Month: July 2020

Editordude: Deborah Sharpe, Howard Greenstein and Jeff Harkness are all landscape architects who retired from the city of San Diego with over 80 years of combined public service. Here they draw a line in the sand against Mayor Faulconer’s “Complete Communities” Plan in this post from Voice of San Diego.

By Deborah Sharpe, Howard Greenstein and Jeff Harkness / Voice of San Diego / July 24, 2020

The San Diego mayor’s office and the Planning Department are engaged in a frenzied attempt to overhaul land use, parks and transportation planning and financing policies and regulations before Mayor Kevin Faulconer leaves office. The “Complete Communities” initiative is the all-encompassing title given to this major effort. This overhaul is probably the most significant citywide planning effort since Mayor Pete Wilson’s 1979 tiered growth management plan.

Some of Complete Communities’ goals are good, especially its emphasis on equity; some of it is perplexing. We’re particularly interested in the changes to parks standards.

Monday, the San Diego Union-Tribune ran a story by Pam Kragen about Ocean Beach’s greatest sidewalk chalk artist in memory. Erick Toussaint has turned sidewalks into masterpieces, copying great artists in Cranola chalk and using the concrete that we all walk or bike over as his canvas.

Back in April, to entertain his house-bound children, Erick began creating some chalk art on the sidewalk in front of their house. His kids grew quickly bored – but not his neighbors and not other OBceans who have seen his work. Toussaint told the U-T:

“Whether people are artistic or not, I live in a community that appreciates it. My neighborhood is really chill and supportive.”

When the pandemic hit, Toussaint, was and still is the design director for the San Diego Natural History Museum, which has been closed to the public for most of the past months since mid-March. Creating masterpieces has been a way for him to keep his art skills fresh during the pandemic.

By Jim Miller

The pandemic belongs to Swole Daddy. In case you missed it, Swole Daddy is the mascot of the NC Dinos of the Korean Baseball Organization (KBO). He is, as his name aptly signals, the super buff cartoonish dinosaur who joins the cheerleaders on top of the dugout in the empty ballpark during games. Actually, his name is Sseri, but “Swole Daddy” took off on social media and it stuck.

“We love you, Sexy Dino,” the meme exclaims. Yes, a jacked dinosaur wearing a necklace is as good as it gets this year, really.

As FiveThirtyEight recently noted, statistically speaking, the NC Dinos may just be the best KBO team to ever take the field at this point in the season. That’s the kind of thing you learn if you take a few moments off from obsessively checking the daily polling and political punditry on the site and scroll over to their sports analysis. Here is where sports and politics meet: in the strange alchemy of the daily numbers. They create their own reality as they seek to document it. The tool of measurement grants an aura to that which can be quantified and reified.

From SanDiegoVille.Com

A video is making waves on social media that appears to show a woman macing a man at Dusty Rhodes Park in San Diego’s Ocean Beach. Allegedly, the woman approached a young couple who was enjoying lunch with their puppy and harassed them for not wearing facial coverings before macing both them and their food.
“So this happened today at dusty rhodes dog park today in ocean beach,” wrote Ash Sherilynn O’Brien on her Facebook page.

“This is my husband getting maced by a random old lady. We had our 3 month old pug with us. We were just sitting down eating lunch and minding our own business. We were not wearing masks because we were eating. You can’t wear a mask and eat at the same time. She kept calling us idiots and flipping me off. Then she started saying more stuff and I told her to leave the park and stop harassing us. She then came right up to our table wear we were eating, pointed the mace at me first and got a little on me, and then my husband stepped in and took the entire can.”

The United States on Thursday, July 23, 2020 passed the grim milestone of 4 million confirmed coronavirus infections.

The rapid spread of the virus this summer is striking, taking just 15 days to go from 3 million confirmed COVID-19 cases to 4 million. By comparison, the increase from 1 million cases to 2 million spanned 45 days from April 28 to June 11, and the leap to 3 million then took 27 days.

Nearly every public health metric suggests America is losing the fight against the virus.

• Positivity rates have reached alarming levels in numerous states,
• hospitalizations are soaring, and
• more than 1,100 new coronavirus deaths were reported across the United States on Wednesday, July 22, marking the first time since May 29 that the daily count exceeded that number.
• The rolling seven day average of Infections has doubled in less than a month, reaching more than 66,000 new cases per day Wednesday. The U.S. death toll now exceeds 141,000.

By Geoff Page

It would not be a stretch to say that our District 2 city council member Dr. Jennifer Campbell would have preferred to be almost anywhere other than where she was Wednesday evening. She was sitting in front of a computer having a meeting arranged by the Ocean Beach Town Council in front of the council and audience members, on-line.

These Obceans all did Ocean Beach proud. They asked tough questions and refused to let Campbell slide away with political answers. It was not an easy hour-long session and when Campbell signed off at the end, she was clearly irritated.

Campbell came into the meeting smiling and happy and the reaction seemed to surprise her. It was like the almost confused, angry disappointment you see when someone thinks they are being benevolent and, instead of love and respect, they are scorned and do not understand why.

The San Diego City Council Tuesday, July 22, unanimously approved an amendment to the land development code allowing moveable “tiny houses” to be permitted in the city as companion or junior units.

The amendment will allow the city and its residents to increase housing supply in space already zoned for residential use, said Councilman Scott Sherman.

“Moveable tiny homes are a great option that naturally increases affordable housing at no cost to taxpayers. It’s a win for the homeowner, it’s a win for the renter, and it’s a win for the taxpayer,” Sherman said. “I appreciate my colleagues’ support for this important housing reform. We must continue pushing for common-sense solutions that result in naturally occurring affordable housing.”

By Howard Wayne / Times of San Diego / July 19, 2020

San Diego’s Planning Department, which works for the mayor, is going under the radar to rush through a dangerous land use change. Hiding under the innocuous name “Complete Communities Housing Solutions Initiative,” the scheme would radically and surreptitiously rezone large swaths of San Diego with minimal public participation and potentially reduce affordable housing opportunities in the City.

The premise of Complete Communities is that San Diego needs more housing. But what we really need is more affordable housing. Builders are generating lots of market-rate houses, but young people, first responders, teachers, and especially essential workers are being left behind.

By Richard Riehl

San Diego County’s Health and Human Services Agency issues daily reports on the number of Coronavirus cases in each city. Here are the counts for North County, as of July 21, indicating the rate of cases per 100,000 residents.

• Carlsbad: 349
• Encinitas: 374
• Oceanside: 448
• San Marcos: 513
• Vista: 595
• Escondido: 645

I searched North County city websites, looking for clues to explain the differences in cities in the rate of infection. Would it be caused by the quality of city leadership, the demographics of the city residents, or both?

By Colleen O’Connor

What a day yesterday. Earthquakes everywhere.

No, not the 7.8 quake in Alaska. That is in the range of “normal.”

Not the confrontation between Florida Rep., Ted Yoho and New York Rep., Alexandra Ocasio Cortez. There, on the Capitol steps, the GOP congressman called AOC “disgusting,” “out of her freaking mind,” and a “f***ing b**tch.”

That, too, seems to be the new “normal.”

Yoho, in typical Trumpian fashion denied it happened, fudged some empty words, “apologized” on the House floor, where he accepted no responsibility, and instead defended his “passion,” and lassoed his wife and daughters into the mix.

All of which prompted AOC to righteously refuse to accept the non-apology apology. Trump’s promise to send more masked, unidentified, camouflaged troops into cities beyond Portland, into Oakland and Chicago doesn’t rank as an earthquake.

On Tuesday, July 21, the San Diego City Council, by a vote of 7 to 2, approved Jen Campbell’s proposal that would demolish the 30 foot height limit in the Midway area for the November ballot. Councilman Chris Cate also sponsored the initiative. Councilwoman Barbara Bry – who is of course running for mayor – and President of the Council, Georgette Gomez – who is running for Congress – both voted against the measure.

Campbell’s office yesterday released a press statement (posted in full, below) praising the move, in which Campbell called it “democracy in action.” Critics of the plan have called it just the opposite, as Campbell and Cate pushed the measure through Council during the pandemic with little or no public input.

by Ernie McCray

There are a lot of folks who are complaining about black athletes drawing attention to Black Lives Matter, saying “Politics and sports don’t mix.”

Have to say that’s news to me since, in our country’s history, particularly, if black athletes didn’t confront the racism inherent in our society and in our politics, there would have been very little notice of a people’s struggle to achieve equality.

I think back to July 4, 1910. On that day Jack Johnson, an African American, entered the ring in Reno, Nevada to face Jim Jeffries, the “Heavyweight champion of the world,” in the “Fight of the Century.”

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