is a continuation of the debate over the future of Fiesta Island. It began with op-eds in the San Diego Union-Tribune, and we helped it along with our earlier post. Here below, Judith Swink rebuts the rebuttals.
By Judith Swink
Improvements on Fiesta Island will happen eventually because they must.
The 1994 Mission Bay Park Master Plan carried forward that intention from the previous master plans. The proposed Fiesta Island improvements will make the island more useful and inviting to a much larger number of people than just those who want to use it as it is today. It is a key tenet of both the Mission Bay Park Master Plan and the California Coastal Act that coastal recreation areas be developed to enable use and access for everyone.
A Local Coastal Program amendment in 2002, in conjunction with approval of the Sea World Master Plan by the Coastal Commission requires the City to develop Fiesta Island as proposed in the 1994 Mission Bay Park Master Plan and LCP. [Read more…]
Why Governor Brown’s Housing Plan Is Bad for Planning
By Murtaza H. Baxamusa, Ph.D., AICP / San Diego UrbDeZine
Governor Jerry Brown’s “Streamlining Affordable Housing Approvals” proposal will have far-reaching consequences on urban planning in cities and counties across California. However, there has been little discussion about the real-world consequences of this policy on the planning profession with regard to public participation.
Simply put, the Governor wants to get rid of local discretion in the approval of multi-family residential projects. To invoke this “by-right” privilege, developers have to limit market-rate (not “affordable”) units to between 80-95 percent of their projects, build on parcels that have urban uses around them on sites zoned for residential uses, and avoid dangerous and sensitive sites where they should not be building in the first place. [Read more…]
Carlsbad Mayor Spins Results of City’s Public Opinion Survey
Land Use Plans Don’t Match Community Vision
At the California Coastal Commission’s May 11 meeting Carlsbad Mayor Matt Hall testified that the city’s General Plan, updated last September, reflects the community’s vision for its future. But the responses to Carlsbad’s 2009 Public Opinion Visioning Survey Report paint a different picture.
Hall claimed the plan “provides a policy framework that will ensure we live up to our community vision and ensure an excellent quality of life for all who live, work, and visit our coastal city. In fact, values like small town beach community character, access to recreation and open space and multi-modal transportation are top of mind for our residents and given high priority in our General Plan.”
But when you find the General Plan’s land use changes allow mixed use commercial/residential development and high-density shopping malls to be built near the Agua Hedionda Lagoon and on property where the Encina Power Plant now stands, you begin to see the disconnect with the community’s actual vision. [Read more…]
Coastal Commission Halts Carlsbad Mayor’s Land Use Shell Game
Find the Hidden Mega Mall
By Richard Riehl / The Riehl World
Regional shopping centers and mixed use residential developments were not allowed to sneak past the California Coastal Commission, thanks to the vigilance of Olga Diaz, the organization’s commissioner, and the leadership of Cori Schumacher, a candidate forCarlsbad City Council.
The attempted scheme was halted during the Coastal Commission’s May 11 meeting to approve a Local Coastal Plan (LCP) Amendment to the city’s General Plan Update. [Read more…]
The High Costs of Policy Shortfalls in Housing
By Murtaza Baxamusa / Rooflines
The high cost of housing is one of the most challenging planning issues of our time. The meager supply of affordable housing is a major contributor to the problem, yet the policy tools to address the shortfall often seem to worsen the problem. But this is because they ignore the underlying infrastructure and financing to support growth.
Housing affordability is really about two things: income and cost. The building industry is doing very little about the former, oftentimes opposing prevailing wages for construction workers. On the latter, the key question (being debated in California now) is whether deregulation of market rate housing projects will somehow “trickle down” to households, enabling them to afford rising rents and mortgages. [Read more…]
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