You know that Trump wants to make the Trump tax cuts permanent. These are the tax cuts that added $7 trillion to the national debt and primarily benefited the rich. Kamala should finesse this issue by taking it away from Trump. Here's how: make it part of her platform to keep the Trump tax cuts for the poor and middle class while sunsetting them for the rich. Even better use the money saved by sunsetting the tax cuts for the rich to give the poor and middle class an even bigger tax cut than the Trump tax cuts provided. The important thing is to get out in front of Trump on this issue. Let him respond to her. Trump will then be behind the eight ball on this and other issues. All Trump has to offer is personal attacks, and they seem to be falling flat with respect to Kamala. Her politics of joy seem to be winning, and the Democratic National Convention should add another boost to the Harris-Walz ticket.
CNBC has just reported: "[Harris'] policies include a ban on “corporate price-gouging” to lower the cost of groceries and prescription drugs, and they aim to expand affordable housing and cut taxes for the middle class." Of course nothing will happen unless Democrats also control both Houses of Congress. But that should not prevent Kamala or any other Presidential candidate from promising big things. The important words are "tax cuts for the middle class." Some of the other plans Kamala is espousing are "the first-ever federal ban on “corporate price-gouging” on food and groceries". Well, good luck with that. Good talking point though. Her other plans include encouraging builders to build starter homes and Federal help with down payments on a house. CNBC reported: "As the supply of entry-level homes expanded, the Harris plan would “provide working families who have paid their rent on time for two years and are buying their first home up to $25,000 in down-payment assistance, with more generous support for first-generation homeowners,” according to the fact sheet." $25,000 will not be much help for a down payment though. At 20% down, $25,000 would only provide a down payment on a $125,000 house. This might be possible in some parts of the country as real estate values vary a lot with region. However, in San Diego starter homes are around $1 million. It would be a non-starter.
Harris will also call for the U.S. to construct 3 million new housing units over the next four years. I don't think this would be very effective as long as those new houses are subject to the market. Market rate housing is the problem, not the solution. Preventing hedge funds from buying up houses and then renting them out would help the situation. Some mechanism must be found such that the average middle class family can afford to buy a house. The emphasis on affordable starter homes is a big deal. Democrats are also all about lowering the price of pharmaceuticals. We can thank Joe Biden for that. However, he won't get credit since that deal doesn't become effective for another year. The various other parts of Kamala's economic plan won't resonate all that well with the American public because they won't understand them. However, "tax cuts for the middle class" will resonate and will steal Trump's thunder. Let Trump complain, as he did with not taxing tips, that it was his idea first!
It seems that, whenever the City locates a suitable site for a homeless shelter, campsite, safe parking area or other accommodations, some group springs up to protest that that site is a threat to their community. Thus it was for the lot near the San Diego airport as residents of Liberty Station stepped up to complain that the site was too near their shops, schools, churches and homes although Liberty Station is separated from the proposed site by the Esplanade Canal! I guess their fear was grounded in the realization that the homeless were likely to swim across the canal to invade their cherished community. To the east is the San Diego Airport. To the south are a couple of hotels and then Harbor Drive a major thoroughfare. The Esplanade Canal is on the west side of the site. To the north is the Marine Corp Recruit Depot Boathouse and Marina. Other occupants of this spit of land are the DHS / FEMA California Task Force 8 (CA-TF8), one of 28 Federal Urban Search & Rescue Teams ready to respond to a multitude of natural and man made disasters, the San Diego Police & Fire Training Center and the San Diego State University Coastal & Marine Institute Laboratory. The area is bounded by McCain Road, Kincaid road, Spruance Road and Harbor Drive. Here is a map.
The San Diego Union recently reported on this. Here are some excerpts:
Local leaders want to create what could be the city’s largest shelter, potentially providing hundreds of desperately needed beds. Some residents fear the possible effects, especially near Liberty Station’s schools and shops, and have organized a substantial opposition campaign. The coming months should see both sides organizing public meetings about the future of the site known as H Barracks.
“Barring something drastic,” said Kohta Zaiser, the mayor’s deputy director of community engagement, “we plan to fully pursue this.”
It’s prime real estate, across North Harbor Drive from Spanish Landing, but the lot’s been promised to San Diego’s multibillion-dollar Pure Water recycling system . Pure Water, however, doesn’t need it for five years, leaving the city with around 7 empty acres and time to kill.
Creating another parking lot where people can spend the night in cars is one option. A safe sleeping site that allows camping remains on the table. The front-runner is an enormous fabric structure that could hold rows of bunk beds in one open space. A similar shelter in the nearby Midway district looks a bit like a circus tent.
The H Barracks lot could probably fit two, meaning there would be space for around 700 people.
The Midway shelter holds just 150, Derek Falconer, a 43-year-old who lives in one of Liberty Station’s nonmilitary homes, said in a phone interview. “I struggle with how you could put in an even larger facility and make it safe.”
Earlier this year, Falconer started an online opposition petition that had more than 6,200 signatures as of mid-December. A website launched under the banner of “Save Liberty Station,” similar signs have gone up around Point Loma and the Peninsula Community Planning Board, an advisory group, wrote the mayor to warn that the proposal “poses significant challenges and risks.”
But the main objection centers on the site’s proximity to the classrooms, businesses and homes in one of the city’s most prominent cultural hubs. To walk from H Barracks to Liberty Station, you travel west on North Harbor, turn into a Marriott parking lot, cross a concrete bridge and follow a dirt path past more hotels until you arrive at the first of several grass fields.
It recently took a reporter 12 minutes to reach the first park. The Rock Church is several minutes past that. (Representatives for the church and Marriott did not return requests for comment.)
H Barracks would be low-barrier, meaning participants don’t have to be clean and sober. City officials said the site would be stocked with everything needed to keep everybody safe: bathrooms, showers, provided meals, case managers, vehicles offering regular rides and 24/7 security. Plus, leaders have emphasized that the open beds will make it easier for police to clear nearby encampments. No-camping signs are going up this month around Liberty Station’s parks, according to Zaiser, from the city.
The NIMBYS want to make the case that the H Barracks site is too close to Liberty Station, but the geography of the area belies their claims. It should be made clear by the city that this site is nowhere near Liberty Station. It seems like the perfect place to locate various accommodations for the homeless population. It is actually completely isolated from Liberty Station. It's 1.3 miles via Kincaid Rd and N Harbor Dr from the San Diego Fire/Rescue Training Facility to the Patrick Wade Child Development Center in Liberty Station. It's a 35 minute walk (1.6 miles) from the H Barracks area to the Liberty Public Market, the main shopping area at Liberty Station. If this is not an isolated area perfect for locating facilities for the homeless, I don't know what is.
Press conference at the second safe sleeping program site near the Naval Medical Center on Oct. 20, 2023./ Photo by Ariana Drehsler
In what used to be the Naval Medical Center’s parking lot, 21 tents out of the 400 planned are ready to serve San Diego’s unhoused residents.
San Diego’s second safe sleeping site is now open.
Mayor Todd Gloria, Councilman Stephen Whitburn and other city officials provided a tour Friday of the site located on the edge of Balboa Park, also known as the O Lot. The city will admit the site’s first residents on Saturday, officials said.
In what used to be the Naval Medical Center’s parking lot, 21 tents out of the 400 planned are ready to serve San Diego’s unhoused residents. These tents are lined up side by side and are staggered into three different levels on the property with the capacity to house up to two people and their belongings.
There is already a waitlist of over 120 people for the O lot.
City officials have considered this lot for months coinciding with the camping ban that started in June, as a way to eliminate encampments on public property with more shelters accessible to the unhoused population.
Within the O lot, residents will have access to restrooms, showers, laundry, meals and even a free shuttle to transport them between two other safe sleeping program sites. This shuttle will help them access other services, run errands and go to work and school as needed.
As of now, city officials expect O lot will be available for 18-24 months.
Chief Operating Officer Eric Dargan during a press conference at the O Lot Safe Sleeping site on the edge of Balboa Park and near the Naval Medical Center on Oct. 20, 2023. / Photo by Ariana Drehsler
“Seven months ago we asked all 31 operational departments to be creative, to open up the minds to step up to the plate and identify city properties where we could provide safe sleeping sites. This is just one of those examples and many more to come.” said Dargan.
The two service providers for this site will be Dreams for Change and the Downtown San Diego Partnership.
“With this site, we will be able to work with clients while they are in place of security and safety,” said Betsy Brennan, CEO for the Downtown San Diego Partnership, “Security and safety is of utmost importance and environment much more conducive to talking about the next steps for how we can support them on their journey.”
Mayor Gloria explained that the city charter dictates that this city property needs to be used for recreational purposes but under an emergency declaration a temporary exception has been given.
A homeless encampment in downtown on Nov. 11, 2022. / Photo by Ariana Drehsler
DeForrest (DeDe) Hancock is a senior native of San Diego and currently resides in City Heights. A member of Voices of Our City Choir, Voices of Dignity, HEAL-Homeless Experienced Advocacy Leadership, UCSF-Benioff Homeless Housing Initiative Lived Expertise Advisory Board and UCSD-HEAL Research Collaboration.
Has anyone ever said to you, “When I grow up, I want to be homeless.”
Homelessness is not a new issue but unfortunately a rapidly growing population in the United States today. Research shows that some of the top causes of homelessness are loss of a job, money issues, cost of housing and disability.
This isn’t just a statistic, though.
I was raised in the Valencia Park community from the age of 5. I obtained a bachelor’s degree in psychology from UC San Diego Revelle College in 1977. I worked at a company for 10 years before getting terminated in 2006.
Throughout those years, my work was consistently evaluated as above average and outstanding. But for reasons beyond my control, my cause of termination denied me access to unemployment benefits.
This led to me losing the home of eight years that I purchased as a single mom. I also lost a separate investment property. Around that time, my mother passed away. My 13-year-old son and I moved into the family home which had been mortgage free for over 25 years. Believing that my unemployment case would be resolved within a year, I secured a loan to cover living expenses. I was unable to find an attorney who would accept my wrongful termination case. The result was, I lost my family home of 50 years and my 13-year-old son, and I became homeless by foreclosure-eviction on Nov. 10, 2009. My journey ended with my early social security retirement income following my 62nd birthday.
During the period that I was homeless, 2009 to 2016, I came to believe that we are all ordinary people simply each living out the scripts of our lives. Some of our scripts include life-challenges which provide lived experience to build the expertise and skills for survival.
There are several myths about the causes of homelessness and the characterization of homeless individuals. But, I have yet to know of any human being ever saying:
“When I grow up, I want to be homeless; I want to have an addiction, medical or physical issue which makes me vulnerable; I want to live on the street where I am not welcome or wanted. I want to be a burden to my family, friends, and society.”
These myths are debunked by the reality on the ground. The fact is, drug use and addiction follow traumatic experiences as coping mechanisms and are not necessarily a cause of homelessness.
Survey research presented during a forum held on April 28, 2022, by the San Diego Housing Federation’s HEAL (Homeless Experienced Advocacy Leadership Network) identified the primary causes of homelessness.
The top six causes are: Loss of job (24 percent); money issues (17 percent); other (14 percent); cost of housing (12 percent); Disability (9 percent); loss of family member (7 percent). Alcohol & Drug Use is 7th on the list at only 5 percent. And homelessness caused by jail or prison time is 10th on the chart at 2 percent.
In terms of absolute numbers, California has more than half (53 percent) of all unsheltered people in the United States. According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development released in 2020, nearly a quarter of all people experiencing homelessness and housing insecurity live in either New York City, Los Angeles, Seattle, San Jose & Santa Clara and San Diego. That number continues to rise locally. Unlike New York City, California’s homeless people are said to be sleeping rough. Research found that an estimated 71.1 percent of the homeless in California are unsheltered, compared to just 4.4 percent in New York City. This data clearly indicates that there are workable solutions to end homelessness if we care enough to pursue those solutions.
I dream and believe all things are possible. My dream today: In my lifetime I will witness the end of poverty and homelessness.
The truth is we may never hear anyone say: When I grow up, I want to be homeless. But today I believe there is a spiritual calling for some of us to “serve the least of them!” And with honor, I am blessed to know I am among those chosen to serve them by growing up to be one of them!
"The San Diego City Council voted 5-4 Tuesday [June 13, 2023] to adopt a controversial policy to ban homeless encampments on public property after hearing hours of public testimony.
"The ordinance was supported by Councilmember Stephen Whitburn, who proposed it, and Councilmembers Marni von Wilpert, Jennifer Campbell, Raul Campillo and Joe LaCava.
"Mayor Todd Gloria also supported what they referred to as an unsafe camping ordinance, with he and Whitburn saying it would address a public safety issue while also helping to get homeless people off the street and into a shelter and connected to services."
In approximate tandem with this ordinance is the City's plan to provide safe sleeping and camping areas and also to buy 3 motels and convert them to housing for the homeless. Father Joe also plans to build a high rise with additional rooms. The problem is that these additional housing units and camping areas are not ready yet. So this ordinance and the plan to provide additional shelter units will have to be somewhat compromised until the additional units are available. The opposition to the ordinance seemed to be based mainly on the fact that the additional units are not immediately available. The larger question is do the homeless have an unconditional right to live on public sidewalks which trumps the rights of downtown residents and business owners who also would like to use those sidewalks in a clean and safe manner. The answer in my mind is no they do not have an unconditional right to use the sidewalks as living areas. If I went downtown and set up a stand selling something, anything, I would be arrested if I did not have a license. However, homeless advocates would argue that the homeless have an unlimited right to sleep wherever they please on public sidewalks.
Finally, I think the Mayor and the City Council are taking a serious approach to this problem after farting around for decades. It amounts to government admitting that people have a right to housing - public housing or social housing, whatever you want to call it - something that American governments at all levels have never before been willing to concede. Once the units the City has promised come online, they need to expand that program since the proposed units are unlikely to be a once and for all solution. As rents are continuing to increase, the City has to be in the business of providing the SROs that the free market used to provide and now doesn't. Getting people off the streets and into housing or safe camping and parking areas with proper sanitation and other services accomplishes not only more humane conditions for the homeless. It prevents San Diego from becoming a tourist desert. Also residents and businesses will be moving out if the streets cannot be returned to their safe and proper usages. People living and running businesses downtown should have rights too. This argument that the new City ordinance is criminalizing homelessness is entirely bogus. If shelter beds or other accommodations are available, the homeless should be forced to take advantage of them IMHO. On the other hand,to the extent that these resources are not available, they should be cut some slack. That does not mean an unlimited right to park their tents wherever they please.
I noted the story of the parent pushing a stroller who was almost run over by a car because they could not use the blocked public sidewalk. I had a similar experience on Commercial street when my car was almost run over by the San Diego Trolley. The fact that the City will be providing SRO type rooms and other accommodations for the homeless as well as social services does not mean that that will be permanent housing for the contemporary homeless. The social workers will be attempting to reintegrate if possible currently homeless persons and families back into normal society. That means that they will be trying to find them jobs and get them living accommodations that they can pay for in the mainstream of society. Problem is that rents are so expensive that it will be impossible for many people, even if they have a job, to provide housing for themselves especially in San Diego where housing prices and rents are continuing their upward cost progression. That's why the next step for the City should be to do something about affordable housing. This means that the City needs to counteract the free market with respect to housing so that people who are reintegrated into society can at least function within the parameters of that society. The free market tendency for rents to keep on rising needs to be counteracted by the public sector. The free market will continue to make housing unaffordable which will result in more people becoming homeless. What is happening is that hedge funds are buying up housing units, rehabilitating them to some extent and turning them into rental units if they aren't rental units already thus driving up rents. People who in prior years could afford to buy a home now can't in the current environment. This process is turning more and more would be home owners into renters and renters who are devoting more and more of their income to paying rent.
The only way children of long time San Diego residents can buy homes today is if the parents can convert some of the equity in their homes to a down payment on the child's home so that they end up with a mortgage they can afford which is something I was able to do. I bought into the San Diego real estate market exactly 50 years ago for a house that I paid 3% of the market value of that same house today! There are companies that will make a home equity investment in your house which means that they will loan you money that you can use as a down payment on a child's house if that's the way you decide to use that money. There are no monthly payments. When the contract period - which can be as long as 30 years - is up, the house must be sold or the contract settled in some other way and the home equity investment must be repaid in proportion to the equity increase in value over that time period. Since I will probably not be here in 30 years, my heir, who can also inherit the contract, will sell the property and have to split the profits with the home investment company. Meanwhile, the property she bought with the down payment they provided and with a mortgage she can afford is increasing in equity. It's a pretty good solution, but only available to people who bought into the San Diego market when prices were cheap. The Home Equity Investment is like a reverse mortgage, but there is no age restriction and it can be used in conjunction with a rental property.
With a combination of safe sleeping and safe parking areas and also converting motel rooms into single occupancy units (SROs), San Diego is heading in the right direction for solving the homeless situation. This is combined with an ordinance that prohibits sleeping in public areas including sidewalks. Finally, a workable solution that gets the homeless off the streets, provides them with some amenities including sanitation facilities and makes the streets and city sidewalks safe for pedestrians again. As a tourist destination San Diego can't afford the spectacle of back to back tents crowding city sidewalks, and the provision of amenities in safe sleeping areas or city sponsored SROs makes the homeless at least somewhat better off than they are without any amenities on public sidewalks. The San Diego Union reported:
The properties being considered include three hotels and one apartment building.
One of the hotels is a 62-unit Ramada Inn on Midway Drive, which the Housing Commission agreed to pursue at its May 12 meeting when it unanimously agreed to apply for $18 million in Project Homekey funding. The estimated purchase price would be $11.6 million, equating to about $182,000 a unit, but adding kitchenettes and other upgrades would increase the overall cost to $29.5 million, or $469,000 a unit.
The city also is submitting a joint $4 million application with Wakeland Housing and Development Corp. to purchase a vacant 13-unit apartment building in Ocean Beach. Purchasing the building would cost $4.5 million, but rehabilitation expenses would increase the cost to $6.8 million, bringing the per-unit cost to $525,000.
The other two properties are a 107-unit Extended Stay America Hotel on Murphy Canyon Road for $40.7 million and a 140-unit Extended Stay America Hotel on Mission Valley Road for $52 million.
Essentially the city is taking the responsibility for providing public housing, something that was abandoned during the Reagan administration. The most dramatic cut in domestic spending during the Reagan years was for low-income housing subsidies. Reagan appointed a housing task force dominated by politically connected developers, landlords and bankers. In 1982 the task force released a report that called for “free and deregulated” markets as an alternative to government assistance – advice Reagan followed. In his first year in office Reagan halved the budget for public housing and Section 8 to about $17.5 billion. And for the next few years he sought to eliminate federal housing assistance to the poor altogether.
Public housing was stigmatized due to failed projects like Cabrini-Green. Cabrini–Green was home to 15,000 people, mostly living in mid- and high-rise apartment buildings. Crime and neglect created hostile living conditions for many residents, and "Cabrini–Green" became a metonym for problems associated with public housing in the United States. Now cities like San Diego are forced to take up the fallen banner for public housing under the metonym of "housing the homeless". The state of California, however, is providing most of the funding.
Other cities have had no problem in providing low cost rental housing. Take Vienna for example, a city which has largely solved the worldwide crisis of soaring rents:
Experts refer to Vienna’s Gemeindebauten as “social housing,” a phrase that captures how the city’s public housing and other limited-profit housing are a widely shared social benefit: The Gemeindebauten welcome the middle class, not just the poor. In Vienna, a whopping 80 percent of residents qualify for public housing, and once you have a contract, it never expires, even if you get richer. Housing experts believe that this approach leads to greater economic diversity within public housing — and better outcomes for the people living in it.
People living in Vienna's social housing pay as little as 3% of their monthly salaries on rent. To boot the availability of low cost public housing keeps costs in the private housing market down.
In 2015, before they bought an apartment on the private market, the Schachingers were making about 80,000 euros ($87,000) a year, roughly the income of the average U.S. household in 2021. Eva and Klaus-Peter paid 26 percent and 29 percent in income tax, respectively, but just 4 percent of their pretax income was going toward rent, which is about what the average American household spends on meals eaten out and half a percentage point less than what the average American spends on “entertainment.” Even if the Schachingers got a new contract today on their unit, their monthly payments would be an estimated 542 euros, or only 8 percent of their income. Vienna’s generous supply of social housing helps keep costs down for everyone: In 2021, Viennese living in private housing spent 26 percent of their post-tax income on rent and energy costs, on average, which is only slightly more than the figure for social-housing residents overall (22 percent). Meanwhile, 49 percent of American renters — 21.6 million people — are cost-burdened, paying landlords more than 30 percent of their pretax income, and the percentage can be even higher in expensive cities. In New York City, the median renter household spends a staggering 36 percent of its pretax income on rent.
Real estate is a place where money literally grows on tree beams. In the last decade, the typical owner of a single-family home acquired nearly $200,000 in appreciation. “Another word for asset appreciation is inflation,” the academics Lisa Adkins, Melinda Cooper and Martijn Konings write in “The Asset Economy,” “an increase in monetary value without any corresponding change in the nature of the good itself or the conditions of its production that would make it scarcer or justify an increased demand for it.” That inflation is creating a treacherous gulch between the housing haves and have-nots. Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies found that, in 2019, the median net worth of U.S. renters was just 2.5 percent of the median net worth of homeowners: $6,270 versus $254,900. Last year, as higher interest rates slowed home sales and caused prices to plateau (and even soften in some overheated cities), the asking price of the median U.S. rental reached $2,000 a month, a record high, according to Redfin. Inflated rent prices line the pockets of landlords while preventing renters from saving for a down payment and ever getting off the treadmill.
Inflation in asset prices, particularly real estate, is causing more people, especially senior citizens, to fall into homelessness. The recent rise in interest rates which supposedly are aimed at curbing inflation have done nothing to bring the cost of housing down. In San Diego county, real estate is still appreciating in value despite the Fed having raised interest rates to highs not seen in recent years. It has done nothing to stop investors and hedge funds that pay cash. I reported previously:
In a deal with the Conrad Prebys Foundation, Blackstone Group, CEO'd by Steven Schwarzman, is buying 5800 rental units in San Diego. According to the San Diego Union, "The deal makes Blackstone one of the biggest real estate holders in San Diego County. It already owns $4.5 billion in assets here — including Legoland and the Hotel del Coronado. The transaction, which also includes Los Angeles-based investment firm TruAmerica as a partner, is expected to close in the next few weeks. The sale of the apartments was praised by Dan Yates, the president of the Conrad Prebys Foundation, who said the portfolio was assembled by Conrad Prebys — a San Diego developer — himself. Yates said the money from the deal will be used for grants primarily in San Diego."
Investors pay cash t buy up cheap rentals, and, therefore, the rise in interest rates doesn't affect them. They don't pay interest. They then give the tenants a 30 or 60 day notice depending on how long they've lived there. Then they refurbish the apartments and rent them out for twice the previous rent. This is the so-called "gentrification" of San Diego neighborhoods. This is why low cost rental units are disappearing just as all the SROs have disappeared. The policies now taking place by the city and county of San Diego to provide converted hotel housing and safe sleeping and parking areas will counteract this trend of higher and higher rents producing more and more homelessness. It's a policy that needs to be continued and increased. It cannot just be a one-off. Eventually, it will put a damper on the private rental market just as it did in Vienna.
San Diego County Supervisor Jim Desmond had tough words about the planned purchase of three extended-stay hotels to house homeless people, contending they were too expensive and didn’t address what he said is the main cause of homelessness.
“We just keep throwing more and more dollars at this problem without really getting to the root cause of mental health or alcohol abuse or drug abuse,” he said April 28 on “Fox & Friends.”
Desmond considered the proposal to spend about $157.8 million — which amounts to more than $383,000 per unit — not just too much, but counterproductive. That cost, along with the price of other housing for homeless people, has come under considerable scrutiny.
“Spending all this $157 million on more rooms, doing the same thing, causing the same problem, is fruitless,” he said.
There’s a lot to unpack here.
For one thing, that housing will include services to help people with the very kind of behavioral issues Desmond was talking about.
The specifics of this situation aside, Desmond, a Republican, is expressing widespread, bipartisan frustration at the lack of progress on reducing homelessness at the state and local levels.
Billions of dollars have been aimed at the problem in California, yet the homeless population keeps growing.
He also touched on concerns that people in all walks of life, including many who are homeless, have mental illness and substance abuse problems and need help.
But his attack on the plan by the San Diego Housing Commission, which was reprised in the New York Post, misses a few important things.
The county, which Desmond helps oversee, has agreed to provide social services for residents of these hotels when they are turned into apartments. That includes getting people assistance for various problems, including mental illness and substance abuse.
The county is a partner with the commission and the city of San Diego on the hotel conversions and was involved in negotiations over their selection from a longer list of properties.
Desmond didn’t mention that on Fox, or perhaps he didn’t know. His spokesperson said the supervisor would be unavailable to comment.
“Services specifically target the people he is talking about,” Ryan Clumpner, vice chair of the housing commission, said in an interview. “The county piece of this is what he’s criticizing.”
The root cause of homelessness, as plenty of research has shown, is the lack of housing or the high cost of housing. During his appearance on Fox, Desmond didn’t talk about the need for more housing or shelter space for people living on the street.
Further, growing efforts by Democrats and Republicans to pursue rules prohibiting public camping are hampered if there is no shelter space available. The law in many cases prohibits authorities from citing or arresting homeless people unless there are beds open.
This is not to say mental illness and substance abuse don’t contribute to homelessness, along with poverty and other economic factors.
“That’s what people really need to get into, is treatment, not just the hotel room where they can continue to use and continue in the bad habit that got them homeless in the first place,” Desmond said.
The county, which Desmond helps oversee, has agreed to provide social services for residents of these hotels when they are turned into apartments. That includes getting people assistance for various problems, including mental illness and substance abuse.
The county is a partner with the commission and the city of San Diego on the hotel conversions and was involved in negotiations over their selection from a longer list of properties.
Desmond didn’t mention that on Fox, or perhaps he didn’t know. His spokesperson said the supervisor would be unavailable to comment.
“Services specifically target the people he is talking about,” Ryan Clumpner, vice chair of the housing commission, said in an interview. “The county piece of this is what he’s criticizing.”
The root cause of homelessness, as plenty of research has shown, is the lack of housing or the high cost of housing. During his appearance on Fox, Desmond didn’t talk about the need for more housing or shelter space for people living on the street.
Further, growing efforts by Democrats and Republicans to pursue rules prohibiting public camping are hampered if there is no shelter space available. The law in many cases prohibits authorities from citing or arresting homeless people unless there are beds open.
This is not to say mental illness and substance abuse don’t contribute to homelessness, along with poverty and other economic factors.
“That’s what people really need to get into, is treatment, not just the hotel room where they can continue to use and continue in the bad habit that got them homeless in the first place,” Desmond said.
That’s an inaccurate description of what this housing is designed to do, which is provide more than just a room.
Regardless, Desmond made a troubling broad statement, suggesting mental illness is the direct result of a “bad habit.” Maybe he was thinking more about substance abuse, which can stem from personal decisions. But often there’s more to it than that.
In talking about the need to get people treatment, Desmond didn’t point out there’s an acute shortage of facilities, programs and qualified people to run them. He also could have mentioned the county is trying to do something about that, for which he and other supervisors can take credit.
The county has increased spending on behavioral health treatment by tens of millions of dollars in recent years. Looking ahead, the supervisors on Tuesday unanimously approved a groundbreaking, long-range program to train new mental health professionals and retain existing ones, according to Paul Sisson of The San Diego Union-Tribune.
Desmond bemoaned the inability of authorities to put troubled individuals into treatment if they don’t want to go.
“We have to force people, or involuntarily get them into the programs they need,” he said on Fox.
He’s not the only one who thinks that way. Last year, the Democratic-controlled Legislature passed Gov. Gavin Newsom’s plan to create CARE Courts aimed at compelling people to get treatment.
Amid considerable opposition, lawmakers also are trying to change the state conservatorship law to make it easier to put people into programs when they are unable to care for themselves or may be a threat to themselves and others. San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria has been a leading advocate for those changes.
There appears to be consensus that new approaches toward homelessness are needed, because what has been done isn’t working. Beyond that, there’s no broad agreement about what direction to go in.
There are arguments for permanent housing and less expensive big tent shelters, safe tent campsites, trailers and tiny houses. The housing commission has, among other things, pursued converting extended-stay hotels, where units have kitchenettes and more apartment-like layouts.
Those buildings also tend to meet regulations by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development for this type of housing. Importantly, they can be turnkey projects converted quickly. The three San Diego hotels, which are near public transportation and grocery stores, could be occupied by the end of the year, according to the housing commission.
Building from scratch could take years to put together financing, gain approvals and complete construction. And that costs more than converting hotels, according to Clumpner.
“These homes are 30-40 percent cheaper than new & include social services,” he said on Twitter. “They’re coming from housing tourists to housing San Diegans with special needs.”
Gary Warth of the Union-Tribune reported that the $383,000 per-unit cost of the three hotels is greater than the cost of the two hotels purchased in 2020 and similar projects, but less than newly constructed affordable housing projects.
One of the more expensive projects is the 96-unit Amanecer Apartments in Linda Vista, which opened at a cost of $51.1 million, or $538,000 a unit.
San Diego Finally Gets It Right for the Homeless Situation
by John Lawrence
San Diego identifies two areas which can be devoted to safe sleeping places for the homeless. They will provide 500 spots for homeless to have tents. Also rest rooms, meals, security and other services will be provided. At the same time the City will pass an ordinance which prevents people from sleeping on the public streets. I have been advocating for this for some time here, here and here. In an article in the San Diego Union Tribune we find this: San Diego to open homeless camp sites at two parking lots near Balboa Park. In addition to these newly identified areas, the City is also buying motels to provide single room shelters. These along with the existing shelter beds should go a long way to providing accommodations for the approximately 2000 homeless people on the streets of San Diego. It will also be a huge sigh of relief for pedestrians and business owners who would like the streets to be clean and safe for customers and dog walkers. According to the article:
Hundreds of homeless people in San Diego will have a legal place to live outdoors in tents on city-owned parking lots adjacent to Balboa Park later this year, Mayor Todd Gloria announced Monday.
One site will be in Parking Lot O near the Naval Medical Center and just east of Nursery Road, which could accommodate up to 400 tents.
The second site could accommodate 136 tents and is in the parking lot of a city maintenance yard at 20th and B streets. That site was temporarily used as a campground with individual tents in 2017 as the city tried to quickly get homeless people off the street during a hepatitis A outbreak.
The safe sleeping sites, as they are known, will be the first of their kind in the county and have individual tents provided by the city. Homeless people often decline offers to move into congregate shelters, and safe sleeping sites are seen as alternatives that people may be more willing to accept.
Monday’s announcement came at a time when the number of homeless people in downtown San Diego has reached a record high.
The mayor also said the new safe sleeping site is in tandem with an ordinance that would prohibit camping on sidewalks when shelter beds are available, which is expected to go before the City Council early next month.
“When the taxpayers of this city are spending tens of millions of dollars on homelessness services to get people off the street and into care, we should expect those on the street to avail themselves of those opportunities,” he said.
Councilmember Stephen Whitburn proposed the ordinance and also has been pushing for the creation of a safe sleeping site for months. Whitburn’s district includes downtown San Diego, where the number of homeless people living in sidewalk encampments has surged in recent months.
Speaking at Monday’s announcement, Whitburn said the new safe sleeping sites will benefit homeless people, who will be offered a place to camp that will include security, toilets, meals and access to services, while also benefiting downtown residents and businesses.
“I have spoken with a number of people who are tired of living in squalor on the sidewalk and want to be in a better place but do not want to go into an enclosed shelter,” he said. “They have told me they would happily move to a safe sleeping site with bathrooms, with security, with meals and services.”
The homeless crowding the downtown city streets put somewhat of a damper on the extensive tourist and conference business that is a big part of the city's economy. Besides in such a beautiful city, homelessness creates a huge eyesore right in its midst. The safe camping sites represent at least a partial solution to the homeless problem and will alleviate the complaints I receive about the city as an Uber driver. Tourists and conference goers notice the homeless problem and it doesn't sit well with them, let alone the residents of expensive high rise condos who, when they descend to street level have to wade through filth in order to get where they're going.
From the point of view of the homeless they will at least have some services plus sanitation plus meals plus social worker access to help them get back on their feet if they should choose to do so. Let's not underestimate security as well. They had none of this on the public streets. Since a lot of them don't want to go to shelters for various reasons, such as they can't take their pets with them, they should be relieved at this solution. It should not be a problem for them to access other services since they will be centrally located. Many have bikes and there are bus stops near by. Now what the City needs to do is to identify other safe sleeping areas that the City could make available for future use. Hopefully they won't be needed, but it would be good to have them available if they are.
Is Private Equity Firm, Blackstone Group, Taking Over San Diego's Rental Market?
by John Lawrence
In a deal with the Conrad Prebys Foundation, Blackstone Group, CEO'd by Steven Schwarzman, is buying 5800 rental units in San Diego. According to the San Diego Union, "The deal makes Blackstone one of the biggest real estate holders in San Diego County. It already owns $4.5 billion in assets here — including Legoland and the Hotel del Coronado. The transaction, which also includes Los Angeles-based investment firm TruAmerica as a partner, is expected to close in the next few weeks. The sale of the apartments was praised by Dan Yates, the president of the Conrad Prebys Foundation, who said the portfolio was assembled by Conrad Prebys — a San Diego developer — himself. Yates said the money from the deal will be used for grants primarily in San Diego."
“Conrad Prebys was a sharp businessman who found true joy in the act of giving, and I believe he would be honored to see the result of his life’s work dedicated to continuing his philanthropic legacy,” Yates wrote in an email." Billionaire Conrad Prebys died in 2016 so it's very unlikely he "assembled the deal himself." But, even if he did, and the money will be used for philanthropic grants, Conrad Prebys has his name on half he buildings in San Diego already. It seems that billionaires can't get enough of charitable giving when it gets their names on buildings even though it will probably mean that relatively affordable rental units will become unaffordable after Blackstone Group "fixes them up" and raises the rent and that the true beneficiaries will be the investors in the Blackstone Group. It is to be noted that California sanctions on evictions, put in place during the pandemic, will expire this June 30.
San Diego real estate analyst Gary London said, “To my knowledge, this is the largest real estate transaction in San Diego County history.” So the process goes like this: the tenants in Blackstone's newly acquired rental units will be given 30 day notices to leave so that Blackstone can do badly needed renovations. This is all perfectly legal. There is no need to "evict" unless the tenants refuse to leave even after given proper notice. The Union article goes on,"All the apartments are market-rate but Blackstone says it plans to partner with nonprofit Pacific Housing to provide services for residents, including after-school tutoring, financial literacy classes, and health and wellness initiatives at no cost. It did not address it directly, but the move seems to counteract earlier concern with the foundation’s sale of these holdings." The key word here is "market-rate." This means that once Blackstone puts in its "improvements," they can charge whatever rent they can get even if it's 50% more than what tenants were previously paying. This is how the game is played, and this is why there are fewer and fewer affordable apartments in San Diego. Investors buy up apartments with affordable rents and convert them into apartments at "market-rate." Ironically, Blackstone intends to provide new tenants with "financial literacy classes." Presumably this would mean tutoring them to the advisability of investing in the Blackstone Group. And what were the "earlier concerns with the foundation’s sale of these holdings." Could it be that the newly converted "market-rate" apartments would reduce the stock of affordable rental units in San Diego?
The most pathetic aspect of this deal was this: "A letter was sent to the foundation in early February from San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria, San Diego County Supervisors chair Nathan Fletcher and California Senate President Pro Tem Toni Atkins to urge them to take into account future affordability of the apartments when considering a sale." I'm sure they'll do that even if it means their investors will take a slight hit to their profuts. Get real, politicians! Your letter is a fig leaf and is worse than useless. The letter went on: “A substantial number of these units are home to working individuals and families,” they wrote, “and are some of the limited inventory in the region of non-deed restricted, naturally occurring affordable housing options for San Diegans.” And the most egregious oxymoron of the letter: "non-deed restricted, naturally occurring affordable housing options." There is no such thing as "natyrally occurring affordable housing" at least not when private equity firms like Blackstone see a profit-making opportunity. The fact that they are "non-deed restricted" means that they are fair game. In any event affordable housing is in the eye of the beholder. It means absolutely nothing unless it is deed restricted or publicly owned.
The article concludes with: "The Conrad Prebys Foundation gave more than $71 million to 112 organizations across San Diego County in March to bolster the arts, health care, medical research, animal conservation, education, and the welfare of young people. The biggest grant — $15 million — went to the San Diego Symphony." Of course! The symphony will always profit as long as billionaires want their names on more buildings and symphony programs. Meanwhile working class tenants lose.
The City Finally Gets It Regarding the Homeless Situation
by John Lawrence
San Diego has spent millions on the homeless problem and the result is that it's only getting worse. More people each month are becoming unhoused than are becoming housed. On March 16, the San Diego Union reported:
"With downtown homeless encampments in his district surging in recent months, San Diego City Councilmember Stephen Whitburn on Thursday announced he will propose an ordinance banning tents and makeshift structures on public property.
“We’ve heard too many stories of people camping on our streets who have been randomly attacked, stabbed to death or even set on fire,” Whitburn said. “These encampments are unsafe. They are also a danger to our neighborhoods.”
San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria joined Whitburn in the announcement and said he supports the proposal and would urge the full City Council to approve it."
The idea is that the city would provide safe places off the city public streets and sidewalks for homeless people to stay combined with an ordinance that would not allow them to pitch their tents on public sidewalks and other public areas. I have long advocated here and here and here that the city make safe camping areas and safe parking areas available in addition to shelters so that homeless people could pitch their tents there making the public sidewalks safe for ordinary citizens and businesses. In addition these safe outdoors areas would have rest portable rest rooms and other amenities which would make the areas more palatable and hygeinic. Shelters are expensive to build. Making available city owned vacant lots are not. Most homeless these days have their own tents and most have bicycles, cell phones and a few other self provided amenities. They just need a safe place to be, and that the city can provide at very little expense. The city is finally coming around to that conclusion! It makes the lives of the homeless marginally better, and makes the streets a whole lot better for pedestrians and businesses not to mention more attractive to tourists, one of San Diego's major industries.
"[Mayor] Gloria said the new local ordinance would get tough on people who refuse to accept help or move their tents, but still would take a compassionate and progressive enforcement approach. People camping in public places, including canyons and sidewalks, would be offered a shelter bed and only cited or arrested after multiple contacts with law enforcement.
"Gloria and Whitburn also said the city is planning to open another safe parking lot in the near future and is looking for a location for its first safe campground."[!]
Finally! Here's what I wrote on November 20, 2022:
"Recently Governor Newsom held up state homeless funds because cities were not getting the job done. Here's a solution: provide campgrounds and safe parking areas in addition to shelters and affordable housing units. In other words to all of the above present so-called solutions add safe campgrounds and parking areas. The beauty of this plan is that it would add minimum cost to all the other solutions. So while they are pursuing the more costly solutions, it would at least get the homeless off the public streets where they are interfering with pedestrian thoroughfares and businesses in general, and would provide them with an an enhanced version of their present living accommodations which are mainly in tents. It would also be more safe and sanitary. They would still be mainly in tents until more robust and expensive solutions can be found but at least they could be provided with portable toilets, showers and dumpster facilities as well as security. In addition social services could be more readily provided than the present solution of finding them on the public streets to offer them. What is wrong with these politicians? They could solve the homeless "problem" tomorrow at little or no expense as far as getting the homeless off public streets which is at least half the problem. The city owns a lot of vacant lots suitable for rural campsites and safe parking areas for those with vehicles. Portable rest room facilities could make the lot of the homeless and ordinary citizens immeasurably better if they would only use them.
So here is my solution, and then I'll tell you why it will never be implemented. Set aside land for free campgrounds just as a city sets aside land for parks. These should be open to all people not just the "homeless" at some snapshot in time. The financial savings from not building lumber and concrete housing would be immense. These campgrounds should have basic services like rest room facilities and showers. Also trash collection and security. The homeless can provide their own tents as they already have which are strewn all over public sidewalks. This solution accomplishes two very important goals: 1) it provides a marginally better lifestyle for the homeless with much better sanitary conditions and 2) it gets the homeless off the streets and sidewalks letting the general public feel safe in using them again. The money saved in police and hospital resources would probably more than pay for the minimal services provided. In addition social worker services in terms of mental health, drug counseling and job search might be provided as they say they want to provide today.
I'm looking forward to safe and hygienic public city streets in San Diego, and as an Uber driver, not having to apologize to tourists about the homeless problem!
More on housing: Newsom also said he will provide 1,200 tiny homes to jurisdictions across the state — including 500 in Los Angeles, 150 in San Diego County, 200 in San Jose and 350 in Sacramento — to be used as a temporary housing option for people immediately leaving the streets. He has tapped the National Guard to help deliver the units.
How to Solve the Homeless Problem and Bring Rents Down at the Same Time
by John Lawrence
Open public campgrounds with amenities that anyone could access. The homeless should have to live there by local ordinance rather than public streets. Many others would choose to live there rather than pay exorbitant rents. Market forces would drive rents down. The homeless would be off the public streets. In Sweden they have Allemansrätten, the Swedish right to camp on public land. It's guaranteed by their Constitution. Many, who are not homeless, would choose to camp on urban public land until rents came down. As apartments lay vacant, landlords would eventually be forced to reduce prices. Where is it written that everyone has to have a mortgage or pay rent? The homeless are camping now, but just in the wrong places - on public streets. They don't lack tents. They don't lack food. What they lack is sanitation. Public campgrounds on vacant land owned by cities, of which there is plenty, could provide that. Security could be provided for a lo less than public expenditures on police now occurring because many of their calls are homeless related. This solution would not solve all of society's problems, but it would be very cost effective and would clear the public streets so pedestrians could use them safely and sanitarily.
All the other solutions for which millions of dollars are being spent could still be provided. However, the millions of dollars now being spent are not getting the job done.Granted families with children need proper housing so housing solutions should focus on them not single individuals. The elderly need to be given special consideration. Parking areas for people with vehicles who wish to sleep in their vehicles on city owned vacant lots would cost the city nothing or next to nothing. Portable rest rooms and showers are already available at a meager cost.Why aren't cities using them? They could also provide factory made portable cabin sized housing modules at minimum cost. Why do they insist that everyone has to be properly housed in two by four construction which is very expensive. Shelters aren't for everyone for a number of reasons. Some people have pets that aren't allowed in shelters, and some just want their own individual space even if it's a tent on the sidewalk.
Is it that the rental industry doesn't want to see a low cost public solution to homelessness that anyone who wants to save money could avail themselves of? An Allemansrätten for America? Why does the public tolerate their sidewalks and public areas being clogged by homeless tents and paraphernalia? This is as much a solution for them, the general public, as it is for the presently homeless and the very poor because, let's face it, the very poor just can't afford current rents and there are very few single room occupancy (SRO) units available. Single tent occupancy on sanctioned public camp grounds would be something better than what exists now especially if a few inexpensive amenities were provided such as toilets and showers, and it would FREE UP PUBLIC STREETS. It would cost a pittance compared to the money that' is now being spent on homeless non-solutions.
As homelessness has emerged as the city’s most pressing problem, massive tent encampments have become its lasting signal. But the persistence of encampments even as we expand shelters offer a lesson, if we’re willing to listen.
Something happened 10-15 years ago to homelessness. I don’t know exactly what triggered it. But I remember walking through the Occupy San Diego protests – the tent encampments that sprang up at City Hall in 2011 demanding Wall Street accountability for the recession – and realizing many of the campers were not necessarily activists but homeless people who had come to live in what became a supportive village.
After that, the tent – the personal tent, the nylon or polyester Coleman, Marmot or REI camping tent – came to define street homelessness across the country. It drastically changed the visibility and experience of street homelessness.
Tents and homelessness are not a 21st Century combination. Tents and campers once filled the entirety of Mission Valley in the early 1940s as migrants from across the country clamored into San Diego to get the many jobs the defense industry created.
But the tent encampments that sprang up in East Village, along the Navy Broadway Complex and throughout San Diego’s hundreds of canyon river beds, started to frame the conversation here differently. It was as if the unsheltered population were tired of two things: tired of hiding and tired of being cold.
The tents privatized public rights of way and asserted homelessness into the public consciousness.
They were a protest – a manifestation of our failure.
The tents helped people create community and provide mutual aid. They created a sense of safety, privacy and even family life but also offered cover for crime and violence.
Worse, though, are the concentrations of death and disease. An outbreak of the feces-borne hepatitis A led to suffering on such a scale in 2017 that it provoked city and regional leaders to take homelessness seriously in a way they had not, though the tent villages had expanded for several years. Now, even those most sympathetic to the tent encampments and the plight of their residents can’t deny the gruesome deaths they often host, whether it’s at the hands of murderers and traffickers or errant drivers who lose control of their vehicles. More than 10 years on, we’re only now, barely, grappling with what the tents changed about homelessness.
San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria said something recently about them that should provoke thousands of conversations and a wholesale rethinking of what we’re doing about this crisis.
In an op-ed in the San Diego Union-Tribune March 28 about the homeless crisis plan he is pursuing, Gloria acknowledged the reality the tents have created:
“One of the central challenges we face is that many of the folks camping on our sidewalks or in canyons don’t want to live in a congregate setting – which most of our shelters are – so they refuse offers of beds in these facilities,” he wrote.
The city, right now, has 1,468 beds under contract in congregate or shared settings.
People who have been working on homeless outreach and services have known that many people prefer their personal tents to congregate shelters for many years. There’s nothing particularly insightful about the mayor’s claim, except that he said it. And if he believes it, and he should, then it has enormous implications far beyond the city of San Diego. If others agree, we need to rethink how we are deploying millions of dollars meant to address the problem and how we are talking to people on the street.
It’s like a taboo has finally been broken. People who are living in tent encampments don’t want to move to shelters. The data is overwhelming. Every time the city sweeps out a huge encampment, the vast majority of people outreach workers offer shelter to refuse. Why? Not because they want to remain homeless necessarily. But because their personal tents offer them dignity, privacy and enough shelter to survive.
The congregate shelters, by contrast, can often be dystopic, dangerous and restrictive. Their incompatibility with healthy living became obvious, again, when disease struck. The very first thing former Mayor Kevin Faulconer realized as COVID-19 began spreading in the United States was that he needed to clear the congregate shelters. A bunch of people jammed into a poorly ventilated setting would have been ideal for the spread of the disease.
“If the environment they are coming into isn’t safe, clean or comfortable, what makes that different than being on the street?” said Hanan Scrapper, the regional director at People Assisting The Homeless, the city’s primary partner in many homeless outreach and assistance efforts. “When we do traditional shelters and response efforts, we’re not always thinking about dignity.”
It turns out, unhoused residents are a lot like people who have homes. They want privacy. They want, though, to be close to community. They like pets. They like being together with loved ones. And yes, some of them like to do drugs or drink. All of these things, however, can be restricted or difficult in a congregate setting.
So what are we even doing? Just last month, County Supervisor Nathan Fletcher announced the county was going to help prop up a new mega-tent shelter for 150 people in the Midway area. The mayor is supportive. But if the mayor agrees that congregate settings can’t compete with the tent encampments, why are we still supporting them? I asked his team.
“Our goal on shelters is not to create the ideal situation but to put them in position to access services to become part of the system that ultimately leads them to housing and to get them off the street. It is not safe on the street,” said Rachel Laing, the mayor’s spokeswoman.
But, the mayor himself said that’s not working?
“Well, that’s where enforcement comes in. If we have enough beds, we are allowed to compel people to move,” she said.
Now we are getting somewhere. We’re saying the quiet parts more loudly now. The congregate shelters, while helping some, provide a tool to the city. In a world where the personal tents changed everything and the widespread adoption of recreational camping gear by the homeless made life just comfortable enough, with just enough dignity, the large shelters allow the city to make homeless residents uncomfortable again.
That’s what the mayor has decided to do. The tents make sense to some, he wrote.
“But we simply can’t be a city that lets people set up camp wherever they please. It’s unsafe, it’s unsanitary and it speaks poorly of us all if we do nothing to address the destitution and despair,” he wrote.
He’s also right about this but merely uprooting encampments sets off an endless cycle of uprooting and re-rooting. The people don’t disappear, they just regroup. The process is hard on the people on the streets, hard on the police who have to carry it out and if the ongoing presence of so much human suffering on our streets is itself a form of violence that traumatizes all who have to move through it, then the approach ensures the most people possible experience it.
It may be worth, instead, rethinking this paradox. Sometimes when you are fighting something, you have to channel its energy rather than keep trying to destroy it. The personal tents are not good. But they represent a human desire to take care of oneself and to build community. The tents reveal not a desire to be on the street but a very human desire to build a home.
There’s no reason our unsheltered population would not continue to do that on their own if given the space.
“From our experience, what we’ve seen is when clients come into a clean, well-kept environment with good food and healthy culture, they try to take care of it. They see people care for them and it gives them hope,” said Scrapper.
They want to build homes and yet we are spending so much of our resources and energy on trying to tear them down and force them into our system.
It would be one thing if it were working but it’s not. Despite a mobilization of city, county and state resources, it is getting worse. More people are suffering. More are dying. More are living in filth.
It’s no coincidence that our already extraordinary cost of living is skyrocketing just as the problem deepens. Homelessness is the lowest rung on the housing ladder. In place of cheap housing, they’re putting up personal tents.
The mayor doesn’t want to accommodate them in a safe camping village, Laing says, because the city and providers cannot afford the support personnel needed to keep it safe. But he has also proven incapable of winning the war on the tents in the streets.
If you’re losing a war and wasting money fighting it, it may be time to rethink it.
The people on the streets are telling us they want space to set up their own lives.
Whatever dollars we spend forcing them to consider our approach instead may be better spent keeping them safe and clean as they pursue their own.
Is San Diego Finally Facing Reality About Homelessness
by John Lawrence
In an article by Scott Lewis he finally sheds some light on what should have been obvious to most observers of the homeless situation. Fact: Homeless people would rather live in a tent on the street than in a shelter. It's not hard to figure out why. They want privacy, pets, their own space, consumption of beverages of their own choice. He writes, "It turns out, unhoused residents are a lot like people who have homes. They want privacy. They want, though, to be close to community. They like pets. They like being together with loved ones. And yes, some of them like to do drugs or drink. All of these things, however, can be restricted or difficult in a congregate setting." Make sense? I have long advocated that local governments set aside city owned land so that homeless people could set up their tents and have some basic social service like portable toilets, showers and storage. In addition social workers could provide them with their services like the city so often says they want to do. So why don't they do it especially if they are in one or more centralized location off the streets and somewhere that can be made into a more sanitary setting. Did I mention dumpsters? By the way the city actually did that temporarily during the hepatitis crisis in 2017.
So here is my solution, and then I'll tell you why it will never be implemented. Set aside land for free campgrounds just as a city sets aside land for parks. These should be open to all people not just the "homeless" at some snapshot in time. The financial savings from not building lumber and concrete housing would be immense. These campgrounds should have basic services like rest room facilities and showers. Also trash collection and security. The homeless can provide their own tents as they already have which are strewn all over public sidewalks. This solution accomplishes two very important goals: 1) it provides a marginally better lifestyle for the homeless with much better sanitary conditions and 2) it gets the homeless off the streets and sidewalks letting the general public feel safe in using them again. The money saved in police and hospital resources would probably more than pay for the minimal services provided. In addition social worker services in terms of mental health, drug counseling and job search might be provided as they say they want to provide today.
So this solution would make both the general public, who could reclaim the streets and sidewalks, and the homeless, who would have a marginally better and more sanitary life, better off and the whole scenario could be implemented on a very cost effective basis. Why would it never be implemented in America? Here's why. It heightens the fear among politicians and especially conservatives that the homeless population would continue to grow unabated as more and more people would choose to live in a campground than to pay exorbitant rent. Landlords would lobby politicians because they would fear losing their tenants. People on the lowest rungs of the financial ladder would lose their fear of becoming homeless as a free or almost free solution to housing in lumber and concrete becomes available. Most of the homeless already have rudimentary transportation i.e. bicycles. This gives them access to bus routes which can get them around the city. Most have some income which they use for food at fast food places which, while not nutritious, at least keeps them from starving. So my solution would not necessarily include food services or transportation services but it could.
"The mayor doesn’t want to accommodate them in a safe camping village, Laing says, because the city and providers cannot afford the support personnel needed to keep it safe. But he has also proven incapable of winning the war on the tents in the streets.
"If you’re losing a war and wasting money fighting it, it may be time to rethink it.
"The people on the streets are telling us they want space to set up their own lives.
"Whatever dollars we spend forcing them to consider our approach instead may be better spent keeping them safe and clean as they pursue their own."
Really? "The city can't afford the support personnel needed to keep t safe." Yet they can afford $800K in overtime pay to deal with homeless problems on the street. Hospitals can afford millions of dollars in emergency room treatment for homeless for which they are not reimbursed. Businesses can afford homeless camping out in front of their doors. Is the city being penny wise and pound foolish? You bet they are. They get millions of dollars to build shelters which the homeless don't want to live in. Yet they can't afford some basic campground facilities on a vacant lot? Oh I see. The Kampgrounds of America would lobby against something for free which is a profit making enterprise for them. Yet the state of California can offer almost free camping in Cardiff, Sweetwater County Park, Campland on the Bay and elsewhere. Plenty of almost free campgrounds are available. The state, county and city could create more at minimal expense compared with brick and mortar facilities. And it might even bring down the price of rents.
The authorities should take note of Scott's article and do the right and inexpensive thing staring them right in the face. It would get homeless off the streets thereby making them safe for ordinary pedestrians. It would bring more people to local businesses that happen to be in neighborhoods where the homeless have set up tent camps. It would provide a sanitary location for the homeless to set up their tents. It would provide ready access to the homeless for social workers who would be there to deal with the problems that landed them up homeless in the first place. Instead of police being called to deal with homeless problems all over the city at random locations, on site security could minimize demands on police. It seems like a no brainer. I'm glad Scott finally called out the stupidity of the local, county and state authorities on this matter. I would also increase tourism in America's Finest (Potentially) City.
Mayor Kevin Faulconer announced the city’s plan to turn Golden Hall into a temporary homeless shelter with more than 240 beds in an effort to stop the spread of the coronavirus. / Photo by Adriana Heldiz
Mayor Kevin Faulconer announced the city’s plan to turn Golden Hall into a temporary homeless shelter with more than 240 beds in an effort to stop the spread of the coronavirus. / Photo by Adriana Heldiz
Hundreds of homeless San Diegans are now sheltered at the Convention Center to help stop the spread of COVID-19 among the homeless community. At the same time, the tourism industry has come to a halt over the virus, leaving hotels citywide empty.
Mayor Kevin Faulconer thinks he’s found an opportunity in those facts, and he’s leading a charge to acquire “hundreds and hundreds” of hotel rooms from owners stung by the lost revenue to turn them into permanent housing for homeless San Diegans.
“There’s never been this much of an opportunity, and there’s never been this much of a need,” Faulconer said of the effort, a partnership between the city, county and the San Diego Housing Commission.
The move to strike lease-to-own deals for distressed hotels would rely on funds from the federal government that the commission already has on hand, and could be expanded by new stimulus funds from the state or federal government. The city would rely on the county to provide behavioral health services, like addiction or mental health treatment tied to new permanent supportive housing.
Faulconer said he’s been in contact with mayors from around the state, Sen. Kamala Harris and Gov. Gavin Newsom over the program. He’s hoping to act quickly, to both take advantage of the struggling hotels that might not otherwise be available, and to provide new housing options much more quickly than low-income housing that needs to be built from scratch.
In a special meeting Friday morning, the Housing Commission’s board of directors could greenlight negotiations for 10 hotels around the city, though that’s meant to give the city options and it’s unlikely to acquire all of them.
A Carmel Valley woman is putting out a word of warning to uninsured people in need of a COVID-19 test after she was billed nearly $1,500 by a local hospital.
“It is not free. If you do not have insurance you will likely get a bill,” Melissa Chalmers told NBC 7.
Chalmers, 44, did not have medical insurance when she was tested at Scripps Memorial Hospital La Jolla in March.
She was not unlike many people who assumed COVID-19 testing was free of charge, in light of the federal ‘Families First Coronavirus Response Act.’ But the provision only relieves co-payment obligations for those who have medical insurance.
Chalmers, who owns a small consulting business, says she had Coronavirus symptoms on March 16. She wanted to get tested to not only protect herself but those around her.
“When my chest started to feel really tight, is when I felt maybe it is COVID and I should go in and get tested," Chalmers said.
She said she drove to Scripps La Jolla and was told she needed to be tested immediately. After receiving the test, she was sent home to self-quarantine.
Seven days later, test results came back negative. But then, she received a bill for $1,496. The hospital reduced the payment to $897.60.
“When I got the bill and seeing that it was, even at a discount rate, almost $900, I was completely in shock, said Chalmers.
The bill breakdown shows a $320 charge for lab services, $1,176 for emergency services for a total of $1,496. The bill deducts $598.40 for ‘patient adjustments’ for a total bill of $897.60.
After talking with the Scripps finance department, Chalmers said the bill was reduced to around $700. She has agreed to a monthly payment plan that will extend over 12 months.
Scripps Health said it could not comment directly on her case for privacy reasons, but released this statement:
“The Families First Coronavirus Response Act passed by Congress on March 18 eliminated co-payments for most people with health insurance coverage for testing for the novel coronavirus. For any patient without insurance, Scripps offers a wide range of payment plans, bill reduction options, financial assistance and other programs to help them pay their outstanding medical bill.”
Meanwhile, health care advocates say Melissa Chalmers’s case underscores a serious problem for those without medical insurance.
“It’s disturbing and it’s dangerous for uninsured Americans to be getting gigantic bills if the go in and do the responsible thing, which is to go get tested for the Coronavirus if they fear that they’re ill,” said Carmen Balder, Executive Director of the non-profit group Consumer Watchdog.
Balder is strongly urging uninsured Californians to sign up for Medi-Cal.
“Especially if this coronavirus epidemic has put you in a more dire financial situation, you could qualify for Medi-Cal coverage, certainly enough to get the coverage and testing that you need."
Meanwhile, Melissa Chalmers wants to put out a simple message for those without insurance.
“If your symptoms are not life-threatening, unfortunately, at this time I would honestly advise to just stay at home and self-isolate and quarantine and try to get over it ad get better, rather than go get tested,” Chalmers said.
Some Good News From the Pandemic: California Finally Housing the Homeless
by John Lawrence, April 4, 2020
It took the coronavirus to finally get state officials off their butts to do something about housing the homeless, and they did it with the greatest possible alacrity. If it takes a pandemic to solve the homeless problem, then maybe the pandemic is a good thing. At least it has had some good outcomes. Governor Newsom said that what they are doing now for the homeless will have permanent ramifications. In addition to possibly solving homelessness, many areas of the world have seen decreased air pollution so that global warming has slowed down as well. California has secured 7000 hotel and motel rooms for the homeless. The temporary housing program will be supported by a first-in-the nation Federal Emergency Management Agency framework created for the crisis. So now FEMA is getting involved? Funny, they were never concerned about the homeless before.
So finally, when there is a health threat that might spread from the homeless population to the rest of us, the solution is readily in hand. Up to now state and government officials have dilly dallied for years and years when they could have implemented this solution decades ago. Instead they were content to "study the problem" ad infinitum. Newsom directed $100 million last month in emergency state funding to several local governments and agencies to get new beds up and running immediately with supportive services like meals and medical care. In addition travel trailers and RVs have been set aside for the homeless. Many of them are elderly with all kinds of underlying conditions, but it took a threat to the community at large in order to get the community to do something of a humanitarian nature.
The new program is aimed at ultimately giving counties and cities the ability to continue homeless services at these hotels and motels. The occupancy agreements include the ability to extend leases, as well as purchase options, Newsom said. Amazing how fast this whole transformation took place without a vote or a lot of fooling around. San Diego's Measure C which was voted on recently would have provided money for homeless services, but it was required to pass with a two thirds majority. Instead it failed by a couple of percentage points. The pandemic provided the motivation to get something done post haste without a lot of hand waving and blather and NIMBYism.
“We’re not just thinking in the short-term, we’re also beginning to process long-term support so we can get people off the streets in a permanent way,” Newsom said. Namara Mercer, executive director of the San Diego County Hotel-Motel Association, said the calls for rooms from the state and county began in mid-March. She couldn’t say how many San Diego hotels have provided rooms since then. “It kind of all happened pretty darn quick,” Mercer said. San Diego County reported that 95 of the 116 people staying in the motel rooms it oversees are homeless San Diegans, though officials have said that people who cannot easily isolate themselves – those who live with a large numbers of other people, for example – were also eligible.
As of late Monday, Cox said nonprofit Interfaith Community Services had mostly filled Escondido and Carlsbad motels it has agreed to manage.
Another 54 families who had previously stayed in Father Joe’s Villages’ shelter on the second floor of Golden Hall in the City Hall complex have been placed in two downtown motels.
Cox said the Downtown San Diego Partnership, a business group that conducts homeless outreach in the area, is also moving homeless San Diegans it has identified as vulnerable into another downtown motel.
And Cox said the remaining 225 rooms the county has promised will likely need to accommodate 327 homeless San Diegans now staying in the city’s bridge shelters who are seniors or have underlying health conditions.
The task force expects to assess the need for additional motel rooms after the Convention Center begins taking in homeless San Diegans on Wednesday. Officials believe the Convention Center could dramatically increase capacity for homeless San Diegans who are currently unable to practice social distancing on the streets.
So there is a mad scramble to do right by the homeless now that a pandemic is sweeping the country. Maybe we should thank the pandemic for finally making us able to do the right thing by the homeless, something we should have been doing all along. All of a sudden there is money available, but in reality there has been money available all along. People just didn't have the will or just didn't care until they realized that a raging pandemic among the homeless could actually affect them, but then we're finally all in this together, right? Whereas we never were before. If this pandemic makes us realize that we are our brothers' keeper and that we really are all in this together even after the pandemic ameliorates, then maybe it will have been a good thing all along.
One Positive Thing: Lower Pollution and Greenhouse Gases
by John Lawrence, March 24, 2020
Among all the negative things that are happening because of the coronavirus, there is at least one positive thing: air pollution and the emission of greenhouse gasses (GHGs) is way down. The pandemic is shutting down industrial activity and temporarily slashing air pollution levels around the world according to satellite imagery. There are fewer cars on the roads, fewer airplanes flying, fewer ships at sea. The downturn in economic activity means that less power is being consumed; therefore, less coal is being shoveled into power plants around the world. It's a veritable demonstration that it is possible to reduce pollution, reduce global warming and in other ways have a cleaner, healthier planet.
Paul Monks, professor of air pollution at the University of Leicester, predicted there will be important lessons to learn. “We are now, inadvertently, conducting the largest-scale experiment ever seen,” he said. “Are we looking at what we might see in the future if we can move to a low-carbon economy? Not to denigrate the loss of life, but this might give us some hope from something terrible. To see what can be achieved. It seems entirely probable that a reduction in air pollution will be beneficial to people in susceptible categories, for example some asthma sufferers,” he said. “It could reduce the spread of disease. A high level of air pollution exacerbates viral uptake because it inflames and lowers immunity.” Agriculture could also get a boost because pollution stunts plant growth, he added.
One of the largest drops in pollution levels could be seen over the city of Wuhan in central China which was put under a strict lockdown in late January. The city of 11 million people serves as a major transportation hub and is home to hundreds of factories supplying car parts and other hardware to global supply chains. According to NASA, nitrogen dioxide levels across eastern and central China have been 10-30% lower than normal.
This period, when the pandemic is not under control, is an opportunity to think differently about the economy. What are essential goods and services? Definitely we need food, clean water and sanitation services. We need garbage collection. People need enough money to supply essential needs for themselves. We could also ask what are inessential needs? Some of these are going to sporting events, going to movie theaters especially when we can watch movies at home, going to music events at arenas especially when we can listen to music at home, going on cruises. With the increase of capabilities for working from home, going into the office is not a necessity for a lot of workers. This can be increased with the result that there will be fewer cars on the road, less rush hour traffic and less GHG emissions. Getting cars off the road is a long term goal for a green economy. This would mean fewer car sales, but it would be better for the environment.
We should ask what are essential activities to keep people healthy and safe and think about doing away with other activities which don't increase the health and welfare of human beings. After dithering for years over the homeless situation, homeless people are being put up in motels and hotels post haste as a public health issue. This is a positive development and goes to show that the homeless situation could have been ameliorated years ago if we had the will to do it. The provision of money to average Americans will not hurt the economy. It will only help the economy. During the 2008 Great Recession trillions of dollars were given to the banks to bail them out. Much of this money went to bail out investors and hedge funds which had made huge bets on the economy. Many of these bets paid off, and their bets were covered in full by the Federal Reserve when the individual Wall Street banks couldn't cover them. Obviously, these rich people did not need that money to continue to cover their own 'essential needs' or the needs of their families. It was money given to gamblers while Joe six pack got zilch. We don't need an economy which caters to rich gamblers and showers them with money when they bet the economy will go down bringing suffering to millions.
At this point the Fed has the capability of bailing out the average American family especially if they have lost their jobs so they can continue to eat and pay rent. This support for average Americans will function also to stabilize the economy and maintain GDP but at a lower level. Perhaps the 70% level that consumption contributes to GDP cannot be maintained, but this might actually be a good thing by eliminating things that are not essential to the health and welfare of the population while driving air pollution and greenhouse gasses down. Neel Kashkari President of the Minneapolis branch of the Federal Reserve siad on 60 Minutes that the Fed needs to be "overly generous" to the average family, something they weren't when the economy tanked in 2008. The Fed is committed to not letting any banks or major US businesses go under. They could just as well make sure that no American families go under. Andrew Yang's idea of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) not only helps families survive. It will help the economy survive.
Needed Now: Mandatory National Bar and Restaurant Closures and Mandated Special Hours for Seniors to Grocery Shop
by John Lawrence, March 18, 2020
Rather than having Dr. Fauci plead with young people not to go to bars and congregate, why don't they mandate at the national level all bar and restaurant closures. Here in San Diego County and in other places they have done just that. They have done it in a few other states like Florida, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Washington among others. This will only be effective if all states are ordered to do it at the national level. Otherwise, there will be a lot of traveling over state lines to bars which could be dangerous.
Also a couple of supermarkets in San Diego have set up special hours for seniors: Baron's and Northgate markets. This is a great idea and should be followed by the major supermarket chains as well. They need to take added precautions to reduce hoarding which hurts seniors the most. "Supermarkets should open early mornings for 2 hours for elderly above 60, to protect them from contact with younger people," celebrity chef Jose Andrés said on Twitter. "Also volunteer system for shopping and delivery should be implemented." It makes sense to keep the most vulnerable population away from those most likely to be carriers. In my neighborhood younger people are not self isolating. They can still congregate in homes and apartments and party into the wee hours.
Stop & Shop, a grocery chain with more than 400 locations across north eastern states, said Monday that it would open stores early to accommodate people age 60 and older from 6:00-7:30 a.m. daily. Dollar General, which operates more than 15,000 stores in 44 states, will dedicate each store’s first hour open for business to seniors. So far the major supermarkets like Ralphs, Vons and Albertsons have not followed suit. Why not? More precautions need to be taken to prevent hoarding.
Now there is a run on gun sales in San Diego. I guess people need to protect their hoards of toilet paper from home invasion. The LA Times reported:
Gun sales are surging in many U.S. states, especially in those hit hardest by the coronavirus — California, New York and Washington. But there’s also been an uptick in less-affected areas, with some first-time gun buyers fearing an unraveling of the social order and some gun owners worried that the government might use its emergency powers to restrict gun purchases.
The coronavirus is bringing out the best in people; it's also bringing out the worst.
I bought a couple dozen eggs at Baron's this morning during special senior shopping hours between 9 and 10 AM. Also got a couple boxes of trash bags that I needed. No paper towels or toilet paper, however. These stores, in addition to having special senior shopping hours, need to save some rolls of toilet paper just for seniors. I have plenty of Kleenex and paper napkins though. They are starting to mark certain items as 1 or 2 only. That's a good thing. Now they need to get caught up on toilet paper!
Some of these people don't honor the 6 feet of space between people while waiting in line. I had to tell one talking machine to back off to 6 feet this morning.
Does that include the homeless, Mr. Trump? Are the homeless over 65 being asked to shelter in place? Does that mean that they keep their same place on the sidewalk? Does it mean that they social distance 6 feet from the next homeless person? Or does it mean that gatherings of 10 or more in homeless shelters need to disperse? Does it mean we should close down the homeless shelters? Does it mean that NIMBYS who don't want parking lots open to homeless people living in their vehicles need to shut their mouths? We want to know, Mr. President. Youth wants to know.
There are 500,000 homeless Americans living on the streets. Are they being asked to shelter in place? It's ridiculous. Rather than have a crash program to put them into single room occupancy units (SROs), they are not even mentioned, not even considered in the President's speech, nor of those of his "team." The coronavirus should sound a clarion call to do something about the homneless situation. Where do you think a pandemic would spread? Probably among the dense crowding of homeless people in San Diego, Los Angeles and Seattle. Especially places where it has been raining a lot. I saw a policeman stop his squad car in the middle of traffic the other day, turn on his patrol lights and deliver a sandwich to a woman who was sitting alone on the sidewalk in the pouring rain. God bless him! My rider told me that his family were all police and they did that a lot. If so, good on them. I know the police are dealing with the homeless a large part of their time which costs money. Also the emergency rooms. Probably bbetween the police and the emergency rooms more money is spent on the homeless than it would cost to put them in SROs.
A few short years ago there was an outbreak of hepatitus A among the homeless in San Diego and elsewhere. The Washington Post reported:
The hepatitis A outbreak in Los Angeles, Santa Cruz and San Diego, long considered a model of savvy urban redevelopment, is the extreme result of a booming state economy, now driving up home prices after years of government decisions that made low-cost housing more difficult to build.
Unlike in some other large U.S. cities, the homeless population in San Diego has been rising sharply, outstripping the local government's ability to manage its scope. State lawmakers passed more than a dozen measures in the recent legislative session to address the state's lack of affordable housing, none of which will help resolve the crisis in the short term.
Nowhere is the need more urgent than in this prospering city, where the number of people living on the streets rose 14 percent in the past year, tracing a hepatitis A outbreak that thrives in unsanitary conditions. Health officials believe an epidemic that has infected more than 500 people statewide since March began in San Diego County, where 19 people have died as a result of the disease, nearly all of them homeless.
So the hepatitis A outbreak was an epidemic, a few short steps from a pandemic. Washing stations were provided then, and washing stations are being provided now, but so far nothing much has been done about the homeless situation in San Diego and elsewhere. Measure C on the ballot recently, which would have provided $25 million a year to address various issues dealing with the homeless population, failed because it didn't quite achieve a two thirds majority. It garnered about 64% of the vote while it needed 67% to become law. So close but no cigar. So now what? More hand washing stations evidently.
Governor Newsom has moved hundreds of homeless people into hotel rooms “to get people out of these encampments.”. This was after a homeless person died from the coronavirus. The Mercury News reported:
Officials have also said they plan to distribute trailers around the state where homeless people can shelter or be quarantined. And on Monday Newsom said shelters were working to create distance between beds to help stop the spread of the virus.
California has more than 100,000 residents who sleep on the streets on any given night, including thousands of people in the Bay Area.
“We will overwhelm ourselves if we don’t move with real urgency in this space,” he said.
Newsom said his team had identified more than 900 hotels that could be suitable for housing the homeless. His team, he said, was in the process of negotiating to convert some of them into temporary living quarters for the homeless.
Now that there is some urgency in dealing with the homeless situation, you'd think that the state would move to a more permanent solution or are they waiting for the coronavirus to subside so they can just let the homeless go back to living on the street. By the way, "Officials also said that homeless people would be exempt from a Bay Area-wide order to shelter in place. But they urged homeless people to seek shelter and said local governments should work to make shelter available as soon as possible." Really??
UPDATE:
From Voice of San Diego:
Supervisor Nathan Fletcher also noted the county is working to secure at least 2,000 motel rooms for vulnerable San Diegans – whether they are homeless, nursing home residents or simply don’t have a safe place to stay – who may be awaiting a test result or showing symptoms of coronavirus but not require hospitalization.
As of Monday, Fletcher said, the county had secured 227 rooms and the Regional Task Force on the Homeless is working to obtain more motel rooms for homeless San Diegans who are at risk of coronavirus who have not been referred by a healthcare provider.
One of the most pressing problems for the homeless population is that there are no places that they can just be without being threatened by the police to move on. They have to settle into little vestiges of public property under freeway bridges or on public sidewalks or little strips of public grass. They need a place they can relax without the threat of constantly having to "move on." That's why the movement to turn parking lots into places where they can pitch a tent or sleep in a vehicle is a radical plan which is giving them some security from the police and illegitimacy of place. Vox reports:
The housing affordability crisis — most acute in the Bay Area, but stretching up and down the West Coast — has helped exacerbate a homelessness crisis in states like California, Oregon, and Washington. Many people who are no longer able to afford or find stable housing are now forced to spend their nights sleeping in the one major asset they have left: their cars.
California has about a quarter of the country’s homeless population, with almost 130,000 people experiencing homelessness, according to estimates from one night in January (known as a “point in time” count) from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. The state’s neighbor Washington has just over 22,000 people experiencing homelessness, and Oregon has almost 14,500. Nearly half of all unsheltered people are in California, according to HUD statistics from 2018. In Los Angeles County alone, there are some 16,500 people living in vehicles. (Note that New York State has about 92,000 people experiencing homelessness, which is 17 percent of the national total).
“These folks by and large have not made any choice to experience homelessness,” said Cassie Roach, the program coordinator and senior case manager at New Beginnings Counseling Center in Santa Barbara. “They haven’t chosen to do drugs or make poor financial choices, and they’re not all alcoholics or any of those biased and ignorant assumptions people make. It tends to be folks that are dealt a really difficult hand; they’re making the best of a bad situation.”
In Los Angeles County, for example, 71 percent of people who are first experiencing homelessness cite economic reasons, according to Gary Dean Painter, the director of the Homelessness Policy Research Institute and a professor at the University of Southern California. About a third of people in the county pay half their income in rent, making them vulnerable to losing their homes when they have a negative shock to their finances. “I point a finger at the economy and housing market,” Painter said.
People who live in their cars are more likely to have been recently living in permanent housing and have some kind of income, making them a unique population that may not require or be able to use the same types of services other people experiencing homelessness do.
“This is a population we should think strategically about,” Painter said. “They’re not a high cost population to serve, they don’t have an accumulation of challenges, [but] they’re experiencing something they’ve never experienced before in their lives, they likely don’t know any of the services available to them.”
Asset prices like real estate and the stock market have soared in price due to the Federal Reserve's policy of low interest rates and quantitative easing. This means that money, which is available only to the rich, is flooding into the markets. That money is used to by stocks and to bid up the price of houses and apartments. The result is that rents have become unaffordable for the average person. It takes two pretty hefty incomes in order to be housed in any kind of housing these days especially in California.
Jewish Family Services is sponsoring a Safe Parking Program in San Diego. This is from their website:
Every night, JFS operates a Safe Parking Program for unsheltered San Diegans living out of their vehicles, many of whom are experiencing homelessness for the first time. As these individuals and families work to lift themselves up out of a difficult situation, many are making a nightly choice between buying food or purchasing gas to get to work and school. Creating further barriers to stability are the isolation and lack of social support that so often accompany homelessness.
The Safe Parking Program provides a welcoming environment, meaningful resources and tools, and dignified support to help families stabilize and transition back into permanent housing. With holistic services focused on basic needs assistance, employment, family wellness, school success, financial education, credit repair, and housing, our goal is to create a pathway out of homelessness while being a support to people where they are now.
The program operates seven nights per week at three secured lots on Balboa Avenue, Aero Drive, and Mission Village Drive.
While government dithers, religious institutions are stepping up to the challenge. Government response to homelessness is to fund a study to see what to do about it. When I was a duly elected member of the CCAC (Center City Advisory Commission), the City of San Diego paid somebody $100,000. to study the homeless problem and come up with a report. That was 20 years ago. They've been writing reports periodically ever since. They refuse to come up with practical solutions like I've suggested many times. My solution would be a glorified Safe Parking Program which would be basically a campground cum parking lot with amenities. That way tents could be pitched as well as cars parked. Of course sanitation facilities would be provided.
Why is it so difficult to come to the same conclusion about homeless camping in America? They wouldn't have to sleep on public sidewalks in LA, San Diego or San Francisco if they had designated areas (parks) where they could rest in peace and security and with sanitation facilities. Part of the angst of the homeless is that they have no place to be, let alone call home, that is legally sanctioned and where they are not subject to being told to move by police and where they can rest assured that their belongings won't be put in a truck and hauled away to the city dump.
Government officials don't want to create a permanent underclass of homeless people. I've got news for them. That has already been created. The question now is what to do about it. Until public or subsidized housing becomes a reality, providing safe parking lots and campgrounds is the best way to go at the cheapest price for society in general. It's a solution that can be implemented immediately.
As an Uber and Lyft driver, I try and remember where the potholes are. Otherwise, I am wrecking the heck out of my car. I scan the road in front of me and swerve to avoid them. The route from downtown to the airport along Harbor Drive and back is particularly hazardous, and, since I drive it a lot, I know where they all are at. The other day I hit an egregiously bad one at Sassafras and Kettner. Since it's a route I'm navigated through a lot, I made a special point to go back there and see exactly where the it was located because I never want to hit that pothole again. One of my riders said he hit one and knocked his car out of alignment in one fell swoop.
So why doesn't the city do anything about them especially on roads that all Uber and Lyft drivers and taxis navigate over on a daily basis? It's all about infrastructure, and this city as well as the US as a whole could care less about infrastructure. As far as the city is concerned, they probably care more about adding to the private economy of automobile dealerships in repair bills than to public expenditures of funds. My poor car is in the position of some poor person in India who can't afford his insulin rather than someone who has good medical insurance. Come to think of it, many Americans can't afford their insulin either. That's why the life span is decreasing and people are dying younger as time goes on.
The US ranks 13th in quality of infrastructure according to the World Economic Forum behind such countries as Singapore, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, U.K. France, Germany, Japan, Korea and Spain. America's infrastructure is desperately in need of investment, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers. They estimate that the US needs to spend some $4.5 trillion by 2025 to fix the country's roads, bridges, dams, and other infrastructure. They gave the nation's overall infrastructure a grade of D+ in their 2017 "infrastructure report card".
Its the American way: let every public institution go to hell while privatizing as much as possible. Schools, drinking water, sewage systems are all underfunded largely to give private corporations the biggest tax breaks possible. Having given those who have largely funded public infrastructure in the past huge tax breaks means that there is little money left over to repair aging infrastructure much less build more modern and up to date, state of the art infrastructure. Far from building infrastructure, the Trump administration is hell bent on deregulating every protection of the environment in order to make corporations more profitable. With regulations in place corporations would have to clean up after themselves and this would decrease corporate profits. We can't have that. Better to let corporations dump their waste products in America's rivers and streams. This is the way you maximize profits.
Instead of eliminating coal and oil as energy sources in order to reduce global warming, Trump and his associates positively salivate over all the money to be made from fossil fuels. Other nations, namely Russia, are doing the same thing because they have enormous natural resources of coal, natural gas and oil. However, those resources need to go untapped if the earth is to be spared runaway global warning and become like its sister planet, Venus, which has a surface temperature of 900 degrees.
We have to keep 80 percent of the fossil-fuel reserves that we know about underground. If we don’t—if we dig up the coal and oil and gas and burn them—we will overwhelm the planet’s physical systems, heating the Earth far past the red lines drawn by scientists and governments. It’s not “we should do this,” or “we’d be wise to do this.” Instead it’s simpler: “We have to do this.” However, the American government is spending billions of dollars a year subsidizing the fossil fuel industries. We're going in the wrong direction.
So are we as residents of planet earth willing to forego digging up or extracting what is estimated to amount to $20 trillion worth of fossil fuels still underground? Or will we maximize short term profits and say to hell with future generations?
One of the most corrupt branches of the military-industrial complex is BAE System located in the US and the UK. The Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) is a UK-based campaigning organisation working towards the abolition of the international arms trade. It was founded in 1974 by a coalition of peace groups. It has been involved in several campaigns, particularly its legal challenge against the Serious Fraud Office's decision to suspend a corruption investigation into BAE Systems in 2007. BAE represents how the hand-in-glove military alliance between the US and the UK works.
BAE Systems formerly British Aerospace, is the world's second largest arms dealer. BAE's arms are sold around the world. It has military customers in over 100 countries and in 2010 it was listed by SIPRI as having 95% of its sales as military. CAAT has long campaigned against BAE, highlighting allegations of corruption and political influence, rebuking claims about jobs, attending AGMs as critical shareholders, and through legal action.
BAE is prominent in the San Diego port area which also houses General Dynamics' NASSCO. The roots of BAE Systems San Diego Ship Repair date back to the mid-1970s. They service US Navy ships at the shipyard, at the Naval Station San Diego, and at neighboring shipyards. They repair, overhaul, and modernize both U.S. Navy surface warfare ships and commercial vessels.
In September 1985 BAE was a signatory to the UK's largest ever arms deal, the Al Yamamah contract to sell and service military planes to the government of Saudi Arabia. This ongoing contact has evolved through several phases and by 2006 had brought them £43 billion.
Shortly after the contract was signed, corruption allegations emerged concerning bribes paid to Saudi officials through a £60 million pound slush fund. On 12 September 2003 the Serious Fraud Office began an investigation into possible corruption. There were also SFO investigations in BAE dealings in Chile, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Austria, Qatar, Romania, South Africa and Tanzania. However, on 14 December 2006 the Government, under the personal intervention of Prime Minister Tony Blair, discontinued the Al Yamamah probe on the grounds that its conclusions might embarrass the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and threaten Britain's national security.
The US and UK are competing to sell arms to Saudi Arabia since the Saudis have tons of money to buy them so Brits and Americans are foaming at the mouth to profit off of arms sales to a big spender. Corruption ran rampant as certain high ranking Saudis including Prince Bandar were paid off in order to insure an arms and planes deal. These items were used to slaughter men, women and children in Yemen. The Guardian reported:
The arms company BAE secretly paid Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia more than £1bn in connection with Britain's biggest ever weapons contract, it is alleged today. A series of payments from the British firm was allegedly channeled through a US bank in Washington to an account controlled by one of the most colourful members of the Saudi ruling clan, who spent 20 years as their ambassador in the US.
It is claimed that payments of £30m were paid to Prince Bandar every quarter for at least 10 years.
It is alleged by insider legal sources that the money was paid to Prince Bandar with the knowledge and authorisation of Ministry of Defence officials under the Blair government and its predecessors. For more than 20 years, ministers have claimed they knew nothing of secret commissions, which were outlawed by Britain in 2002.
The US and UK and their arms dealers were anxious to profit off of Saudi corruption and maintain jobs in the arms industry. President Trump is all about selling military procurements to the Saudis, and he doesn't hide his motives. “It will create hundreds of thousands of jobs, tremendous economic development, and much additional wealth for the United States,” Trump said in a statement. So selling arms to a human rights violating murderous regime is being justified on the grounds that it will provide wealth for the US - filthy lucre to say the least. The deal supposedly included a Saudi order for $110 billion-worth of US military equipment and weapons.
Corruption and human rights violations are at the core of US and UK dealings with Saudi Arabia. They are US and British allies simply because they have money to buy arms and create profits and jobs for these countries despite their abominable human rights record including murdering journalist Jamal Khashoggi. This in and of itself makes the US and UK human rights violators one step removed. Some ally!
The City of San Diego has no lack of plans to help the homeless. When I was a duly elected member of the Center City Advisory Committee (CCAC) in 2004, it came up that the City of San Diego had given $100,000 to some woman for a plan to solve the homeless situation. I wonder whatever happened to it. No in 2019, the City is appropriating a $183,900 contract with nonprofit Corporation for Supportive Housing to establish an overarching vision for addressing homelessness that includes short, medium and long-term action items to better aid homeless San Diegans. I see that the price has gone up - inflation no doubt - for yet another plan to solve the homeless situation. That's a master stroke - keep giving money to well off people to solve a situation for those that are not well off and yet years go by, and the homeless situation only gets worse.
As Mayor Kevin Faulconer has urged City Council members to line up behind an array of new city-funded homelessness programs, he’s consistently encountered a demand from fellow city leaders.
Instead of approving one-off initiatives and projects, they argue, San Diego needs a clear, comprehensive strategy guiding all of its homelessness efforts.
“A lot of the programs that have been coming forward (are) reactionary, and I’ve not really seen a holistic approach in where we’re going,” City Council President Georgette Gómez said before a vote to extend contracts with shelter providers last year. “We’re just reacting, having a piecemeal type of a program moving forward.”
Faulconer seemed to take a shot at that approach in his State of the City address when he said, “I am not going to tell a veteran sleeping in a park, or a family living out of their car, that they should wait for the government to do another study while they spend another night in the cold!”
They want a clear cut vision of a way forward so staff can act on it. It's prbably yet another boondoggle. Anytime you see the word "staff" that's going to act on something, beware. Staff is going to feather their own nest and add more staff. Then staff is going to enlarge the staff's budget so they can"do more" and "solve the problem." There's only one way they're going to build more "suppoprtive and affordable housing" and that is to tax the genrral public to come up with the money. But then the NIMBYs will get active and not want to pay any more in taxes to support a bunch of "drug addicts and worthless people" - their words not mine.
“We requested that (the plan) contain not only general policies, but specific tasks that can be executed and adapted in order to reduce homelessness,” Halsey wrote in a statement. “The report will not be the last step, and we are ready to keep taking action with our partners and find a sustainable source of funding to implement ideas from the report.”
Another bureaucratic term to watch out for - "a holistic approach." This is just a bunch of bureaucrats who are making money off the homeless situation without a clue as to solve the homeless situation. Either you get a lot of money (through taxes) to build a huge amount of public housing or you create sanitary and secure campsites where the homeless can safely be until they can figure out how they can do something better. The campsite situation with portable sanitation facilities could be set up for a fraction of the cost of one "event" in this event happy city. At every event they have a ton of p[ort-a-potties, huge portable stages with audio systems, about 2 dozen semi trucks to haul all the stuff in and out so they can have some rock band for people to listen to and sell a lot of beer.
Meanwhile, bureaucrats dither. There is a March 2020 ballot initiative to raise the hotel tax to provide for the homeless and expand the convention center. There is no clue yet as to how they plan to help the homeless with the money so obtained.
While the hotel-tax measure defers to the mayor and other city leaders on decisions about how to address homelessness, the plan is designed to give Faulconer and others in-depth input from policy experts about how to improve the city’s homelessness response.
Housing Commission CEO Rick Gentry has said that informing efforts that aim to pull in more new money to address homelessness is a key goal of the plan and that the plan can and should adjust as needs – and resources – change.
“Although this is a roadmap, it is not an atlas. It’s a GPS and it’s going to be variable based on road conditions and the biggest one is going to be what kind of money’s available,” Gentry said last month. “But what it will be will be a guide to local policymakers on what resources are needed and what we can do with the resources and of course, we can only do what we can do with the resources.”
Yes, they can only do what they can do with the resources like hire more policy experts and create more plans like the one they spent $100,000 on 15 years ago.
It started off with an email I received from Mike Wofford, who is a great jazz pianist, having to do with the plight of Betty Bennett, a jazz singer who was married to Mundell Lowe, a great jazz guitarist for 42 years. Mundell died a couple of years ago at the age of 95. Betty is 98 and she's run out of money, a plight that will become increasingly common as people are living into their 90s and 100s. Their money runs out before their life does. Betty's daughter had set up a Go Fund Me website for her to raise money so they could hire another caregiver to spell her daughter and so that she could stay in her own home the equity of which had been drained out. Another problem for older people especially when they get no break on property taxes which are considerable in California.
Betty was a WW II veteran, but so far she hasn't been able to obtain VA benefits. This is from her Wikipedia page:
Her first major signing was with the Claude Thornhill band in 1946, the band in which her husband, bassist Iggy Shevak, was playing. Shortly after her husband left to join Alvino Rey, Bennett followed him there. In 1949, she joined Charlie Ventura's band before going on to join Benny Goodman in 1959.
Her second album featured arrangements by Shorty Rogers and her second husband, André Previn. Bennett later married guitarist Mundell Lowe.
Betty had two daughters with Andre Previn who died last February 2019. Previn was involved in the music industry having worked on the music for over 50 films in his career. He won four Academy Awards for his film work and ten Grammy Awards for his recordings (and one more for his Lifetime Achievement). He was also the music director of the Houston Symphony Orchestra, the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the Oslo Philharmonic, as well as the principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. He was also a jazz pianist.
A little about Mundell's career: In 1965 he moved to Los Angeles and worked for NBC as a staff guitarist, composer, and arranger. He wrote music for the TV shows Hawaii Five-O, Starsky & Hutch, and The Wild Wild West, and the movies Billy Jack and Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, But Were Afraid to Ask. He recorded with Carmen McRae and Sarah Vaughan. During the 1980s, he worked with André Previn, Tete Montoliu, and the Great Guitars. He was a teacher at the Guitar Institute of Technology and the Grove School of Music. For several years, he was music director of the Monterey Jazz Festival.
So this extended family was as close as you can get to American musical royalty.
I donated to Betty's Go Fund Me campaign, and then I went on the road as an Uber and Lyft driver. Later that day, during my 4 hour break and after my nap, I spoke on the phone with my friend, Grace Rich, who is in a retirement home facility in Flagstaff after having had a several month serious bout with anxiety and depression. She used to give water and Vienna sausage to the homeless in Tucson. Thank God, she is doing much better and we plan to talk more after several months of being incommunicado. Then I Facetimed with my oldest granddaughter, Jasmine. It was so good to see her beautiful face and hear that she's going to community college and working. She looks great!
Then I went back on the road driving for Uber and Lyft. I had a long ride from El Cajon near where I live to Miramar Road up near Mira Mesa, then another from there back to San Diego. When I saw the woman's destination, it rang a bell. Wasn't that the street that Mundell and Betty lived on? See I knew their house very well because I had cleaned the windows there a whole bunch of times in my former career as a window washer. Sure enough we went right by their house before I dropped the woman off a few houses down the street. What a coincidence I thought! My daughter Justine said, "That was no coincidence, Dad." That was Mundell's way of thanking you. By the way I had presented Mundell in concert with the San Diego State Jazz Orchestra under the direction of Bill Yeager when I was President of the San Diego Jazz Society back in the 80s. The last time I had seen Mundell and Betty at their house, they were both in their 90s but in good health. Betty gave me one of her CDs, and then she went out walking.
After I dropped the woman off I dropped in on my good Swedish friends, Britt and Olof, who lived only a few doors away. I just turned off the Uber and Lyft which I can do any time at my discretion and convenience at least for now. That may be changing, however, since Governor Newsom just signed a bill making Uber and Lyft drivers employees rather than independent contractors. This means I could lose flexibility with my driving habits and lifestyle. Right now it's perfect the way it is insofar as it works for me. Britt invited me to stay for dinner, and we talked politics. She likes Kamala. I like Elizabeth Warren. Of course we all think Trump is an ignoramuis who wants to reduce California's stricter tailpipe emission standards so cars can pollute more. What a backwards shitass! We talked about how this Friday school children were going to walk out of class protesting climate change and about how the Swedish teen ager, Greta Thunberg, is leading the movement in which children, who will inherit the earth, are realizing that, if we don't step it up regarding climate change, they will be inheriting a hellhole.
Then I came home after an amazing day. I'm sure the close knit San Diego jazz community and perhaps the jazz community all over America will come to Betty Bennett's aid. Already after 3 days the Go Fund Me site had collected over $5000.
The words “climate change” were always just another two words that our science teachers would throw around during the Earth unit and that we would hear during the documentaries we were forced to watch. They were always just another two words that we would occasionally hear on the news or at the dinner table. Many adults even told us that the whole concept might not even be real. But today, things are different. Today, the words “climate change” are just about everywhere you look. Because today, we are aware of the fact that we are in a climate crisis. While we students are held to tough learning standards, there seem to be no grading rubrics to hold our leaders accountable for all the ways that our air, water, and land are being exploited. If there were, our leaders––and our society––would receive a failing grade, as Greta Thunberg has stated.
Thousands of San Diego students like me will be walking out of our schools on Friday, September 20th, and we need you to stand with us — to walk out of work and join us at schools across the county to demand immediate and substantial solutions that will give life on Earth the chance to survive. We are the first generation whose futures are truly at risk, and we are the last generation who can make the changes that will save our planet before it is too late.
This isn’t a question of whether or not we will face climate peril. Consequences have already manifested. Many of us, too young to vote, are being sentenced, but your support can shift course and prove that there is, indeed, hope.
Whether you’re a fellow student, teacher, or parent, we need your help to demonstrate the urgency of our message. In the link below, please indicate if you can help with planning and promotion, and make a donation to support the walkout if you can.
Thank you!
Alyson Liu Senior, Scripps Ranch High School
Ps. Join us at our upcoming art builds. We’ll be making compelling banners and signs for the walkouts. Both are 10am - 5pm — come for the whole day or any part. Fun for all ages and skills. RSVP for September 7th in La Mesa or September 14th in Encinitas.
To the Mayor and City Council: You have to Do Something About the Homeless Crisis
by John Lawrence, August19, 2019
What's happening with the homeless in San Diego is not fair to them, and it's not fair to the tourists and residents that have to put up with it. You outlaw people sleeping it vehicles. Yet it's OK to live in tents on public sidewalks. As an Uber driver I picked up a lady who lives in a luxury high rise at Broadway and Pacific Highway. She regrets moving downtown because she can't walk her dog at night without being verbally assaulted by some homeless person or stepping in some poop. Uber navigates me sometimes through the worst homeless areas at 17th and Imperial so tourists are treated to the sight of people and their belongings sprawled all over the streets in "America's Finest City" supposedly.
Here, in my humble opinion, is what you need to do:
1) Set up one or more public campgrounds where the homeless as well as others can pitch their tents.
2) Provide minimal amenities such as sanitation facilities including port-a-potties, portable showers, lockers and security. You had a place like this in Balboa park. From the San Diego Union, October 2017:
"The first city-sanctioned homeless encampment is scheduled to open Monday in a public works yard near Balboa Park with tents, security, food, showers, restrooms and social services for more than 200 people, San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer and other officials announced Wednesday.
"Speaking at the city operations yard that will be used for the camp area, Faulconer said the site will be short-lived, with a plan to begin moving people out after the first of three large industrial tents to temporarily house homeless people opens later this year."
You were on the right track and then you blew it by making it temporary. Nobody wants to live in "three large industrial tents."
3) Provide transit passes so that they can get from wherever the campgrounds are located to downtown homeless services.
4) Allow pets.
5) Very low cost solution compared to actual housing.
6) Pass an ordinance making it illegal to sleep on public streets and sidewalks.
Homelessness is becoming a culture embedded in American society. Until this culture is changed, it is becoming a permanent part of American cities, a way of life. As far as drug use, it seems to be happening with impunity on public streets so it's a wash whether or not it would be happening at public campgrounds. Until this street culture is eradicated, HOT teams would have to be in the business of transporting homeless people to the campgrounds because they would probably prefer public sidewalks. After all that's what they're used to, and that's a part of the culture that's being embedded in society.
Forget about "shelters." You only need shelters in case of very inclement weather which we have little of in San Diego. Also don't worry about San Diego becoming a "homeless magnet." The improvement in the city's ambiance if the areas around 16th and 17th streets were cleaned up would be a guiding light for other cities to do the same, and it would promote the city as a tourist destination as in fact, "America's Finest City.".
I envision a nice campground with ample parking space for those who want to sleep in their vehicles. It would be a lot less expensive than building public housing although that would be the long run solution. Shelters can be provided for inclement weather, but when it's nice out, a campground with amenities would be preferable for most people. First, it would be more amenable to pets which aren't allowed in most shelters. Second, sanitation facilities including rest rooms and showers should be provided. Not that expensive compared to housing. Third, security needs to be there and fourth, social workers to figure out how to help people with drug problems and problems getting a job and leading a normal life.Lockers could be provided for valuables. Otherwise, belongings could be stored in their tents. There must be access to transportation. There must be no restrictions on who can camp there so people who might use hostels would also have this option. The only difference is that people who can afford to would have to pay. So there would be a mix of people in residence and not only "homeless" which has become a subclass in American society. This would help to remove the stigma of being homeless.
If I were a billionaire, I would buy up some land and make this campground plus parking lot a reality. Maybe I would buy up two parcels or three so people would have a choice of where they wanted to be and were not stuck in one place. Why isn't some billionaire doing this? They are stuck in their vision of going to the moon or going to Mars. This is a false wild goose chase. First, why don't they try to solve some problems here on earth? Establishing a colony in some harsh locale is a fool's errand. Why not pick some inhospitable part of earth to do this? There are plenty of areas to consider. Like the Mojave desert or Greenland. Perhaps the Sahara or Antarctica. At least Elon Musk is developing technology like the Tesla that doesn't spew greenhouse gasses.
My campground cum parking lot cum sanitation facilities cum social worker access cum security idea would solve several problems related to homelessness. Number one: it would get the homeless off the streets. It would give them a secure place to be without the threat of having their possessions heaved into a dump truck by the local authorities. They would not have to worry about being told to "move on" or find some place else to lie down. Police are always telling the homeless they cannot stay where they are. They are always in the position of trying to find some minute public space to wedge themselves into temporarily until the cops or security comes and tells them they can't stay there. So they have to take their stuff and move on. I literally saw a security guard order a homeless person off the sidewalk in front of a business so they just threw their stuff a couple of feet to the sidewalk in front of another business. This insecurity of place is a constant problem. They are not welcome anywhere.
Police are always being called to deal with some problem involving the homeless. Having a campground where they can be without being hassled would be a first step solution. The other thing it would solve is the unseemliness of having people, their pets and possessions sprawled all over the streets where they urinate and defecate in a tourist town like San Diego, supposedly "America's Finest City." Right next to the gleaming high rise condos, Petco Park and upscale restaurants, you have what amounts to a homeless settlement. It's pretty unseemly to say the least. Businesses don't appreciate it when the homeless are sleeping in their doorways. The HOT team could be responsible for transporting the homeless to one of the campgrounds that the billionaires have provided.
The HOT (Homeless Outreach Team) is a presently constituted service of the City of San Diego. Here's what they do. City police officers team with a County social worker and a Psychiatric Emergency Response Team (PERT) clinician to assess the problems of homeless persons and identify how to help them from a range of solutions. One HOT team focuses on downtown and another on the beach area. HOT provides field assessments for eligibility to public entitlements, crisis intervention, comprehensive case management, drug/alcohol rehabilitation placement, and psychiatric/medical treatment placement. Sounds pretty good, huh? Why not provide this at a campground? Basically they are trying to clear the streets of the homeless when they get a complaint from a citizen or a business owner. But the net result is that the homeless person(s) involved just move to another public space where they wedge themselves in until the next police officer or HOT team arrives to tell them to move on.
If there were a campground as I'm suggesting there could be a City ordinance that these one or more spaces were open to the public, were in fact public spaces but ALL OTHER PUBLIC SPACES IN THE CITY WERE OFF LIMITS TO TENTS, TARPS AND LOITERING. The police and HOT teams would have to decide who was just going about their business and who were loitering. This would be a somewhat arbitrary decision, but so be it. It should not really be that hard. Little Italy already has a team that just gets the homeless out of Little Italy, but they don't provide services or an alternative place to be.
In the final analysis, the homeless need a place to be. There should also be places not to be. This would clean up the city for tourists and "homed" residents alike and make it a safer place for everyone while showing compassion for those in desperate circumstances for a price that would save the city money on police services and emergency room services in the long run. If I were a billionaire ... Won't some billionaire step up? You don't need to provide housing to solve 90% of the homeless problem both for the homeless themselves and also for everybody else.
Last week was the Comic-Con convention at the San Diego convention center. There were hordes and masses of people all over downtown. The conventional traffic lights were inadequate to control traffic so the City hired an army of human traffic controllers. Many streets were blocked off so any kind of egress or ingress was virtually impossible so that the denizens of virtual reality and 5G could have their annual party. A few blocks away were the denizens of homelessness but they might as well have been far away from the madding crowd.
San Diego’s convention draws more than 130,000 people each year and is estimated to generate an economic impact of more than $140 million for the city. The only reason those numbers haven’t grown is because the convention organizers cannot fit any more attendees into the exhibition center. So the dilemma for San Diego is to add to or build another convention center or else lose the Comic-Con convention altogether. While the city makes $140 million on providing every conceivable amenity for convention goers, the homeless sit sprawled all over the sidewalks without anywhere to go or anywhere to be. The City of San Diego cannot even afford to set aside one decent campground for them. Resourcefully, some have taken advantage of the hidden recesses of Balboa Park, but they must live under the constant fear of being found out and evicted.
In Balboa Park the old Sports Museum, which didn't make it financially, has been converted into a Comic-Con museum. There were hordes of people lined up there as well. A separate amusement right outside that museum allowed people to have the full Batman experience. You dressed up like Batman and then jets of air propelled you into weightlessness so you could fly like Batman and hover as well. The roar of the sound was deafening, but I guess that's the price you pay for a good amusement. I'm wondering what that cost for each individual participant. Balboa Park itself was overrun with tourists. Vacant parking spaces were non-existant.
Last week it was the Pride parade that brought hordes of tourists to San Diego. On the same day the Over the Line tournament, which is one big beerfest, was held on Fiesta Island in Mission Bay. Hordes were in attendance there as well. All summer Bayside Summer Nights is being staged by the symphony on Embarcadero Island. Semi-hordes are in attendance there. Parking lots and valet parkers are dismayed because so many are taking Ubers to these events so they don't have to pay outrageous sums for parking. As an Uber driver, I don't mind taking people from outlying areas to these events even though I get stuck in traffic. However, after dropping them off, I turn off my Uber or I would get calls from those parked a couple miles away where they can park for free and then call an Uber to get them to the event. The Uber driver then gets stuck in a lot of traffic in return for a very meager payout. Petco Park is another destination that a lot of people Uber to in order to attend Padres baseball games. Hordes are always in attendance there.
With all the "events" in San Diego happening weekly, you would think that the City could provide adequate resources for the homeless. The so-called "America's Finest City" should actually be called America's Finest Tourist City or America's Finest destination to go and amuse yourself. The homeless languish on the streets not far away from the convention center. Not that they aren't consuming their share of resources. The police are constantly being called to deal with some homeless situation. A fair share of police resources goes to dealing with the homeless. And then the medical system is spending tons of money as the homeless frequent emergency rooms to get basic health care situations taken care of. At the Bayside Summer concerts I have marveled at the 50 or 60 port-a-potties lined up for paying customers only, but not one port-a-pottie is available to the homeless. They have to hide out in the crevices of the city or sprawl in the "homeless neighborhood" on 17th street. Those taking the back way to Petco Park or the I-5 southbound entrance are forced to go through "homeless town." It's as distinct a neighborhood as any other. Tents and shopping carts abound. There is no money out of the millions the city makes off of events to provide a decent campground with adequate sanitation services much less an actual single room apartment.
The economic divide in America has produced those who are extremely rich and those who are extremely poor. Local, state and federal governments cannot even provide adequate facilities for those who can't afford a market rate apartment. They are afraid that, if they do, the homeless will all flock here even though studies have shown that a majority of the homeless were homed here before they became homeless. Did it ever occur to the City Fathers that a regional approach in which cities all over the West Coast might provide decent facilities might make the distribution of homeless more acceptable? In other words they wouldn't all have to flock here to get decent treatment. Or how about a national approach? Guess that will never happen The nation as a whole is only concerned about military might and a weaponized dollar. The American culture is more concerned with Bat Man then it is with solving the homeless problem or any other problem for that matter. We are literally Amusing ourselves to Death while climate change will eventually diminish the amusement of us all. The homeless will just have to continue fending for themselves unless and until they can hire a lobbyist to knock on Congresspersons' doors in Washington, DC. or get the Mayor and City Council to listen to them.
In Del Mar it's bluff erosion that's threatening multimillion dollar homes. In Imperial Beach it's low elevation plus the Tijuana River that is making the city uninhabitable, at least the el primo area near the Pacific ocean. The California coast is disappearing under a rising sea. So said an LA Times report. The Pacific is nearing the end of an unusually calm cycle that had lulled settlers into assuming that endless sandy beaches were forever. Therefore, infrastructure like highways and train lines were built right next to the coast. These gave travelers amazing views of the ocean, but now this infrastructure is being eroded and must be moved inland.
But at what cost? Should California become one long wall of concrete against the ocean? Will there still be sandy beaches or surf breaks to cherish in the future, oceanfront homes left to dream about? More than $150 billion in property could be at risk of flooding by 2100 — the economic damage far more devastating than the state’s worst earthquakes and wildfires. Salt marshes, home to shorebirds and endangered species, face extinction. In Southern California alone, two-thirds of beaches could vanish.
Not a pretty picture for those who are California Dreaming. Homeowners on the bluffs want cities and counties to shore up the shore line at public expense in order to save their real estate investments. Others want a managed retreat from the shore line. These battles are being fought out in Chambers of Commerce throughout California. What is happening in Pacifica pretty much tells the story:
“There’s a public cost and a private cost in any choice that we make, and we need to start doing that cost-benefit analysis,” said Charles Lester, director of UC Santa Barbara’s Ocean and Coastal Policy Center, who has consulted for a number of towns, including Pacifica, on sea level rise planning. “If we don’t start managing retreat now, how much is it going to cost later?”In hundreds of pages of planning documents, officials concluded that moving inland in future decades might pencil out to be the most cost-effective option for a number of neighborhoods. Seawalls keep failing, they said, and the ocean is winning. Much of the shoreline protection could be overwhelmed with as little as 1 foot of sea level rise.But many lambasted the proposal, fired up by a property rights campaign by the real estate industry. Homeowners flooded city meetings, knocked on neighbors’ doors and plastered signs around town. The mayor became the town punching bag, and new leaders were voted in to help Pacifica stand its ground.“‘Managed retreat’ is code word for give up — on our homes and the town itself,” said Mark Stechbart, who worries that Pacifica, and in turn his own home’s value, will be dismissed by future developers, insurers and buyers. “This is not just some intellectual exercise. These are real people and a real town at stake.”
In San Diego County beach erosion is a serious problem. We need tourists to come and enjoy the beaches. Therefore, much public money has been spent to restore them.
In 2001, officials in San Diego County pumped about 2 million cubic yards of sand from offshore onto 12 beaches — the first large-scale attempt by California officials to add sand to disappearing beaches. It cost city, state and federal taxpayers $17.5 million.
The effort was short-lived. Most of the beaches had narrowed significantly by the following year. The extra sand, Griggs found, “was removed within a day when the first large waves of the winter arrived.” A second attempt by the county — with twice as much money — yielded similar results.
In Del Mar the train tracks run along the eroding bluffs. It's the town where the turf meets the surf, where Bing Crosby and Jimmy Durante hung out. Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz had a home there right on the beach. Movie stars abound.
Dry sand here was once abundant, the beach twice as wide today. Private seawalls now protect multimillion-dollar homes that early settlers had built right on the sand. On the southern end of town, train tracks run precariously close to the edge of rapidly crumbling cliffs.
But as word got out that those in charge were considering managed retreat, the town exploded. Relocating could mean allowing the ocean to claim as many as 600 homes.
If you start retreating, residents demanded, where do you stop?
“If you let the first row of homes go, the whole area behind it floods,” said Jon Corn, a resident and attorney representing dozens of homeowners in the Del Mar Beach Preservation Coalition. “And then what about the next road? And the road after that? … At some point, everyone is going to say: ‘No, we’re not just going to retreat away from the ocean.’”
City leaders finally agreed and said they would keep an open mind about relocating the rail line, the fire station and other city-owned infrastructure — but took out any mention of private property. The land here is too valuable, they reasoned, and the threat of lawsuits too high. Adding sand will be the solution for now.
Terry Gaasterland, a data scientist who led the sea level task force and ended up running for office over the issue, said she’s confident more studies and more time will uncover ways to coexist with the ocean and save the town.
Del Mar can afford to both protect homes and save the beach, said Gaasterland, who’s now on the City Council. “We’re not going to be packing our bags.”
But if past sand projects are any indicator, Del Mar and its neighbors might be in for a surprise. For every jetty and breakwater that has helped keep Santa Monica and Venice wide and sandy, Dockweiler and beaches farther down the coast in turn needed their own supply of sand, which then disappeared and flowed onto beaches farther south.
Sand, although it might seem limitless, is not free. It’s the most exploited and consumed natural resource in the world after fresh water. Federal agencies, states, cities and private companies across the nation are all trying to stake their claim.
And because sand is always on the move, adding more of it is anything but permanent. Erosion runs its course all the same.
In Imperial Beach the ongoing fight is between those who want to save the pricey oceanfront real estate and those who want to save the town. Imperial Beach is located right next to the Tijuana estuary and regularly floods with sewage from the Tijuana river. It's a place that once had low priced real estate, where someone could buy an affordable house along the beach. Lately more affluent people have moved in bidding up the price of once reasonably priced beach access homes.
The reptilian frenzy over managed retreat has overtaken Imperial Beach, as it has in other cities. Fear overwhelms reason. Conspiracy theories and misinformation abound. Some think the mayor, an environmentalist known for his history of preserving open space, just wants to turn the town into one giant lagoon.
With the city barely able to scrap together a $20-million budget every year, others say letting go of prime real estate means abandoning the whole town.
“If you get rid of the waterfront, the municipal tax base, how do you support the city?” said City Councilman Ed Spriggs, who lives along the water and questioned managed retreat as a strategy. He points to the city’s first upscale hotel, which was built in 2013 with coastal defenses, as a sign that Imperial Beach has time to survive and thrive well into the future.
As chair of the coastal cities group for the League of California Cities, Spriggs sees what’s been happening across the state and calls managed retreat an ideology being pushed by extreme environmentalists with no rules or standards.
As far as the City of San Diego is concerned, there seems to be hope that the city which is built right on the harbor can survive in some form although the popular beach areas of Ocean Beach, Mission Beach and Pacific Beach which are right on the ocean and depend on tourist dollars may have to make some adjustments like moving the beaches inland a few miles. For the present flooding is minimal and the sand is still there. San Diego downtown is probably better off than a lot of California coastal communities. The multimillion dollar houses on Point Loma are well above sea level for the most part. Those in lower lying Coronado, however, could be underwater in a few years. The really pricey real estate in La Jolla is high enough that it will survive unscathed.
The housing market in San Diego is just a few short steps away from being a disaster. Take the latest guesstimate (8,000) of unhoused humans in the county and city, multiply it by twenty five, and it’s possible to visualize being just one stock market crash away from dystopia.
If your budget is highly stressed because of housing costs, you may as well make contingency plans for being homeless in San Diego.
This includes 28% of the renters (who pay more than half their income for housing) in San Diego County, according to statistics from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. Multiplying the number of rental units by the average number of occupants and taking .28 of that number leaves us with roughly 397,000 humans facing homelessless.
Assuming half of those people can find another place, often by doubling up occupancy with others, we’re still left with over a potential 200,000 homeless humans.
Obviously this is an extreme scenario, destined to be torpedoed by somebody with other statistics or insights that I lack. But the point I’m making about huge numbers of people living on the precipice of disaster remains.
An article in the business section of the San Diego Union-Tribune by Philip Molnar started me down this rabbit hole of housing despair.
Despite all the yammering about build, baby, build, the number of residential permits pulled locally is down 58% from last year. It’s down 70% for multifamily units.
We’re told the reasoning behind the slowdown is because rents are not increasing fast enough.
Real estate analyst Nathan Moeder is quoted in the UT account:
“Projects are having a hard time achieving feasibility, so it means a lack of new projects in the pipeline,” he said. “Developers used to be able to count on long-term inflation of rents. But, we’ve pretty much hit a ceiling.”
Rents had increased at a rate of 2.7 percent annually as of the first quarter, said real estate tracker CoStar. That compares to 6.1 percent at the same time in 2017 and 4.6 percent in 2018.
Moeder said he doubted San Diego County would return to the levels of homebuilding seen in recent years, despite calls by housing advocates to increase supply. Even Mayor Kevin Faulconer’s latest proposal to increase housing density near transit stops, Moeder said, would mostly be smaller, in-fill projects — not the scale needed to address housing shortages.
According to the Payscale Index, wage growth in the San Diego metro area was a half of a percent (year over year) for the first quarter of 2019. That figure represented a .7% decrease in wage growth over the last quarter of 2018. And real wages nationally are 9% lower than in 2006, before the last recession.
So if wages weren’t increasing as fast as the needed amount of rent charged by developers, the long term prospects don’t look good for increasing the amount of available housing.
Added to the rent inflation/ability to pay factors are the rising costs of construction.
The Trump administration’s tariffs on goods from China are the equivalent of a $2.5 billion-a-year tax on the entire U.S. home-building industry. Impacted are stainless steel and iron, molded glass paving blocks and tiles as well as lead, nickel, building stone, cement and copper. Items critical to HVAC infrastructure are also part of the new tariffs (from air compressors to heat pumps), as are interior materials for flooring, walls and furniture.
***
Matt Strabone’s most recent Show in Progress podcast featured three guests with different perspectives on solutions for the housing shortage.
Jim LaMattery, realtor/spokesperson for anti-development group Raise the Balloon, argued for more forethought on changes making it easier to change zoning rules and build denser housing.
Maya Rosas, president of the YIMBY Democrats of San Diego County, advocated for building as much new housing as possible.
And Andy Kopp, described as “a public housing advocate,” dared to discuss the third rail of NIMBYism, namely getting the government more involved in financing construction.
If you listen to the podcast, you’ll discover that nobody was absolutist in their positions, meaning the usually irrational parts of such a discussion were left out.
***
While San Diego and California’s housing shortage is driven somewhat by local ordinances and neighborhood opposition to new construction, there are bigger issues at play.
Nationally we have built 7 million fewer homes in the 10 years since 2009 than needed to break even. There is also a shortage of an additional 7 million units of affordable rental housing. It’s no wonder prices keep rising: The law of supply and demand cannot repealed.
The way the economy is presently structured, with near-stagnant wage growth, even if those residential units had been privately built, they couldn’t be rented/sold. Developers know this, which is why they’re not building.
Where the private sector is incapable of solving a societal problem, it becomes necessary for the government to step in.
The elephant in the room is racism.
Public housing has been used as a weapon, its residents demonized to the point where even the discussion of such a thing is enough to create panic in some quarters.
So let’s not call it public housing. Let’s call it social housing.
Social housing is public housing, but only in the sense that it is government-financed. European social housing is subsidized yet serves middle-class as well as low-income households, thereby avoiding the stigma associated with America’s public housing.
There are countries all over the world that do this successfully.
California suffers from the aftereffects of Constitutional Article 34, which prohibits the construction of public housing projects without a public vote.
There’s no better example of the tyranny of the ballot measure than Article 34.
An amendment to the California state constitution passed by public referendum in 1950, Article 34 states that: “No low rent housing project shall hereafter be developed, constructed, or acquired in any manner by any state public body until, a majority of the qualified electors of the city, town or county … approve such project by voting in favor thereof at an election to be held for that purpose, or at any general or special election.”
It’s California’s original housing sin, a binding not-in-my-backyard clause that has forced municipalities to adopt creative workarounds to build low-income housing. That it was enacted before the Fair Housing Act or even Brown v. Board of Education raises questions about the historical purpose of the rule. But today, it’s a powerful weapon for communities that want to keep low-income families out—a legal path to de facto segregation along race and class lines. When it comes to housing, California’s progressive reputation doesn’t apply.
Efforts are underway to repeal Article 34 via the 2020 ballot. In the meantime, as Andy Kopp explains in the aforementioned podcast, there are workarounds, things that can be started today.
What’s true for California is true for the nation, as this excerpt from Smithsonian Magazine demonstrates:
In the early 20th century, a number of cities, particularly border cities like Baltimore, St. Louis, and Louisville, Kentucky, passed zoning ordinances that prohibited African-Americans from moving onto a block that was majority white. In 1917, the Supreme Court found in Buchanan v. Warley that such ordinances were unconstitutional, but not for racial reasons. The Court found it unconstitutional because such ordinances interfered with the rights of property owners.
As a result, planners around the country who were attempting to segregate their metropolitan areas had to come up with another device to do so. In the 1920s, Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover organized an advisory committee on zoning, whose job was to persuade every jurisdiction to adopt the ordinance that would keep low-income families out of middle-class neighborhoods. The Supreme Court couldn’t explicitly mention race, but the evidence is clear that the [Commerce Department’s] motivation was racial.
Jurisdictions began to adopt zoning ordinances that were exclusive on economics, but the true purpose was, in part, to exclude African-Americans. So they developed ordinances that for example, prohibited apartment buildings from being built in suburbs that had single-family homes. Or they required single-family homes to have large setbacks and be set on multiple acres, all as an attempt to make the suburb racially exclusive.
Ryan Cooper at The Week set forth some principles for what publicly financed housing should look like going forward.
1) Abandon the Stalinist, gigantic apartment block model. These are more expensive, require a lot more land and maintenance, and tend to be built on mad-architect lines with a total disregard for functionality. Worse, they concentrate poverty, a known factor for all manner of social ills.
2) Public housing should be ordinary. Though obviously it should be built efficiently, public housing ought to appear just like any other building. Abolish the “projects” stigma.
3) Public housing should be dispersed. Smaller buildings ought to be spread out all over the place, not just in the poorest districts. Though the super-elite residents of Georgetown would collapse in paroxysms of rage to hear it, there ought to be a good number of units there as well. Indeed, rich neighborhoods are particularly well-suited to public housing. Poor people need the high-quality services and schools a lot more than rich people do.
Again, this is only part of the solution. But while there is broad agreement that additional construction should be brought to bear on housing supply, advocating for public housing is typically met with scorn or sheer bewilderment. On the contrary, these are two great tastes that taste great together.
To those thoughts I’d like to add the caveat that social/public housing should not be run by government. History (think Chicago) shows housing agencies rarely get the funding or oversight needed to maintain safe and sane living spaces.
Non-profit or cooperative models are the way to go here. Making sure the people living in properties have a say in keeping them well run is smart.
San Diego has unbuilt land. I pass the San Diego Unified School District headquarters on a daily basis and dream of what good could be done there. They could find a way to facilitate a complex including their offices and affordable housing for educators and staff. It’s more likely they sell it for quick cash and move the headquarters somewhere else.
WE can solve the housing problem. But as long as it’s ME (Nimbys), ME (developers), ME (short sighted public officials) in control, nothing is going to happen.
True reform to the American housing system would be incomplete without restoring our commitment to homes as places to live, instead of shelters for capital.
Doing that will take eliminating tax privileges for rental properties, dismantling speculative real estate practices, and encouraging alternative ownership models.
Federal tax subsidies for purchasing, operating, and reselling rental property attracts speculators eager to flip buildings, which raises rents and destabilizes neighborhoods.
Progressives should pare down rental property depreciation to just long-term building improvements or investments in decarbonization. Rent and the sale of the property should be taxed like wages to keep landlords from disproportionately benefiting from the rising property values that stem from public investment and land scarcity, and incentivize holding on to buildings and tenants for longer.
In a hard reality check for Los Angeles County's multibillion-dollar hope of ending homelessness, officials reported Tuesday that the number of people living on the streets, in vehicles and in shelters increased by about 12% over last year.
The annual point-in-time count, delivered to the Board of Supervisors, put the number of homeless people just shy of 59,000 countywide. Within the city of Los Angeles, the number soared to more than 36,000, a 16% increase.
The homeless problem gets more entrenched with every passing day. Concomitant problems are trash piling up in public places and public urination and defecation. San Diego has turned parking lots into place where people can sleep in their vehicles overnight. San Diego now has 3 parking lots open where additional services are also provided. These facilities are overseen by Jewish Family Services.
The basic problem is a lack of affordable housing. Rents are seriously, extremely high and getting higher as real estate is bid up by corporate players and hedge funds. Single Room Occupancy Units (SROs) are being demolished and replaced by high rise condos and luxury apartments. San Diego is becoming a place that only the rich can afford to live in or be grandfathered in by virtue of having bought cheap real estate 50 years or more ago.
Homelessness breeds hopelessness and drug use to relieve the misery. It is a downward cycle with little hope of a positive outcome at the end of the tunnel unless social services intervene to help people get back on the right track. There are some people that can be helped if the right resources are available, those who are motivated to have a better lifestyle for themselves and their children. Others are chronically homeless and seemingly beyond help. They have adapted to the homeless lifestyle.
This growing phenomenon is not without cost for the rest of the population who must foot the bill for increased police and medical services with their tax money. Businesses find their walk in trade diminished if homeless are sleeping on the sidewalks blocking their entrances. Calls to police for removal of bodies have been increasing. Police are tied up just dealing with requests from business owners to get the homeless away from their businesses.
Funds from the 2017 Measure H sales tax reached full strength last year and expanded homeless services got more people off the street than ever before — a little more than 20,000 into some form of housing, according to the county. Yet the number of people becoming homeless outpaced those historic gains.
"Last year's count, we felt we were trimming in a way that would suggest we were getting our arms around this," Ridley-Thomas said. "And yet this year we are pretty well stunned by this data."
As people are being helped by social services in record numbers, record numbers more of homeless are showing up needing help. Comprehensive solutions are lacking although there is no lack of efforting. Only the building and maintaining of public housing in huge amounts will solve this problem as the forces of capitalism drive rents higher and higher. Public housing has alleviated housing needs for the extremely poor in many places and times. Unfortunately, it has also created problems if other social services have not been provided as well. Homelessness needs to be addressed on the level that 1) many people cannot cope with modern social circumstances in this advanced capitalistic world and 2) society has to devote major resources to shoring up peoples' lives who have basically been left behind and are not needed by society. They can be left to die on the streets or they can behelped by a humane society. The question is: is the US a humane society?
New York City has the largest homeless population in the United States with 77,000 homeless people. However, they are addressing this crisis head on. The De Blasio administration is tackling the issue by closing hundreds of low-quality shelter sites and building 90 new ones, including an innovative Bronx facility that combines a 200-bed shelter with more than 100 units of affordable housing. As a result no one is left out in the cold on a dark, rainy night in NYC. It is this type of commitment that needs to be undertaken by California and other west coast cities like Seattle.
The homeless problem is not going away without considerable resources, both in terms of real estate and human social services, being disposed to deal with it. It is a problem that needs to be dealt with before the US can become a nation that values quality of life for all its people more than it values its war machine and other frivolous expenditures.
Los Angeles is not alone in its homeless situation, but mountains of rat infested trash have been piling up on city sidewalks there and out into the streets. The trash contains human feces and urine and is located in areas where food service trucks enter and exit. The homeless situation is getting worse despite the fact that record numbers of homeless are being moved into permanent housing. Problem is that even higher numbers are hitting the streets because there is no affordable housing. Experts have calculated that a person needs to make three times the minimum wage to afford an apartment in LA. That won't be happening any time soon. But it's not just in LA. San Diego and San Francisco have problems similar if not worse. Disease ran rampant last year when Hepartitis A was discovered in the homeless population in San Diego. For what it costs in trash pickup, police services and medical services alone for the homeless population, affordable housing could be provided. It's just that there's no money for that. But there's money for numerous trash pickups per day, numerous calls to police about homeless, numerous trips to emergency rooms by the homeless. This society has produced a class of super poverty people. And to think just a few years ago it was all about poverty in Appalachia. They even had leaky rooves over their heads.
Elena Stern, spokeswoman for the city Department of Public Works, said the backlog on service calls for trash pickup around homeless encampments sits at just under 8,400 currently. On average, the city gets six calls per site.
“If it’s a homeless encampment, it’s a lengthier process because humans are involved and we have to meet certain protocols,” she said, including a survey of who’s there, an inventory of personal property and notice of a cleanup. ...
I spent a few hours one morning on trash patrol with Jesse Ramirez, operations manager for Lopez’s maintenance and safety crew. He told me the 17-person team picks up four tons of trash each day, but the recent numbers have been even higher. One two-person crew walks up and down San Pedro all day between 4th and 7th streets.
At 9 a.m. Thursday, we had been out for not quite two hours, and already several pickup trucks had been filled with trash. There had also been six service calls to the BID from merchants — four to pick up human waste and two to clear storefronts blocked by encampments.
Joey Joseph, who owns a seafood distribution center on Gladys Avenue near 4th, called to report urine and feces on the sidewalk where vendors pull in to load their vehicles. Joseph told me he also calls police and City Hall, along with the BID, so I asked how often.
So so you think your seafood might be getting contaminated by the urine and feces deposited on the sidewalk on a daily basis because sanitation facilities for the homeless are inadequate? And contractors are piling on figuring that, if homeless can deposit their trash on the street, well then so can they. But still the response by LA and other cities up and down the west coast from Seattle to San Diego is meager compared to the size of the problem. Will the US finally do something about the poorest of the poor? They can spend a trillion dollars on the military budget but have inadequate funding available not only to provide housing for the homeless, but even to provide sanitary conditions for the average person walking up and down the street as well as businesses that have to conduct business in the midst of a pile of rat infested trash.
It's the reason so many people are living on the street or in their vehicles. Rent control's time has arrived, my friends. Right now in San Diego and most cities in California, a landlord can double the rent overnight. There is no rent control. That is about to change, at least in Los Angeles where a rent control law is going into effect. The scenario is very simple. Wealthy investors and hedge funds are moving into the real estate business. They identify marginal properties on the periphery of good neighborhoods, then move in, buy them up, rebuild or renovate and upgrade or upscale the area. They then can double the rent having converted cheap real estate into more expensive real estate. This process upscales and upgrades marginal neighborhoods, but outprices tenants who were already living there.
If you’ve signed a lease in the past year, there’s a good chance your landlord wears a tailored suit and works on Wall Street. One of the hottest trends in the financial sector is known as “REO-to-rental.” Over the past couple years, hedge funds, private equity firms and the biggest banks have raised massive amounts of capital to buy distressed or foreclosed single-family homes, often in bulk, at bargain prices. Their strategy is to convert them to rental units for a while before reselling them when prices appreciate. The Wall Street firms are scooping up properties in the hardest-hit areas, promising high returns for the rental revenue streams—up to 10 percent annually —and starting bidding wars that have driven up some prices well above national averages. It’s the next Wall Street gold rush, with all the warning signs of a renewed speculative bubble.
Since hedge funds have unlimited monies available to them - they can borrow money at 0% interest -, they can pay premium prices for distressed and marginal properties, then tear down a one family home and build 16 apartment units on the same property. This process has been going on for years but now it's at an accelerating rate. There is a snowball effect: the more a neighborhood gentrifies, the higher property values become, the higher rents become. So renters are being priced out of the market. Single room occupancy hotels, the last resort of the poor, are being converted to regular hotels and other more expensive rentals. In San Diego there is much soul searching and hand wringing over the closure of one of the last SRO hotels. Voice of San Diego reported:
City housing officials are rushing to aid dozens of residents who will soon be booted from the downtown Plaza Hotel, the latest historic single-room occupancy hotel set to shut down in anticipation of a redevelopment project.
For the first time, the Housing Commission board earlier this month voted to sink up to $500,000 into relocation assistance for low-income San Diegans who must move out within weeks – a move that a top official there described as “the right thing to do” amid a regionwide affordable-housing shortage.
Despite that assistance, the closure follows a familiar pattern: Low-income San Diegans paying meager rents – in this case, $635 to 780 a month – will be left to find new homes as their small units are demolished or converted into more lucrative hotel rooms or apartments.
Many of the people kicked out of these SRO hotels will inevitably end up on the streets. Rents will skyrocket as a city loses its cheap neighborhoods and the city's neighborhoods gentrify. At least in Los Angeles they have temporary rent control.
The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted 4 to 1 recently to extend—and expand—an ordinance that bars landlords from raising rents more than 3 percent in most apartments built prior to 1995.
Originally set to expire on June 18, the measures will now remain in effect until December 31. That gives county officials more time to flesh out a permanent ordinance, and Supervisor Sheila Kuehl said it would continue to help “prevent people from slipping into homelessness.”
A provision that requires landlords to have “just cause” before evicting tenants was also expanded to cover all rental units in unincorporated Los Angeles, including single-family homes. That primarily means that tenants can’t be booted unless they have not paid rent or have violated the terms of their lease.
It seems that rent control is an idea whose time has come. Without it rents will continue to skyrocket due to the hedge fund money coming into the market and the aggressive stance that these entities are taking in tearing down marginal housing and replacing it with higher priced units.
UCSD researchers at the School of Medicine have found that exposure to Monsato's (now Bayer's) glyphosate in the popular weed killer Roundup has increased 500% since the herbicide was introduced in 1974. “The data compares excretion levels of glyphosate and its metabolite aminomethylphosphonic acid in the human body over a 23-year time span, starting in 1993, just before the introduction of genetically modified crops into the United States,” said Paul J. Mills, PhD, UC San Diego School of Medicine professor of Family Medicine and Public Health and director of the Center of Excellence for Research and Training in Integrative Health.
Glyphosate is a key ingredient in the herbicide brand Roundup. Use of this herbicide has increased approximately 15-fold since 1994, when genetically modified “Roundup Ready” glyphosate-tolerant crops were introduced. Historically, it is used on genetically modified soy and corn, but it is also sprayed on a substantial portion of wheat and oats grown in the U.S., said Mills.
“Our exposure to these chemicals has increased significantly over the years but most people are unaware that they are consuming them through their diet.”
In a paper published in the journal JAMA on October 24, Mills and a team of researchers compared urine excretion levels of glyphosate and aminomethylphosphonic acid (AMPA) in 100 people living in a Southern California community who provided samples during five clinic visits that took place between 1993 to 1996 and 2014 to 2016. Samples were extracted from the Rancho Bernardo Study of Healthy Aging (RBS), a prospective population-based investigation started by Elizabeth Barrett-Connor, MD, Distinguished Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at UC San Diego School of Medicine and a co-author of the study.
“What we saw was that prior to the introduction of genetically modified foods, very few people had detectable levels of glyphosate,” said Mills. “As of 2016, 70 percent of the study cohort had detectable levels.”
In July, glyphosate was listed by California as a carcinogen. As exposure to this chemical has increased, interest in how much risk it poses to human health and what exposure levels are safe has become a topic of ongoing debate.
Roundup is a commonly used pesticide here in the county of San Diego, California. Its active ingredient, glyphosate, is a harmful, type 1 carcinogenic chemical as declared by the state of California's Environmental Protection Agency.
San Diego County allows the spraying of this and similar toxic pesticides at schools, which unavoidably forces children to be exposed to cancer-causing chemicals. The city of Irvine had so many childhood cancer patients that a huge movement was created to ban pesticides from being used at parks and schools. WHY ISN'T SAN DIEGO DOING THE SAME?
There is an increasing amount of scientific research showing the multitude of dangers associated with Roundup use in the environment and human bodies and has been a definitive cause of untreatable lymphoma in dogs. Our beloved pets who roll in, play on, sniff, lick their paws and fur, have been exposed to and ingesting this pesticide...and have been dying from this cancer for years. How can San Diego pride itself in being one of the top "dog friendly" cities when it allows pesticides everywhere that cause cancer? Plus, EVERYTHING toxic to plant and insect life will inevitably end up in our ocean, the natural environment that San Diego is so proud of and renowned for! Research has proven that glyphosate is known to kill marine life, just as it kills the plants and insects its carelessly used for.
Sooner than later, the entire developed world will regrettably understand the drastic effects of over-use of pesticides that we are seeing now: sky-rocketing cancer rates, super-weeds with resistance to all pesticides, diminished soil quality, death of pets, humans and aquatic life, and much of our available food causing chronic gut inflammation.
There are currently no restrictions to who can purchase Roundup and where they are legally able to spray it. Therefore, this dangerous chemical could be available for anyone and sprayed virtually anywhere in the public. This is a huge concern for parents, health conscious individuals, and organic gardeners.
According to an article below, Santa Cruz county has joined Trinity, Mendocino, Humboldt, and Marin county in a GMO ban.
By signing this petition, we are requesting for Roundup to be banned from the shelves of all stores that sell it in San Diego county. It could be easily and much more safely replaced with natural herbicides, such as Dr. Earth, which is sold at health conscious stores like Staff of Life.
As a worldwide tourist destination, San Diego is known for its natural beauty, wildlife, and beaches. Plus we are considered one of the top ten "pet-friendly" cities in the US.
Our famed monarch butterfly as well as the much needed honey bee are both declining rapidly in population, which the spraying of pesticides is largely contributed to.
We want our children and pets to have a healthy future, free of unavoidable environmental poisons.
If the state of California recognizes Roundup and its active ingredient, glyphosate is a carcinogen, why isn't San Diego banning it? This product needs to be taken off all store shelves and its use discontinued by the Parks and Recreation Department. Let's get rid of this nasty cancer causing stuff once and for all. Send a message to Monsanto (now, Bayer): No more Roundup in our city. Bayer, by the way, is located in Germany where there is a ban on Roundup. But they don't hesitate to sell it to the US where there isn't. Germany’s agricultural minister, Julia Kloeckner, announced April 17, 2018 that she was finalizing a draft regulation to end the use of glyphosate, the world’s most heavily used herbicide in history. And something else: feed your family organic foods. Restaurant foods and in particular fast food restaurant foods are loaded with GMO products containing hefty amounts of glyphosate. Bye y'all.
A Modest proposal to Eliminate Potholes in San Diego City Streets
Or Why Are San Diego Freeways So Devoid of Potholes But City Surface Streets Are So Pothole Intensive?
by John Lawrence, April 18, 2019
There's a simple answer to this question. There are no utility lines running under the freeways so they are not being dug up constantly. But surface streets - that's another situation. They are being dug up constantly to replace sewer lines and to maintain and upgrade various other utilities which run right down the middle or to one side of practically every street in San Diego. The patches they provide once the digging is done do not facilitate the smooth passage of vehicles over them. They've got two methods: run the utilities down the middle of the street so that they can be connected to from both sides. This creates a constant mess. And if they run the utilities down one side of the street, they need to be connected to from the other side by lines going perpendicular to and across the street.
I have the solution to this problem, but it may not be workable except for new streets under construction: run the utility lines down both sides of the street under the sidewalks. Then the streets do not ever have to be dug up and they can be resurfaced with high quality asphalt not subject to potholes in the same way freeways are not subject to potholes. This would be more expensive of course, but not as expensive as continually resurfacing the streets. Except that they hardly ever resurface the streets. They spend millions of dollars on what they call a slurry seal. They fill the potholes and cracks with a slurry which is a temporary solution at best.
On February 20, 2019, local station NBC7 reported, "On the City of San Diego's Get It Done app, there have been a total of 4,573 pothole complaints in the past 30 days." City of San Diego spokesperson Anthony Santacroce released this statement:
"The strong and frequent rains of late have greatly impacted San Diego roadways and led to the creation of an unusually high amount of potholes in a short amount of time. During intense storms like the city has been experiencing weekly, road repair crews that normally patch up more than 100 potholes a day are reassigned to our storm prep and storm patrol to respond to the most critical storm-related issues such as downed trees, flooding and emergency street repair.
During fair weather and less intense precipitation, road repair crews have been working extended hours to repair potholes and are bolstered by additional staff that normally perform larger asphalt repair, concrete replacement and traffic marking maintenance.
We are eager for a break in this rain long enough to allow us to focus all of our efforts on road repair and to demonstrate the hard work and dedication of City staff in continuing to fix the damage this wet season has imposed on our streets. Safe, drivable and rideable roads remain a top priority of Mayor Faulconer and City of San Diego and that is why the city is deploying all available resources to address this issue."
Except it's not a high priority at all. What needs to be done is resurfacing, not patching up, the streets. The utilities need to be moved so the streets don't have to be dug up all the time. Then there won't be so many potholes, cracks, bumps, grooves and fault lines in the first place. How come they can have the freeways so smooth with nary a pothole, but the surface streets are a mess? Youth wants to know.
By the way having double sewer lines running down both sides of the street instead of one sewer line and digging ditches across the street to get to the other side can be accomplished with many fewer transverse connections. When there does need to be a transverse connection, it can be made in the form of a tunnel with the street running over it so that the street does not have to be dug up for this transverse connection either. In fact the lines running under the street in a tunnel do not have to be buried so that they are more accessible in the first place.
So I repeat my question: how come freeways in San Diego don't have potholes but the surface streets are almost one continuous pothole? They need to be resurfaced not slurry sealed.
San Diego Incentivizes the Homeless to Get Off the Streets
by John Lawrence, March 20, 2019
Some recent strides have been made in San Diego to solve the homeless problem. They have provided storage centers where the homeless can store their belongings. They have repealed a city charter provision outlawing sleeping in vehicles so now that's OK. The storage centers have let the city revise a key legal settlement which has allowed city workers to give homeless San Diegans three hours’ notice – down from 72 hours – before conducting sweeps of homeless camps if there is space at the storage center. Providing more facilities for the homeless combined with increased law enforcement if those facilities are not taken advantage of is a step in the right direction. This incentivizes the homeless to get their stuff off the streets and allows the streets to be cleaned up.
This approach makes more sense than the ultimate solution which is getting the homeless into housing. Until and if that becomes a reality, the lives of the homeless and of those who share the streets with them can be ameliorated by relatively inexpensive means. Sanitation facilities have been provided in the past when there was an outbreak of hepatitis A. I'm not sure if they're still being provided but they should be. Everyone should have a basic right to sanitation and a place to store their stuff. Camping out doesn't need to be conspicuous or an eyesore which camping out on the streets definitely is. So places should be provided where people can camp out legally and securely. Some shelters have been provided by the city.
Yet the pull remains for many homeless San Diegans for another reason: East Village and now Barrio Logan and Sherman Heights are places where they can access services. They count on free meals in East Village, check into the homeless tent in Barrio Logan or store their belongings in Sherman Heights.
“You go to other places and you’re not gonna have food as much,” said Sean Davis, who said he has bounced on and off the streets of East Village over the past six months.
City Council members Vivian Moreno and Chris Ward, who represent the Barrio Logan and East Village neighborhoods, and Greg Block, a spokesman for Faulconer, say they are aware of the strain that homelessness and drug activity have put on the neighborhoods.
Ward, who also chairs the countywide Regional Task Force on the Homeless, said he supports aggressive police efforts to address drug issues and has continued to urge investments in homeless-serving programs, outreach and housing across the city.
Still, Ward said, homeless services remain in the East Village, Sherman Heights and Barrio Logan neighborhoods because many homeless San Diegans live there.
Block said city officials are now seeking out locations in other neighborhoods for safe parking lots and homeless storage but defended the city’s decision to add additional services in the eastern reaches of downtown. He said the city is serving homeless San Diegans where they are, and that police and cleaning crews have mobilized to respond to the neighborhoods’ concerns.
“We believe that what we’re doing is the right thing and that we’re helping a lot of people with the things that we’re doing,” Block said. “We can always do more and do better.”
The important thing is that the homeless have been incentivized to change at least partly their behavior by providing some facilities in combination with increased enforcement to actually get them to use those facilities. This method could also be used to reduce begging on street medians, freeway off ramps and street corners. Most homeless have access to some financial resources through General Relief or social security disability both of which pay them about $600 a month. They could be offered additional financial aid as an incentive to eliminate begging on the streets combined with increased enforcement. This would reduce the pull of on street begging if they could make the same money by not begging or if that money were to be taken away if they were caught begging. The idea is to clean up the streets while at the same time incentivizing better social behavior. The two things go hand in hand. This helps both the homeless and the rest of society which shares a common city with the homeless.
These ideas are contrarian to the Housing First philosophy which requires a significant investment on the part of society to build housing. Until that can be provided, society can at least incentivize the homeless to lead better lives by both positive and negative incentives. This can be done at minimal taxpayer expense. As far as drug use, this is a problem not only among the homeless but in society at large, and will always be until people are motivated to live better lifestyles. Only education and psychological and social services can help with this.
Sometimes building more housing stock really just means more investment opportunities instead of more places for people to live…
Mayoral Candidate Cory Briggs’s critique of the YIMBY (Yes In My Back Yard) movement is, as I said on Friday, not something we should dismiss as advocacy for the status quo.
This is not the status quo as a tenet of the Church of Unlimited Parking Spaces, or homeowners believing their property values are endangered by hordes of public transit riders.
The danger in the city’s rush to spur more housing construction is the probability of ‘same old, same old’ rules of the game applying, wherein the rest of us get stuck with paying for the consequences/impacts of such development.
In other words, the status quo is exactly what we should be worried about.
I have long marveled at how the power of the magic hand of the free market gets muddled when it comes to housing. Part of this can be explained by the scarcity of land in big cities.
Developers would like us to believe they’re mostly building ‘market rate’ housing –meaning it’s affordable by an increasingly small segment of the population– because fees and regulations stand in the way.
It’s also true the current cycle of capitalism devalues labor. Real wages for the bottom 90% or so of the population haven’t kept up with increases in the cost of housing even as productivity increases.
From 2010 to 2018, median rental prices for a one-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles increased 84%, while median wages during the same period only rose 11%.
A significant portion of reported increases of income at the bottom tiers of the workforce has come from legislatively increased minimum wages, along with companies grudgingly paying more as a public relations ploy.
But I think there’s something right under our noses we might be missing. Like maybe we have more housing built than we realize.
A night time drive through the canyons of cool looking cribs in downtown San Diego (and other cities) offers some insight in what may be a root cause of our housing crisis.
Did you ever notice how many of those units in newer construction are dark at night?
Seriously. Drive by older tall buildings around town after dark and see how many units have their lights on. Now drive downtown and make the same survey of newer construction.
It suggests to me that lots of those condos have absentee owners. They’re bought as investments, not living spaces. And if you happen to be wealthy enough to pay cash, the other costs of ownership are likely less than the probable return from appreciation.
The Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network is significantly expanding its investigation into whether foreign buyers are using shell companies to buy U.S. real estate in order to launder money.
Recently, the threshold for additional reporting for cash purchases (including wire transfers and cryptocurrency) in 12 cities around the country including San Diego has been lowered to $300,000. This comes after a pilot study found more than 25% of transactions involved a “beneficial owner” who is also the subject of a “suspicious activity report,” which is an indication of possible criminal activity.
Although the volume of foreign all-cash purchases for high end real estate has fallen since the recession, Chinese consumers have been the top foreign buyers in both units and dollar volume of residential housing for six years straight, according to the National Association of Realtors, and now they expanding to new, lower price tiers.
These purchases aren’t foreign syndicates looking to launder money– overseas (especially Chinese) buyers are increasingly middle class families looking to protect their new-found wealth.
Out of town buyers, according to a recent study, can have the effect of increasing real estate prices (4.9%), rents (8.9%), and decreased local revenue (.34%).
A solution putting more housing on the local rental market and increasing revenue for localities is to place a surcharge on property taxes for non-residents.
When Vancouver passed a tax on homes that sit empty for more than six months out of the year–apartments that serve as pieds-à-terre or investments for the rich, for example–it made a difference: The city recently reported that the number of empty properties dropped 15% between 2017, when the law took effect, and 2018. More than half of those homes went back on the rental market, presumably to avoid the tax. The city also raised more than $38 million, most of which will go to affordable housing programs.
A new study suggests that something similar could happen in other cities–and that in expensive, dense areas where it’s difficult to build new housing, an empty house tax might be an effective way to make housing more affordable. The research focused on London, where housing has become significantly more expensive in the last couple of decades, and where property has become a popular investment for people who live overseas. In the most expensive neighborhoods, the study found, as many as 30% of the housing can be empty or “low use.”
A recent article at CityLab looks at what people in Berlin are doing to address a severe housing shortage and spiraling rents.
In one of Europe’s largest cities proposals are under consideration for limiting how many units a landlord can own, stopping rent rises for five years, and of re-nationalizing real estate.
As Berliners grow increasingly frustrated with rising rents, there’s a question making the rounds in local politics that could seriously shake things up: Should there be a limit to how much housing a landlord can own?
Following months of intense debate (and some action), the German capital is considering whether landlords with more than 3,000 units should be barred from operating in the city.
Opinion polls show a majority of Berliners favor such a move, and activists are about to start preparations for a referendum on the subject. If voted through, the plan could give citizens the power to make Berlin’s biggest landlords break up their portfolios, in the hope that this could prevent galloping rent rises and provide tenants with better service.
The proposal is just one of several moves in a city that could be on the cusp of a housing revolution. Over the past few months, the German capital has been trying out several plans to keep housing affordable. In effect, these plans would transfer large sections of the city’s rental homes from private owners to the public sector.
I realize the concept of government taking over real estate is something unlikely to happen in California, even if the GOP thinks we’re trying for a socialist utopia.
However, the increasing concentration of ownership of rental housing by large corporations has to be acknowledged at a minimum.
None of these alternatives to build, baby build is perfect. What works elsewhere may not work here.
I’m sure it won’t take much effort to find studies contradicting those I referenced in this post. I still think these are ideas worthy of consideration.
We need more data, a sense of urgency, and politicians willing to make bold moves, in addition to rational densification.
There are groups around that are trying to build tiny homes for the homeless. The problem is where to put them. Do you put them on some kind of foundation? Do you have utility hook-ups? What about drainage? What about mildew and rot from water soaked lumber? One of the big selling points of this approach is that the tiny homes are lockable. My solution would be tents plus lockers for valuables. This solution could be produced much more cheaply and is more flexible in terms of moving things to a different location. While tents are not secure unless they were to be made out of a material that couldn't be easily slashed with a knife (maybe such materials are available, I don't know), tents can be locked. That's some deterrent to would be thieves.
Utility hook-ups should be out of the question. There are battery powered lamps for lighting. Lockers which can be mass produced and made out of mildew resistant material like plastic are the ultimate solution for valuables. These lockers could also be made to be portable. You still would need a plot of land, and the best way to secure that would be to cut a deal with the city. Portable sanitation facilities could also be added, both rest rooms and showers. These solutions have been available for some time. They just need to be scaled up.
The problem with tiny houses is that building materials are expensive, and you would have to rely on volunteer labor to put them together. Securing land from the city of San Diego like the unused, undeveloped land south of Morley Field in Balboa Park would be ideal. They had a temporary tent city there once. I wonder what happened to it. Adding a security guard would relieve the police of a lot of their problems in dealing with the homeless. A step up from there would be adding a social worker to help getting the homeless on the right track to a job and a more permanent housing solution.
The city's campground was opened in October of 2017. The San Diego Union reported:
The city of San Diego on Monday opened a camping area for people who are homeless, with 24-hour security, bathrooms and storage.
The 136-space facility was set up in the parking lot of the city operations yard in Golden Hill, just south of the Balboa Park Golf Course.
The camping area is operated by the nonprofit Alpha Project like a typical campground, with rules and regulations and an on-site manager. Each person will register and be assigned a 13- by 13-foot campsite, but each space can accommodate one or more individuals.
The city said that this solution would be temporary until 3 large tents could be opened. I think people would prefer to have their own individual space, no matter how small, than to be thrown together in a large tent with other people. The city was on the right track with the idea of a campsite for the homeless involving individual tents. Why didn't they continue that?
The solutions for the homelessness situation always end up with paying developers to develop more affordable housing. Only problem is it's never affordable, and it costs too much in the first place. The developer's profits could be used much more efficiently somewhere else. So here's a solution that wouldn't cost nearly as much. Develop campsites downtown. The City of San Diego was on to something when it took an unused, undeveloped part of Balboa Park and set up a rudimentary campsite there. Whether or not it's still there I don't know. It was only supposed to be temporary.
The first city-sanctioned homeless encampment is scheduled to open Monday in a public works yard near Balboa Park with tents, security, food, showers, restrooms and social services for more than 200 people, San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer and other officials announced Wednesday.
Speaking at the city operations yard that will be used for the camp area, Faulconer said the site will be short-lived, with a plan to begin moving people out after the first of three large industrial tents to temporarily house homeless people opens later this year.
So why did it have to be temporary? Here's my vision of what this could be. It would be similar to those campsites out in the mountains where tourists go and set up a tent or bring in their camper. So it would be nice, not a bare bones operation, and it would be open to homeless and others who just wanted a place to camp. The homeless would not have to pay; the others would. It would integrate homeless people back into society which is the main goal of resolving the homeless situation. Otherwise. a permanent underclass is developing.
Facilities there would include rest rooms with showers, laundry facilities, lockers and tents. Social worker services would be available for the homeless. Meals would be available for the homeless. Food is transportable so they could be brought in. Father Joe's in downtown San Diego provides meals for the homeless 365 days a year. That's why the homeless congregate there, but food is transportable and could be brought in from Father Joe's or other places. Picnic tables are cheap and simple to provide. Security would be provided. Transit passes would be provided for the homeless so they could get to job interviews, other services etc. Spaces would be available for campers, cars and RVs for those wishing to sleep in them. Many semi-homeless sleep in their vehicles in unsafe areas or areas where the police roust them out because it's illegal to sleep in your car.
So this solution would integrate the homeless and the rest of the population who just wanted a reasonable place to camp out, not in the woods, but closer to downtown. It would disperse homeless services and provide nonjudgmental shelter so that the homeless would be indistinguishable from the rest of the population. There would be no need to push belongings around city streets in shopping carts because lockers would be available. Transportation would be provided in many forms from bicycles to bus passes to transportation on demand for elderly and handicapped. Father Joe's demands that no alcohol or drugs be used in the shelter. This rule would not be in effect here as the Housing First solution provides. Security would see to it that fights or unsafe conditions would not be allowed and that children were safe in this environment. Barbering and beautician services could be provided so that homeless people would be indistinguishable from the rest of the population. Pets would be allowed. They are not allowed in most shelters.
All this could be done inexpensively without having to build houses which are expensive. What we are talking about here is nothing more than a glorified park or campground. In inclement weather indoor shelters should be made available, but otherwise outdoor camping plus a few other services would make the homeless have lives that are decent until they can back on their feet, and social workers would be there to help them to do so. In the meantime the homeless would not have to exist apart from mainstream society in a separate culture which is becoming a permanent underclass in the US.
Why Can't El Cajon Dedicate One Vacant Lot for the Homeless
by John Lawrence, August 9, 2018
The homeless are overflowing into every alley, nook and cranny in El Cajon, a suburb of San Diego. They congregate on Walter Way behind the Walgreen's. They've almost taken over Wells Park, a playground for children. Yet the City does nothing except to erect some signs along the roads that discourage people from giving money to the homeless as they hold up cardboard signs at intersections. It seems that Nixon's policy of "benign neglect" is the official policy towards the homeless.
Yet there are a bunch of vacant lots downtown and nearby, one right across from the Salvation Army where they go for services, right on Main Street. They could put in a park like campground plus services there, and then the homeless would have some place to go, some place to be. It would be a lot cheaper than building so-called affordable housing. Just a camping site basically plus services like maybe rest rooms, lockers, showers, security, a social worker, a bike rack, a laundry, mailboxes. This place would allow pets, a key provision that most shelters do not allow. However, the NIMBYs are out in force. Also the NWMTDers. (Not With My Tax Dollars). Wouldn't it be nicer to have a children's park not overflowing with homeless citizens because they had a better place to go? Also, it would make the police's job easier. Naysayers would compare this to a concentration camp, but that's a false comparison because they could leave at any time. They would not be confined there.
In downtown San Diego there is one measly place on 17th street called the Neil Good day center. It offers a bunch of services for the homeless including laundry, mail, coolness, TV. The homeless flock there, but it's only open during the day and it's overcrowded. It's the kind of place that's on the right track, but insufficient. Of course Father Joe's serves meals 365 days a year and offers shelter beds. But they don't allow pets. Most homeless people don't want to give up their pets, the only friends they have in many cases.
America does not want to deal with the homeless situation as a social problem that warrants something being done about it including the expenditure of funds. As a result the homeless population continues to grow due to unaffordable rents and other factors. It really separates society into two groups: the haves and the have-nots, the homed and the homeless. There is a stark contrast between the two groups which makes for a very Un-united State of America.
Councilwoman Barbara Bry at the San Diego City Council meeting July 16. / Photo by Adriana Heldiz
In a dramatic shift, the San Diego City Council voted 6-3 Monday to allow only residents who live in homes in San Diego to rent them out to visitors up to six months every year. Councilmen David Alvarez, Chris Cate and Scott Sherman voted no.
It was a huge win for Councilwoman Barbara Bry, who first proposed a framework like this last year but got very little support from colleagues, besides Councilwoman Lorie Zapf. The tide changed with Councilman Chris Ward’s decision last week to switch his long-held more liberal position on the matter. Ward recommended that residents with accessory dwelling units, aka granny flats, should also be able to rent those out.
That will have to come up later.
The Council rejected a carve-out for Mission Beach. And existing Mission Beach vacation rentals were not grandfathered in.
The Council decisively rejected Mayor Kevin Faulconer’s proposal that people be allowed to rent out their own place plus one other. Faulconer had also proposed the Mission Beach carve-out. The policy vastly changes what someone has to go through to rent out a home they own to visitors. Unless they find a loophole, it will eliminate all vacation rentals owned as second homes or investment properties.
City Attorney Mara Elliott cheered the move in a tweet. “Congratulations to the mayor and City Council for stepping up to regulate short term vacation rentals, an issue that dragged on 11 years.”
But it Depends on Enforcement …
Councilman Chris Cate said, in a written statement, a compromise would have provided resources to regulate the industry.
“Instead, the Council chose a path that is not only unenforceable and subject to legal challenge, but would drive the activity underground, resulting in the loss in millions of dollars in revenue that funds public safety officers and the repairing of city streets,” he wrote.
The mayor was optimistic: “As I’ve said repeatedly, the most important thing is that we have an established set of rules that protects neighborhood quality of life through increased oversight and enforcement.”
The losers: HomeAway, one of the platforms people use to rent out to visitors, said in a written statement it was “extremely disappointed” and hinted it may consider legal action.
Former City Attorney Jan Goldsmith, who was hired by vacation rental advocates to review the proposed regulations, argued Monday the city could face a fight in court over its decision to treat people with second homes in San Diego differently than those who spend more of the year here. The Constitution requires that all people be treated the same. Elliott had previously raised similar concerns and recently reiterated some of them.
Deputy City Attorney Shannon Thomas has said the City Council can apply different regulations to people but it must describe a legitimate purpose for doing so.
Last hurdle: The new vacation rental rules could face another major roadblock too. The California Coastal Commission, which has rejected multiple cities’ regulations, could take issue with a measure that significantly curtails rentals along the coast.
Plastics were supposedly a wonderful development, one that ushered us into the "modern age". They were a boon to our existence. Now as they accumulate in the oceans and threaten wildlife, they have become the bane of our existence. One of the most ridiculous uses of plastics is plastic straws. Paper straws worked just as well. It seems someone decided that when you order a soft drink at a restaurant it automatically comes with a plastic straw. People have forgotten how to drink directly out of a glass. Or it's too gauche to drink directly out of a glass. Whatever it is, in some environmentally sophisticated locales, like Seattle, they have banned plastic straws just like they have banned non-reusable, but ubiquitous, plastic bags.
They’re all cities that have banned or limited the use of plastic straws in restaurants. Straws, routinely placed in glasses of water or soda, represent a small percentage of the plastic that’s produced and consumed but often end up on beaches and in oceans.
Advocates said laws aimed at cutting back on the use of plastic straws can help spur more significant behavioral changes.
“I think a lot of people feel overwhelmed by the magnitude of the plastic problem,” said Diana Lofflin, the founder of StrawFree.org, an activist organization based in San Diego. “Giving up plastic straws is a small step, and an easy thing for people to get started on. From there, we can move on to larger projects.”
Will plastic straws be banned in the heartland or only in the Blue States, the Left and Right coasts? It seems that progressive environmental policies are a no-no in the era of Trump and for Trump's base. They don't believe in global warming and to hell with the environment.Trump's approach is to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency presided over by an anti-environmentalist, Scott Pruitt. These guys don't care whether or not all the fish in the oceans swallow plastic. The oceans now contain gyres or garbage patches that are filled with plastics consumed by "advanced industrial societies" while more primitive societies, presumably, drink directly out of glasses or coconut shells.
Gyres are large systems of circulating ocean currents, kind of like slow-moving whirlpools. There are five gyres to be exact—the North Atlantic Gyre, the South Atlantic Gyre, the North Pacific Gyre, the South Pacific Gyre, and the Indian Ocean Gyre—that have a significant impact on the ocean. The big five help drive the so-called oceanic conveyor belt that helps circulate ocean waters around the globe. While they circulate ocean waters, they’re also drawing in the pollution that we release in coastal areas, known as marine debris.
The most famous example of a gyre’s tendency to take out our trash is the Great Pacific Garbage patch located in the North Pacific Gyre. The patch is an area of concentrated (and mostly plastic) marine debris. While this is certainly the most talked about garbage patch, it is not the only garbage patch in the ocean. In the last five years, researchers have discovered two more areas where a “soup” of concentrated marine debris collects – one in the South Pacific Ocean, the other in the North Atlantic. As with the North Pacific Garbage Patch, plastic can circulate in this part of the ocean for years, posing health risks to marine animals, fish, and seabirds.
Trump's base including Fox News prides itself on their collective ignorance. They just love oil and the internal combustion engine. Fireworks and NASCAR add to the world's pollution, but they don't care. Independence Day and July 5 consistently have some of the worst air quality of the year. With so many fireworks going off at once, levels of fine-particle pollution — a stew of tiny, lung-damaging specks of toxic soot, smoke and ash known as PM2.5 — surge several times higher than federal health standards across Southern California, air monitoring data show. Not celebrate July 4th? Unthinkable. A fireworks free July 4th. Unthinkable. Plastic straws not in your drinks served at a restaurant. Unthinkable.
Just remember, we only have one planet and its carrying capacity is being outstripped by its human population especially the human population of the advanced societies.
The city is expected to tap San Diego Housing Commission funds meant to support permanent housing to finance short-term solutions.
Mayor Kevin Faulconer’s team is pledging to quickly replenish the funds to support more permanent solutions but the latest fund-shuffling move underscores the lack of certainty surrounding new funding and the lack of a strategy to address an urgent problem.
So what are the city and county’s plans to address homelessness? The answer: They don’t have an overarching strategy.
The Regional Task Force on the Homeless, a countywide group coordinating the regional response, last year paid a Sacramento consultant to produce a plan. (Here’s a cheat-sheet version.) The goal was to get local governments and homeless-serving agencies rowing in the same direction.
Gordon Walker is CEO of the Regional Task Force on the Homeless. / Photo by Vito Di Stefano
But the plan for that regional plan has changed in the past year. Task Force CEO Gordon Walker says the group has since decided against having the outside consultant produce a more detailed regional strategy. The Task Force is, however, working on overarching suggestions laid out in the initial report that advocated a housing first approach. (Translation: Housing first means focusing on quickly housing the homeless rather than demanding they enter temporary programs first.)
Qualcomm is getting rid of 1231 employees in San Diego. This is not because of what Qualcomm wants; it is what Qualcomm investors want. Trim the fat. Get rid of the deadwood. Load up other employees with the jobs of those that have been laid off. If Broadcom had done a hostile takeover of Qualcomm (saved at the last minute by Trump), there would have been a lot more layoffs. Wall Street demands short term performance, not long term research. Therefore, employees have to take a hike so that the stock price stays up. Investors love it when a corporation downsizes so they bid up the stock price. They don't care about the hit to the San Diego economy. Executive perks, salaries and bonuses are not in jeopardy.
The news comes after reports surfaced Wednesday that the company is facing pressure from shareholders to reduce spending by $1 billion after consecutive years of revenue decline and a blocked takeover bid from San Jose-based Broadcom Ltd.
Last month, President Trump banned a $177 billion takeover proposal by the chip company, which would have been the biggest tech M&A deal in history. Trump cited national security concerns as the reason to block the deal.
“We first evaluated non-headcount expense reductions, but we concluded that a workforce reduction is needed to support long-term growth and success, which will ultimately benefit all our stakeholders,” Qualcomm said in a previous statement, as reported by Bloomberg Wednesday.
Qualcomm is laying off so many employees that it has to file a WARN (Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notice) notice with the state of California. They are trying to save a billion dollars in costs now that revenues are declining, and they are trying to "win over investors."
So R&D goes out the window. What really is important is placating investors who demand short term profits. They are already worth millions, but they want MORE. Forget the little guy who has devoted his life to Qualcomm probably by working weekends and 12 hour days. These are the guys Qualcomm wants to get rid of. I'm sure there will be no tears shed at Qualcomm headquarters among the executives. There jobs are safe ... for now. But wait till Broadcom moves its headquarters to Irvine. Then the hostile takeover dance of death begins again. Qualcomm investors will be coming out with torches and pitchforks demanding that employees be "let go" in an overwhelming show of force. How dare they hold on to these peons when stock prices are at stake and investor cash is dwindling.
What it comes down to is: who is more important... investors or employees? Anybody's guess? Anybody? There are only so many "non-headcount reductions" you can make. Eventually, heads have to go on the guillotine. Employee heads that is.
San Diego Mulls Providing Storage Lockers for Homeless
by John Lawrence, March 17, 2018
San Diego has slowly and begrudgingly started to provide facilities for the homeless. It started with the rest room facilities and washing stations that were put up as a result of a Hepatitius A crisis. It made sense to provide minimal facilities such as are provided at any outdoor event in San Diego. Prior to that people were urinating and defecating on the street because they had nowhere else to go. Then amid much resistance they finally got the idea of providing storage facilities for the meager belongings of homeless people so they would not have to push them around in shopping carts.
Theft of homeless peoples' belongings is a big threat when you're living on the street. And it makes it difficult to use public institutions, the library or go for a job interview if you show up with a shopping cart full of your possessions. The City routinely scooped up peoples' possessions and put them in garbage trucks. In one case they scooped up a tent and placed it in a garbage truck with a man inside. Getting people and their belongings off the street is one of the concomitant results of providing storage lockers. The grocery stores and super markets are also thankful not to have their shopping carts stolen.
Laura Davis woke up on a sidewalk in downtown San Diego on Monday morning, pulled back the blanket she used as a makeshift tent and looked to her side.
The two bags that held the bulk of her possessions were missing.
“I woke up, and they were gone,” she said.
The apparent theft was frustrating, a setback — and not uncommon for homeless people on the street. Davis said a friend of hers recently lost her children’s birth certificates and other important documents to thieves in the night.
“You need storage facilities so people can get out of being homeless,” she said. “It almost feels like society wants to keep people homeless.”
Help may be coming within a few months. Mayor Kevin Faulconer announced in his State of the City address last week that the city plans to open a second storage facility for homeless people this spring, an addition that would more than double what is available now.
Details were sparse in the speech, but Faulconer spokesman Greg Block said Friday that the new facility will be in a 25,000-square-foot, two-story building at 20th and Commercial streets with space for 700 to 1,000 storage bins.
The second floor will have public restrooms, and the facility will be run by the San Diego Housing Commission, which will hire an operator to manage it, Block said.
Besides helping keep sidewalks clear and protecting property from being stolen, the new facility will allow homeless people like Davis to look for work and go to other appointments.
But as always, when the City tries to do the right thing, indignant citizens are fighting back. Sherman Heights residents don't want a storage facility for the homeless at 20th and Commercial streets. They don't care if the City puts it somewhere else, mind you, just not right in their back yard. The city, however, is promising to be a good neighbor, stressing the site will have security 24/7. There will be no loitering, drugs or alcohol allowed, and they will have regular waste pick-ups within a block radius.
So can't we all get along? Let the homeless have a modicum of respectability? The situation as it exists right now is much worse in terms of the visibility of the homeless on the streets than it would be if they were allowed to store their belongings and have bathroom privileges. And the City would not have to remove 30,000 pounds of garbage every week.
America, the Hideous: Turning Schools into Armed Camps
by John Lawrence, February 24, 2018
America is becoming an armed camp, and terrorists from abroad are not the main problem. Now Trump wants teachers to carry guns. I am not a gun lover. I have never owned a gun. In fact I hate guns. I would be in favor of repealing the Second Amendment. That being said, under present day circumstances, it makes some kind of perverted sense to have teachers carrying guns. It also make sense for the schools to post signs telling the public that teachers are carrying guns and they won't hesitate to shoot anyone that comes on campus with a weapon. The real solution to the problem, of course, is to get rid of the 300 million guns that are now flooding the society.
Australia did it, and they haven't had a mass shooting since. This is a phenomenon exclusive to America - the level of gun violence in and out of schools. What next? Parishioners being advised to carry a gun to church? The US is becoming the world's outlier on everything from climate change to infrastructure development to anything that more civilized societies have implemented or outlawed.
It is up to individual states and municipalities to come up with their own gun regulations. In blue states this is completely possible. It won't happen in Republican controlled states, however. At least part of America can and should have a sane approach to gun control. San Diego did just that. The City Attorney and upcoming police chief used court orders to take away the guns of several mentally unstable individuals. How did they know they were mentally unstable? For instance, 911 had been called because of spousal abuse or men threatening to kill their wives whom they suspected of having affairs. If 911 has been called on any issues of domestic violence, this is a red flag that will allow the San Diego authorities to take away their guns. Wayne LaPierre is not happy.
According to the National Rifle Association, the more guns the better. Of course they represent those companies who make a profit from gun sales. They don't give a hoot about children getting killed by guns. Their solution to every gun related problem is to encourage people to buy more guns. Arming teachers seems to be the only alternative in some cases, but I like the San Diego solution better. Court ordered removal of guns for anyone accused of domestic violence or other erratic behavior which causes somebody to call 911 and have the police come out is a good start.
It's about time the kids spoke up. They are directly in the crosshairs of the gun nuts and the nuts with guns. It's obvious that school shootings are an epidemic ruining the lives of countless families, some of them former supporters of the Second Amendment. It seems that every town has its resident candidate for the looney bin who doesn't know what to do with himself other than by buying an AR-15 assault rifle and gaining his 15 minutes of fame by shooting up a school. It isn't about the rights of gun nuts or the NRA or the politicians who take money from the NRA any more. It's about what the kids want and need to protect themselves.
Since the FBI has said that they can't follow up on every lead because there's so many of them, it's up to the kids themselves and their parents and loved ones to take matters into their own hands. The kids are in an ideal position to do so because they haven't been indoctrinated yet by the military. After high school when many of them go into the military, they come out Republicans of the Trump variety and gun advocates. That's the military's job, to convert kids from peace and love hippies into hardened men and women of the world who vote Republican and strongly support the Second Amendment.
Here in San Diego the local City Attorney has taken matters into her own hands. She and law enforcement have obtained court restraining orders against mental cases who have threatened harm to others and taken away their guns. In an article in the San Diego Union, 10 San Diego residents under court orders to give up their guns, Dana Littlefield writes:
Ten gun owners are under court orders to give up their weapons after prosecutors and police filed gun violence restraining orders against them, San Diego authorities said Friday.
The orders require the gun owners — some of whom are dealing with severe mental health problems, according to the San Diego City Attorney’s Office — to surrender or sell the firearms, and bar them from possessing guns or ammunition for 12 months.
“Our federal government is inexcusably ignoring the growing problem of gun violence in our schools and communities,” Elliott said. “The City of San Diego will not tolerate federal inaction. We’re doing everything in our power to respond to the epidemic of senseless killing by removing guns from the hands of unstable and irresponsible gun owners.”
Thank you, San Diego Superior Court Judge Tamila Ipema, City Attorney Mara Elliott and San Diego police Assistant Chief Dave Nisleit! Together they developed this approach. It should be replicated everywhere. It's about time. No use in waiting for the FBI to act. Local communities have to take matters into their own hands. Forget the National Level. The national level is a farce, and Congressmen and Senators are in the pockets of the NRA. It's up to local judges, attorneys, law enforcement, the local judicial system, school districts and people of good will to end this gun paranoia which lets every mental case buy an AR-15 with a bump stock.
Once these young men go into the military, forget about good sense when it comes to guns. They become the definition of their manhood. The same holds for indoctrinated women. They'll complain about sexual harassment, but not about the US role in guns and violence in the world or that a trillion dollars a year is spent on the military and still they can't prevent domestic terrorism or protect American school kids. One of the reasons is that they stand to profit from generous GI benefits when they get out. They're not going to cut their own throats.
So when are you starting your local chapter of Moms Against Gun Nuts?
Suddenly you see billboards all over San Diego saying something like "It took a San Diego native to put the smart in smartphones." What do they want - a pat on the back or something? They don't sell anything to the general public. Who is their target market for this advertising? Their chips go in Apple products and android phones although those companies are on the outs with Qualcomm. They'll probably develop their own chips because Qualcomm's are so expensive. Qualcomm is also on the outs with various countries who have accused them of unfair business practices.
It's all about intellectual property. Qualcomm says that these companies must pay for Qualcomm's intellectual property as reflected by all the patents on their patent wall. My patents aren't there because I was never a Qualcomm employee, and they probably worked around them. But I don't have a bevy of corporate lawyers to figure that out. Apple and Samsung say that Qualcomm should just be charging them for their chip, not their wall full of patents.
Meanwhile their arch rival, Broadcomm, is launching a hostile takeover to buy them out. Naturally, Qualcomm doesn't want to be taken over by Broadcomm. It would result in thousands of layoffs. But investors see it differently. According to cnbc:
But billionaire investor Kevin O'Leary sees a bright side, he told CNBC's "Squawk Box" Monday.
"People love this deal," he said. "Many people that own Broadcom and Qualcomm, like me, want to see this."
The reasoning is pretty simple: $3 billion in "synergies" — a term often used to mean cost-saving layoffs — protects profits in the long run and, in this case, frees up engineers to fill the well-established tech talent shortage.
Those "synergies" mean massive layoffs in San Diego. Freeing up engineers is just another way of saying "laying them off." O'Leary thinks that the litigation problems with Apple could be resolved if Broadcomm takes over. Qualcomm's insistence that it's their way or the highway is not playing well with the other adults in the room.
So this is why Qualcomm is putting up those billboards. Somebody, anybody please help Qualcomm not to be taken over by rival Broadcomm because if that happens, San Diego, you're going to lose a ton of jobs.
El Cajon, CA police officers arrested about a dozen people for feeding the homeless at a city park Sunday afternoon.
The event was organized by a group called Break the Ban, which formed after the El Cajon City Council unanimously passed an emergency ordinance in October prohibiting the distribution of food on any city-owned property.
City officials said the ordinance was a way to protect the public from hepatitis A, but critics have called it a punitive measure to dehumanize and criminalize the homeless.
Mark Lane, one of the event’s organizers, said about 12 to 15 people were passing out food and toiletries to the homeless at Wells Park on East Madison Avenue when police arrived.
About 40 more people, including several lawyers, also were there, but not actively passing out food. Some of those carried signs that had slogans like “Feeding the hungry is not a crime.”
While the event was intended to feed members of the homeless, it was also part of the group’s plan to legally contest the ordinance.
“It was absolutely necessary to break this law until they were willing to enforce it, and, now that they have, we will continue this fight in court,” said another organizer, Shane Parmely.
It’s a familiar legal strategy that played a critical role during the civil rights movement and other social justice movements, Parmely said.
The arrests began about 3:40 p.m.
According to a video Parmely shared on Facebook, a police officer explained to the crowd that the city council had banned food sharing on public property.
"This park is part of city property so you aren't allowed to food share," the officer in the video said. “...If you guys continue to food share, then you guys are subject to arrest, all right?"
Everyone who was handing out food, including a 14-year-old child, was arrested, given a misdemeanor citation with a date to appear in court and released. No one was taken away in handcuffs.
In the video, one officer can be heard explaining the citation was for failing to comply with a municipal ordinance as well as an emergency order recently passed by the city.
An El Cajon police lieutenant was unable to comment on the arrests, saying the city would handle all inquiries.
Lane said Break the Ban will continue to organize events to feed the city’s homeless. Sunday’s event was the second hosted by the group.
They have partnered with a second group called Food Not Bombs that has also hosted two food-sharing events. Another is planned for Jan. 27 at Wells Park.
“Our goal it to get the ban overturned and sit down and figure out how to humanely deal with something that's not going away,” Lane said.
Workers power-wash a sidewalk near the Midway area. / Photo by Adriana Heldiz
San Diego’s reputation as a nice tourist destination was tarnished this year when an historic hepatitis A outbreak made international news.
The city’s homelessness crisis fueled the spread of the disease, and while city and county leaders had been holding meetings, writing memos and making plans to house the growing number of people sleeping on our streets, little was being done until San Diego’s hep A problem made its way into headlines.
New shelter tents have gone up, but it’s unclear what will happen next for the folks who move into them — or for the hundreds of others who chose not to.
A handful of potential ballot measures to pay for permanent housing and homeless services may make their way onto the 2018 ballot. There’s also a new regional strategy to tackle homelessness, but leaders will need to maintain momentum now that the hep A crisis is calming and the pressure subsides.
“The question is whether San Diego leaders and perhaps voters will continue to demand results and make the tough decisions they’ve resisted for years,” Halverstadt writes.
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