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?
First, it means delivering the basic services that people have a right to expect from their local government. I’ve spent my career managing government budgets and securing grant funding, and I know fiscal discipline and quality services go hand in hand. Repairing core infrastructure on time, every time, including streetlights, roads, crosswalks, and sidewalks, is a basic city service.
And to pay for that, we must start with the money City Hall is already leaving on the table. Other cities are negotiating steep discounts on shared vendor contracts that San Diego isn’t,
which is why I will order a full audit of City contracts to ensure fair pricing, not cuts.
It also means reviewing our full lease portfolio and holding tenants to fair terms. Roughly a quarter of City leases sit in expired holdover status, likely well below market value, including golf course leases signed decades ago that haven’t been meaningfully renegotiated since, locking in below-market rents for operators for years to come. And it means directing City departments to compete more aggressively for the federal and state grants for roads, parks, public safety, freeing up real money for essential infrastructure and municipal services.
The solution is not to contract out our city services to the same corporations and consultants that have created a pay-to-play system at City Hall: it’s to recover the revenue we’re already owed and reinvest it in the communities that provide them.
Fixing things also means reining in the nearly 6000 short-term vacation rentals across our city that drive up housing prices and sit empty for nearly half of the year. When we allow entire
homes to become hotels full-time, we price out families and force our teachers, nurses, and firefighters into long commutes far away from the communities they serve.
We have already seen the consequences: the loss of permanent residents in neighborhoods saturated by short-term vacation rentals has been tied to declining school enrollment and even school closures. These rentals also overburden our first responders, costing taxpayers and increasing emergency response times. We need common-sense reforms to improve the lives of long-time residents, such as extending the City’s current two-night minimum stay to match the standards set by other cities across the country. These policies will encourage owners to convert these entire-home rentals back into long-term housing that local residents can afford, keeping homes in San Diego available for San Diegans.
City Hall must also make sure our city’s land is being used in ways that make sense to improve our quality of life.
My neighbors in Clairemont have constantly raised concerns about the noise and air pollution from the 450 acre Montgomery-Gibbs Airport that seeps into the surrounding neighborhoods. For years, planes from the airstrip have caused hazardous lead exposure for San Diegans, something that the City has hardly acknowledged after years of community outrage. The risk of accidents directly endangers our neighborhoods. The Federal Aviation Administration has even named the airstrip a “hot spot” for potential incidents and warned about the risk of collisions. Two people died in a plane crash just this week. Another plane crashed on the way to the airport last year in Murphy Canyon, killing 6 people and displacing families in the middle of the night. Either we decide that these risks to our homes, health, and children in the heart of San Diego are somehow tolerable, or we listen to our neighbors and use the land to serve local residents.
Every night when I tuck my daughter into bed, I think about the future that I want to see for her. I want my daughter to grow up in a city where our communities are thriving, our streets are safe, and nobody who works full-time is forced to live in poverty. I’m running for city council because San Diego families deserve someone who will stand up for them at City Hall, demand accountability, and make sure our city is working for the people who live here — not the special interests with the biggest checkbooks.
If you believe in fighting back, I hope to earn your vote this November. Please join our people-powered campaign, because it takes a good neighbor to stand up for our neighborhoods.
Two people died in a plane crash at Montgomery just on Monday.