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Video of Nov. 25 City Heights Rally to Demand Justice for Michael Brown

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By Anna Prouty

On Tuesday, hundreds of activists in San Diego rallied in City Heights to demand justice for Michael Brown and all victims of police brutality and institutionalized racism. The rally started at the City Heights Performance Annex and continued in a march down University Avenue.

Protesters marched down the south-bound I-15 ramp where they were blocked by police before turning back and taking the freeway from the north-bound entrance. Hundreds stood on the freeway and blocked traffic for over twenty minutes.
  [Read more…]

After the Wars, City Heights

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A reminder of San Diego’s refugee resettlement in a time of terror

Why does City Heights physically look the way it does and why does it have such distinctive demographics? The case can be made that City Heights has been shaped both by design–the adoption of the Mid-City Plan in 1965– and by happenstance in the form of the fall of Saigon one decade later.

The Mid-City Plan provided a blueprint of sorts for stimulating business and commercial growth that is reflected in the built environment.  The fall of Saigon and the subsequent resettlement of Southeast Asian refugees in City Heights also became a blueprint of sorts for influencing the ever changing demographics of the individuals who would move within the built environment.   [Read more…]

SDFP Street Beat: Sherman Heights Streets, SDG&E’s High Pressure Gas Lines in the Mid-City, Artificial Turf in Pacific Beach Schools

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By Staff

The San Diego Free Press receives emails about quality of life issues from residents across the city and county. These issues receive little if any media coverage and inadequate attention from policy makers and enforcement agencies.  We have decided to provide a civic forum for those issues in our weekly Street Beat column.

Sherman Heights Street Conditions

Sherman Heights resident Remy Bermúdez sent the following email to Councilman Alvarez, Mayor Faulkner and Council President Gloria:   [Read more…]

La Maestra Foundation’s Free Youth Program in City Heights Turns Skateboarding Stigma into Positive Impact on Community

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By Brent Jensen & Kiran Mehta / AjA Project Inter+Sections

On Saturday afternoons at Skate 4185!, a free youth program at the City Heights La Maestra Foundation on Fairmount Ave, kids utilize their skateboarding prowess while participating in trash cleanups. The community-based Skate 4185! program gives local youth the opportunity to explore their interests, express their individuality and leave a positive impact on the community.

Youth from the City Heights area meet at 12 pm every Saturday at the main building of the La Maestra Foundation, located at 4185 Fairmount Ave, to fill trash bags with the litter that persistently occupies the streets of their neighborhoods.

The old Foundation building was transformed from residential housing to a community center ten years ago. Smiles, positivity and a sense of family resonate through activities at the Foundation such as cooking, gardening and hanging out with peers.

Matt Eaton, Youth Programs Coordinator for the La Maestra Foundation and lead instructor of Skate 4185!, focuses on keeping youth safe, positive and on task. Eaton accompanies his students on their skating excursions and provides encouragement and positive feedback for their dedication and community service – which despite the rubber gloves and dutiful cause, always resembles play.   [Read more…]

The Bahati Mamas : Seeds for Change

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Chasing Freedom and Opportunity

By Binti Musa / AjA Blog

The Bahati Mamas are a group of five Somali Bantu women living in City Heights who started their own farming business. The women are Somali Bantu Refugees who were forced to leave their home in 2004 to seek refuge in the United States because of the civil war in Somalia.

The Somali Bantu refugees had to leave everything they knew. As part of their resettlement, the International Recuse Committee (IRC) helped the refugee families find jobs, learn English and help their children get an education. The refugees faced many challenges while learning American customs; one of these challenges was finding good, quality, organic produce for the families in their community. This served as an impetus for people of the Somali Bantu community to begin efforts to farm like they did in their old home.

  [Read more…]

For the Mid-City Community: Three Decades of Broken Promises

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By Sam Ollinger  / bikesd.org

In late 1972, the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) released a report detailing the impact that would result after the construction of I-15 (from I-805 to I-8, approximately 3 miles) through the heart of Mid-City, specifically the neighborhood of City Heights:

The project is in an urban area. Potential impacts are mainly on people, air quality and noise. Another issue is the use of land from the area known as Park de la Cruz.

The selected freeway design will displace about 650 apartment units or homes [Ed. note: displacing 2,000 people plus about 63 commercial units affecting 110 jobs and $1.5 million in annual taxable retail]. The impact of displacement is borne by the people in the path of the freeway. For some, moving will mean a disruption of life patterns. Others would have been moving away. For many, the Federal Uniform Relocation Assistance and Real Property Acquisition Policies Act of 1970 will bring economic benefits as high as $15,000 for moving costs, replacement housing payments and interest differential payments.

  [Read more…]

Ghosts of City Heights Past: Chaos, Wonder, and Love

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By Jim Miller

In my first novel, Drift, there is a passage where the main character, Joe, is driving through City Heights pondering the poetry of the streets.

He notes the “funky majesty” of a store front church sandwiched between a pharmacy and a liquor store and revels in the cacophony of signs in Vietnamese, Spanish, English, and more while he loses himself in the street life passing by as “everything bled together seamlessly in the twilight and became part of the mystic fabric of impending night.”

Joe’s musings mix with music on the radio as he contemplates the “blue feeling” of minimarts to jazz and rolls by massage parlors, 99-cent stores, and the Tower Bar. When I read this passage back in 2007, I had the pleasure of being accompanied by Gilbert Castellanos on trumpet and his melancholy solo lent the perfect air of blues dignity to the piece. It was, of course, a love song to my old neighborhood and the present hard-edged marvel that is City Heights.   [Read more…]

Floyd Morrow, Eternal Optimist in Paradise

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By Mic Porte

Floyd Morrow is an ex-Marine sergeant who served in combat in the Korean War and later earned a law degree at the University of Texas. He has been a career attorney and longtime citizen activist, both in and out of the San Diego political scene since 1952. He currently leads a philosopher’s round table every Wednesday in the Linda Vista Village community room. The roundtable is a potluck and it’s a potlatch, a native people’s word that means everybody contributes.

“Everybody contributes” would be one of the tenants of Floyd Morrow’s philosophy of life, as well as “positivism,” his personal contribution to a round-the-table query of everybody’ s favorite “isms” which included “prism, hedonism, favoritism, romanticism, mechanism and fiesty-ism. ” We laughed that capitalism, socialism, and communism didn’t make the cut. We shared a moment of silence for the great Pete Seeger, who just died, at 92, a heroic voice of many generations, but only a moment of silence as there were many talkers at this council of scholars.”   [Read more…]

Albertsons is Abandoning City Heights. A Terrible Disaster? Or a Great Opportunity?

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By Richard Juarez

Like Ralphs and Vons, Albertsons is continuing the trend of moving out of inner-city areas. Change that to ethnic communities. The Ralphs and Albertsons in downtown San Diego are doing just fine because their target shoppers are their predominantly white middle class neighbors. They are leaving City Heights, National City and Chula Vista because they have lost sales to smaller specialty markets that cater to their clients’ food preferences.

The large traditional supermarkets are set up to provide the same food products in all their stores, all over the country. Their store policies do not allow individual stores to adjust their products to meet the food preferences of the neighborhood clientele. They cannot or will not adjust because they want to be able to order the same food, have the same promotions and sales at all stores, and more easily compare store performance using the same products.   [Read more…]

Reader’s Response to “What Does City Heights Lose when Albertsons Closes?”

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“The branch doesn’t fall far from the tree” vis á vis City Heights and Albertson’s

By Remigia Bermúdez’ 

“The branch doesn’t fall far from the tree” comes to mind in so many respects as I read with great care the insightful article written by SDFP’s Anna Daniels on the economic prospect’s and livelihood of City Heights residents without a clear direction as to who does what about City Heights’ concerns losing a major supermarket, jobs, economic base and faith in local government.

My comments are my professional/personal opinions in an attempt to answer the original questions posed by Anna Daniels in her outstanding article on the impact of Albertsons departure from the City Heights redeveloped project area:

  • 1) Who benefited most from the original redevelopment project in City Heights
  • 2) Who are the parties of interest?

  [Read more…]

The Dark Side of the Mayoral Race: Dog Whistle Racism vs Evil CEOs

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By Doug Porter

As predicted, things are getting nasty in San Diego’s mayoral contest between City Councilmen David Alvarez and Kevin Faulconer.

The “non-affiliated groups”, fostered via right wing challenges to rules about campaign finance, are doing the heavy lifting. In theory this separates the candidates from the ugliness. In practice nobody can tell the difference. Or cares.

Two of these major mudslinging efforts are under scrutiny in the local media scene this week. Voice of San Diego took on a labor council backed TV ad putting Kevin Faulconer in the crosshairs and UT-San Diego ran a “fact check” on a Lincoln Club backed mailer attacking David Alvarez.  (Yes, the actual entities doing the dirty work have “official names”, but the truth is that these groups are the real contenders in this race.)   [Read more…]

UT-San Diego Shafts its Employees, Blames Obamacare

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By Doug Porter

Employees of the UT-San Diego are the latest casualties in the sordid saga of the right wing’s assault on the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare.

UT Publisher Doug Manchester has made opposition and denigration of the President’s health insurance reform agenda a top priority since the day he bought the paper. His editorial pages have been (figuratively) screaming about the impending end of Western Civilization for months on end.  The ACA’s primary pillar—the individual mandate—was actually a conservative counter-proposal to President Clinton’s attempt to implement universal health care nearly two decades ago.   [Read more…]

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