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From Redevelopment to Civic San Diego Economic Development: A New Name and the Same Old Game?

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Recently elected Mayor Bob Filner’s inaugural day assertion that “neighborhoods are the heart and soul of the city” was music to my City Heights ears. A great deal of resources need to be invested in neighborhoods and new community based voices need to play a pivotal role in defining those investments. This process can’t be business as usual.

I was still doing an inauguration day happy dance in my chair when I opened an email from City Heights Planning Area Committee resident board member Jim Varnadore. I was jarred from my happy place by its message that entrenched interests and ways of doing things do not disappear with a new mayor.   [Read more…]

Filner Cites FDR on Anti-Poverty Pledge: “I agree with you, now make me do it.”

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Challenged by a local activist at the District 4 inaugural party on Monday night to make fighting poverty a priority in his administration, newly elected Mayor Bob Filner responded by quoting President Franklin Roosevelt’s rejoinder to activists in the early days of the New Deal: “I agree with you, now make me do it.”

And that’s exactly what the Center for Policy Initiatives (CPI) is doing. They’ve launched a letter writing campaign seeking to gather 500 letters over the next week urging the Mayor to make poverty a priority in San Diego.

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The Elections are Over. Will City Heights Get “Stuff” with their Pizza?

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Last Tuesday I walked the four blocks from my house to Euclid Elementary School in City Heights to vote. The election notices were in five different languages and the citizens lined up in the hallway were conversing in those languages. Young people had small children in tow and pushed baby carriages. Elderly people moved slowly using canes and walkers. The poll workers were all young and ethnically and racially diverse; the voting process went smoothly and quickly. Despite all of my anxieties regarding the electoral outcomes, I felt that “rush of democracy” Megan Burks described so well in her Speak City Heights article about election day in City Heights.   [Read more…]

Busloads of Foreign Looking People and Fraudulent Voting Assistance: Paranoia at the Polls and the City Heights Vote

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This past weekend I suddenly became conscious of a quotidian, unremarkable occurrence in City Heights. I was walking to the number 7 bus stop on University Avenue when a large van with the words Alliance for African Assistance turned down the street. Earlier that morning a mini-van pulled up next door with a small group that socializes regularly with my ethnic Chinese neighbors.

But this weekend I wondered if vans, mini-vans and even buses will be used to get citizens in City Heights to the polls on election day. I hope so.   [Read more…]

Paranoia at the Polls: The San Diego Election Integrity Project’s Troubling “Evidence”

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The Election Integrity Project, although it defines itself as non-partisan, operates as a platform for the conservative Heritage Foundation, the right wing Breitbart.com, and the Tea Party groups True the Vote and the non-profit iCaucus. Their website raises the ubiquitous fearful specter of voter fraud; their intent is to police the act of voting itself, to assure that “every lawfully cast vote [is] accurately counted.”

While the restrictive voter laws enacted after the Republicans gained power in 2010 have the impact if not the explicit intent to suppress the vote of communities of color, the young and the elderly who tend to vote Democrat, True the Vote and its offshoots not only support those efforts but have also assumed the role of election vigilantes at the polls and registrar offices.   [Read more…]

The Continuing Saga of City Heights Capital Improvements in the Time of Austerity

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The City Heights Area Planning Committee (CHAPC) meeting held on Monday October 15 was spent presenting information and answering questions about the capital projects on the master list; a bare-bones list of projects that includes the installation of sidewalks, street lights, drainage projects, a number of small parks, renovations for a senior center, repairs to the police shooting range and a new fire station. During the course of the meeting committee members and the audience were given the opportunity to add additional projects to the list.

On November 5 the CHAPC will decide upon a prioritized capital project list. Their goal is to present the top five projects. I encouraged them to submit every single project as a number one priority for the community. I was dead serious. Jim Varnadore responded that while the committee didn’t dispute the validity of doing so, the City would impose its own prioritization. I responded that the City does that anyway and that their ranking process is not transparent.
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The Starting Line – Walmart Walkout Widens to 12 States, Black Friday Walkout Threatened

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Walkouts at the worlds’ larger retailer spread to at least twenty eight stores in twelve states yesterday, with unprecedented protests against company treatment of employees and working conditions expected to continue today at the annual Walmart investor meeting in Bentonville, Arkansas.

Dan Schlademan, director of the United Food and Commercial Workers’ Making Change At Walmart campaign, said job actions took place in Dallas, Seattle, the San Francisco Bay area, Miami, the Washington, D.C., area, Los Angeles, Sacramento, Chicago and Orlando.  There were also reports of walkouts in Kentucky, Missouri and Minnesota.

The New York Times has posted an article saying that disgruntled Walmart employees, joined by labor unions and community groups, might stage a combined protest and educational campaign the Friday after Thanksgiving, the traditional start of the holiday shopping season.   [Read more…]

The Scramble for Parks, Street Repairs, Fire Station, Street Lights and Sidewalks: City Heights Capital Improvements in the Time of Austerity

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The list does not include the pressing infrastructure need for wireless hubs throughout City Heights. Councilman Tony Young stated in a budget committee meeting earlier this year that he would like to see wireless access made available to the surrounding communities using our public libraries as a broadcasting source. He quickly discounted the possibility unless the City found a private partner.

Councilman Young knows that his district as well as the other low income districts constitute the have- not side of the digital divide. While the city as a whole ranks high in internet connectivity, there are whole sections of the city in which families do not have computers or are unable to afford monthly internet access fees. There are large swaths of the population who are not computer literate. City Heights is one of these communities.   [Read more…]

Staged Events– Mitt Romney, Barack Obama and Juanita LaRue

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Teresa has spent the last two decades addressing the impacts of inter-generational poverty, drug addiction and incarceration upon our young people– the very issues our presidential candidates have chosen to overlook. She carefully unwinds these young people’s stories resulting in fully realized, complex human beings who deserve not only our compassion and our understanding, but more importantly our commitment to finding solutions.   [Read more…]

Carl DeMaio in City Heights

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Many of us living in the inner city communities and south of Route 8 will remember Mayor Sanders as the leader who performed triage with a hatchet upon a flat-lined city budget. He destroyed the villages writ small while saving the only village that really counts–powerful business interests and an entrenched downtown establishment.

Mayor Sanders’ recent endorsement of Carl DeMaio raises the obvious question–Will Carl DeMaio, if elected, embrace the same governance policies and attitudes? The corollary of course is–Does City Heights want more of the same?   [Read more…]

Skin in the Game : Mitt Romney and the 47%

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On trash night last week an elderly Vietnamese woman stood outside my front door, waiting patiently for me to notice her. I recognized her immediately and opened the screen. I suspect that she knows little English–she simply stood there, smiling shyly. “Oh! Bottles! I forgot!” I smiled and pointed toward the back alley. Her bicycle was hung with a number of empty bags as she began her slow evening peregrinations through City Heights alleys, picking through recycling bins that were as tall as she. Our bin always provides a particularly rich haul. It is evident that she is not doing this as an antidote to unbearable ennui or as part of an exercise regimen. She clearly depends upon the recycling to augment her income.

This week I watched the recent video of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney describing the 47% of the population that pays no federal income tax as shiftless, government dependent moochers. While this is not a new right wing talking point–it played heavily during the Republican presidential primaries–there was a shocking quality to Romney’s assertions. He oozed equal parts certitude in those assertions and utter dismissiveness of their subject. Which is to say he came off as a sneering plutocrat.   [Read more…]

The Starting Line — Bubba-licious: Clinton Schools Republicans with Arithmetic, History

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“Now, people ask me all the time how we got four surplus budgets in a row. What new ideas did we bring to Washington? I always give a one-word answer: arithmetic.”

 Former President Bill Clinton took the stage at the Democratic National Convention last night and systematically dismembered the Republican Party’s memes, schemes and misrepresentations that make up the body of their work in building a case against the Obama administration and for electing the men at the top of their ticket. In a fifty minute speech that strayed significantly from the version released in advance to the press, the former chief executive effectively used all the rhetorical skills in his arsenal to argue for another four years of Democratic control of the White House.

I have plenty of reservations about Bill Clinton’s tenure as President; his role in de-regulation of the financial industry and his shortsightedness about the repercussions of NAFTA immediately come to mind. But when it comes to his ability to mount a political offensive, nobody in recent memory can top the combination of ah-shucks populism and wonk-like command of facts that was on display last night.   [Read more…]

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