OB Rag

By Nicole Crosby, Candidate for San Diego City Council District 2

It’s no secret that many of us feel left behind by City Hall. It’s a sentiment I hear from and share with my neighbors every day. With costs on the rise, our infrastructure crumbling, and City leaders pushing half-baked solutions to complex issues, it’s easy to see why.

These were the issues on my mind when I decided to launch my campaign for City Council District 2, which covers the neighborhoods of Ocean Beach, Mission Beach, Point Loma, Clairemont, Midway, Old Town, and North Bay. These are the neighborhoods where I started my family, served as the President of the PTA and Clairemont Town Council, and am proud to be raising my daughter.

And as a working mom, I know this race isn’t about abstract ideas or numbers on a spreadsheet; it’s about real problems that impact real people’s lives. I have served the City Attorney’s office for over a decade, where I’ve stood up for victims of elder abuse, hate crimes, and gun crimes. Every day, I work to help ordinary people secure justice and dignity against those who try to exploit them. Now, I’m running to take that fight to City Hall on behalf of our neighborhoods and stand up against the corporate special interests that want us to stay quiet.

While serving in the community, I have seen firsthand the ways that the system is rigged against working San Diegans: whether it’s corporate short term vacation rentals turning affordable homes in our communities into unregulated hotels, a recreational airfield spreading pollution directly into our backyards, or a stunning lack of investment in basic infrastructure and services. What would fixing these issues and making City Hall actually work for us mean in our everyday lives?

Reporter Interviews Editordude and Cites His Study, “Death and Distress at Sunset Cliffs”

By Andrew J. Campa / The Los Angeles Times / September 8, 2026

SAN DIEGO — As dusk approached San Diego’s seaside enclave of Ocean Beach, its Sunset Cliffs bustled on a recent Friday evening. Two engaged couples posed for wedding photos in between joggers, dog walkers and sightseers who clamored around Osprey Street to enjoy the day’s majestic sunset.

It was a deceptively idyllic setting for what authorities say is continued lawbreaking and peril, which authorities just can’t seem to quash.

The lawbreakers were gathered this day on a cliff and a nearby arch, a crowd of around 50 young people — 14- to 20-year-olds, mostly males. Buoyed by a youthful sense of invincibility, they dared one another to leap, waiting for another to move, like emperor penguin chicks before a first arctic plunge. After a few minutes, there was a dive off the arch, followed by a cannonball from the next person, a backflip from a third and then other more spectacular and daring stunts from the flock. The cliff divers, drawn to the thrills of the illicit jumps amplified by social media, reveled in dozens of leaps.

No one was injured that day, but that hasn’t always been the case.

By Mat Wahlstrom

Consider what can be accomplished in four years. High school, college, military service, medical residency, a term in political office, a vehicle lease, can all be encompassed in that time. So it is fitting to reflect that four years ago today was the kickoff of the Midway Rising scheme, when the San Diego City Council’s Land Use and Housing Committee voted unanimously to send it to the full council as their “recommendation” of the three proposals winnowed by Todd  Gloria’s staff.

Here is the link to the original write-up of that meeting by Jennifer Van Grove in the San Diego Union-Tribune. (Full disclosure: one of the public comments she reported was by yours truly, so judge for yourself how well this project has aged.)

It was already clear that the fix was in for Midway Rising. La Prensa revealed a week before the committee’s vote that the couple behind its development team had been the largest individual contributors to Todd Gloria’s 2020 political campaign.

Players Have Begun Petition to Restore Hours

By Michael Hernandez

A group of pickleball players are waving their paddles in frustration after a reduction of hours at the North Clairemont Recreation Center leaves them without a court to play on.

New hours of operation, as part of city council-approved budget cuts, went into effect for at least 16 different rec centers in San Diego at the end of last month, including at the North Clairemont Rec Center at Officer Austin Machitar Memorial Park.

For years, a tight-knit band of pickleball players have called the facility home, taking advantage of the free pickleball lessons offered every Tuesday and Thursday at 9 a.m. and the open-play from 10:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. However, under the new schedule, hours of operation would drop from 60 down to 40 hours, and the center would not open on Tuesdays and Thursdays  until 2 p.m., virtually eliminating their routine morning games.

By Kate Callen

When my sister and I were children, we loved making Christmas wish lists: pedal-powered mini-cars, two-story dollhouses. But we understood that Santa had to provide for a world full of kids and we wouldn’t get everything we wanted.

Rational people faced with limited resources set realistic expectations. So why do Balboa Park planners keep inviting San Diegans to envision upgrades this cash-strapped city can’t afford? Why ask the public to sit through two years of presentations and workshops that will only raise false hopes? Why not revisit the original 1989 Balboa Park Master Plan to learn about valuable ideas that were never implemented?

These issues surfaced when the latest Balboa Park Master Plan Update kicked off at the September 3 meeting of the Balboa Park Committee. In a 45-minute presentation, San Diego Planning Director Heidi Von Blum and her team slow-walked the Balboa Park Club’s capacity audience through a 35-page slideshow.

People new to park planning might have been bewildered by the mash-up of abstractions: from “vision and guiding principles” to “conceptual framework” to “priorities and phases.” For those of us who have participated in Balboa Park presentations, studies, surveys, and workshops over decades of steady park decline, the slideshow resurrected ghosts of failures past.

‘It’s Not the Time to Panic; It’s the Time to Get Ready’

By Mona Charen / The Bulwark – Reader Supported News / September 4, 2026

THE SUPREME COURT GAVE US A START this week with what looked, at first glance, like a win for Donald Trump’s efforts to suppress mail-in ballots. But, as Andrew Egger explained, that isn’t quite what happened. In broad outline, the Court stayed a lower court injunction while the legality of Trump’s attempted interference will be decided later. It was a temporary procedural win for Trump, but not a permission slip.

Not yet, anyway. After the 2024 immunity ruling, you’d be ill advised to assume anything about this Court. Until three years ago, it was axiomatic that the president was not above the law. The Roberts Court undermined that key principle. And here too, it seems an open-and-shut case that the Constitution grants power over elections to Congress and the states, not to the executive branch. But we’ll see.

Still, the Court’s little summer fright is a good reminder that early voting will begin in some places in as little as four weeks, and while the polls and projections look good for Democrats, this is not an ordinary election year. Trump is weakened and flailing, yes, but he remains determined to prevent a free and fair election in November if he possibly can. And he does not lack for lackeys.

The Supreme Court touched on just one of his efforts to subvert the election: his executive order directing the Postal Service to work with states to determine whether voters requesting mail-in ballots were citizens.

There have been other below-the-radar efforts to subvert election security.

Muralist Sarah Steiberg to hold pop-ups in celebration of public art,September 20th–from Peninsula News of the PLA

From 10News – CNS / September

Homes in Ocean Beach and Loma Portal Eligible

The Federal Aviation Administration Tuesday, September 1, awarded the San Diego County Regional Airport Authority $15.3 million for its Quieter Home Program to provide sound insulation for around 400 homes in the airport’s flight path.

The funding comes from the FAA’s Airport Improvement Program centered on infrastructure projects.

“We are grateful to receive this funding for our Quieter Home Program,” said Atif Saeed, president and CEO of the San Diego County Regional Airport Authority. “We appreciate the unwavering support from Senators Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff, Congressman Scott Peters, and the entire San Diego congressional delegation. This funding will help us work with our neighboring communities and provide sound insulation treatment to reduce noise inside eligible homes located around the airport.”

By Tanja Kropf / Explore Clairemont / Sept. 2, 2026

Linda Vista has always been a scrappy neighborhood, fighting to avoid being overlooked, with fiercely loyal residents leading the charge to protect their home turf. One of Linda Vista’s earliest scrappy residents was a woman who fought the pending evictions of Linda Vista’s public housing residents and led the way for them to become proud homeowners instead.

[Please go to original for all the great links.]

A neighborhood of small homes and big dreams
Besides being a Linda Vista resident, Margaret Hottell was the editor and founder of the local newspaper, the Linda Vista Reflector. In 1952, she used it as the platform for her movement to keep her neighbors, who were military and defense workers, in the homes they’d lived in for a decade. The Defense Housing Act of 1951 had recently passed, allowing the enforcement of certain guidelines that were squeezing residents like the Hottells out of their homes.

Housing in Linda Vista was erected at a fever pace in the early 1940s. Despite the City of San Diego’s objections, the federal government pushed forward, building thousands of homes as World War II raged on. San Diego’s population had exploded 67% from 1939 to 1945, and military families and employees of local defense companies desperately needed homes. The federal government chose Linda Vista because the land was cheap, vacant, and easy to acquire. The Linda Vista Housing Project became the largest low-income defense housing project in the world.

September 7, 2026 at 7:30pm
Labor Day Classic Rock Concert
with ORGAN-ISM
at the Spreckels Organ Pavilion

About ORGAN-ISM
Rock out to some of your favorite songs with ORGAN-ISM,
the Organ Pavilion Rock Band!
Featuring songs by The Doors, Dire Straits, Tina Turner, Van Halen, and more!