OB Rag

By Phillip Molnar / The San Diego Union-Tribune / November 7, 2024

San Diego has the fourth-highest percentage of renters in the nation as homeownership rates fall.

About 48% of households in San Diego metro are renters, said a new Redfin study, only behind San Jose metro (52%), the Los Angeles and Orange County metro area (51%) and New York (49%).

San Diego isn’t alone in seeing homeownership rates slow. The number of U.S. renter households grew 2.7% in the last three months, Redfin said, which was the biggest year-over-year gain since 2015. The number of renter households is growing three times faster than homeowner households.

From PhillyBurbs

John F. Hipp, Jr., “Jack” of Brattleboro VT, passed away October 23, 2024, peacefully, surrounded by his wife and family.

He was the much-loved husband of Lisa Hipp of Brattleboro and the son of John F. Hipp Sr., and the late Anna (Nancy) Hipp of Warminster PA. In addition to his wife and father, he leaves behind daughter Kathleen (Katie) Hipp and husband Dan of Buckingham PA, daughter Deirdre (Dee) Nichols and husband Matt of Brattleboro VT, daughter Michelle (Mickey) Hipp of Brattleboro VT and daughter Jacqueline (Jackie) Hipp and her partner Matt Sensor of Brookline VT.

Jack is survived by sister Theresa Hipp of Warminster, PA, brother Joseph Hipp of Perkasie PA, brother Robert Hipp of Perkasie PA and brother Paul Hipp of Santa Monica CA.

He also leaves six beautiful grandchildren, three nieces and a nephew.

Striking mental health care workers at Kaiser Permanente were back on the picket lines this week, beginning Monday, November 11 at one site in San Diego as well as others at multiple Southern California medical centers in a continuing dispute with management.

Union officials said workers would be picketing be at the San Diego location all week – Monday through Friday at San Diego Medical Center, located at 9455 Clairemont Mesa Blvd. Picket lines will begin at 8 a.m. and run through 2 p.m.

The union’s contract with Kaiser expired Sept. 30. No bargaining sessions are scheduled for this week.

According to the union, the key issues remain “Kaiser’s unwillingness to provide its nearly 2,400 mental health professionals in Southern California the same amount of time for critical patient care duties that can’t be done during appointments as their counterparts in Northern California — as well as the same wage levels and retirement benefits as comparable workers throughout the Kaiser system.”

Edited from MSN and Times of San Diego

Seven performers were inducted Friday, Nov. 8 into the San Diego Music Hall of Fame, and they includedsinger-songwriters, bluesmen and even an inventor.

“There is a long, rich history of wonderful music in our region.  We are focused on sharing this history and giving San Diegans a meaningful connection to this evolving tale,” said Jefferson Jay, the Hall’s founder — and OBcean.

The ceremony took place at Vision: A Center for Spiritual Living, 4780 Mission Gorge Place, near Navajo Canyon Open Space Park.

At the beginning of November, the City of San Diego gave notice of an application for a possible construction of a seawall and rip rap revetment at the very end of Bermuda Avenue in south Ocean Beach.

Applicant Bob Trenttin has applied for an emergency coastal development permit and other permits “for the abatement of a retreating coastal bluff landward of a failed existing seawall” which would be “the construction of a reinforced shotcrete coastal bluff seawall with drilled tieback anchors and a rip rap revetment consisting of two-to-four ton stones along the shelf below the proposed shotcrete wall.”

The notice also states, “The 0.10-acre site is located on City-owned public right-of-way at the western terminus of Bermuda Avenue, west of 4848 Bermuda ….”

by Joe Mathews / Times of San Diego  Zócalo / November 9, 2024

California, let’s go Coastal. Let’s put the California Coastal Commission in charge of the entire state.

Why? Because, in this land of weak governments and cowardly corporations, the Coastal Commission is the rare California institution with a spine.

Elon Musk’s new fight against the commission is merely the latest testament to its extraordinary effectiveness.

The California Coastal Commission was created not by politicians but by the people of California, via a 1972 ballot initiative.

Barrio Logan Mid-Rise Planned

A four-story, 73-unit housing complex at 1864 National Avenue has won approval from the Barrio Logan Community Planning Group despite neighborhood pushback. The project will replace an industrial warehouse and take more than three years to complete.

On September 18, the planning group voted to recommend the project 6-2 with one abstention. According to an inewssource report, community members expressed concerns that parking problems along the busy street will grow worse. Minutes of the meeting by a documenter reported:

One feature that raised many questions was that the complex will only offer 13 parking spots. These spots will be located in an alley on the side of the building on a first-come, first-serve basis.

There were no satisfactory answers given to the questions, to some in the audience.

Residents to Demand Answers Why There Was No Community Input and More on “Footnote 7”

Encanto and Emerald Hills residents will turn out in force tomorrow, November 12th, at San Diego City Hall to stop a high-density housing project and demand detailed information about how residential zones in Southeast San Diego were up zoned with no input from the community planning group or neighbors.

“We’re identified as an environmental justice-affected community,” said Encanto resident Rob Campbell. “And so we don’t see how paving over what green space we have will increase our air quality or will decrease the heat island effect that we suffer from.”

The residents are appealing a multi-unit project made possible by a still-mysterious footnote in the city’s planning code that reduced the minimum lot size from 20,000 square feet to 5,000 square feet.

On November 8th members of a raft of locals of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW) voted to ratify a new three-year contract with CVS Pharmacy.

The 8 locals — Locals 5, 135, 324, 648, 770, 1167, 1428 and 1442 — representing CVS pharmacists, clerks, and technicians  — reached the agreement after months of negotiations, a 3-day unlawful labor practices strike in Los Angeles and Orange counties, and active participation from thousands of California pharmacists, pharmacy clerks, and technicians.

By Geoff Page

As I thought about the Presidential election result this week, one thought dominated over everything. For the first time in my 73 years, I am ashamed to call myself an American.

I’m not naïve, I am familiar with the dark side of America’s history. We have a lot in our past to be ashamed of. Our founding on slavery and slaughter of the indigenous people was the start. As if that were not shame enough, that the effects of both still linger hundreds of years later is equally as shameful.

Racism, religious zealotry, misogyny, we have it all. Meddling in foreign governments, meddling that consisted of assassinations and wars.

But even with all of that, I always felt that what this country has accomplished was a counterweight to the shameful. I came of age in the 1960s that began with huddling under a puny elementary school desk for protection against an atomic bomb.

I lived in Arlington , Virginia, across the Potomac River from the nation’s capital. We lived about five miles from downtown D.C. Everyone knew that D.C. was a likely target in the event of a nuclear war.

I was in the 7th grade when John Kennedy was killed.

I was in high school in 1968 when Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed. I saw the devastation the riots left behind in D.C. Blocks of burned out and boarded up buildings that were once stores. Burned out hulks of cars.

Two short months later, Bobby Kennedy was killed. It began to feel like the world was falling apart, and it was.

by Ernie McCray

Mass deportation
is uppermost
in a mad man’s plan
on his first day back
to being president again
and my eyes dampen
as vivid recollections
flood my mind,
memories of an earlier time
in my lifetime.

1944.|
I was six years old.

Editordude: This Op-Ed by NY Times columnist Michelle Goldberg reprinted in the LA Times helped me to understand that I was truly grieving — in grief — about the death of democracy — and it helped me get through the weekend. I wanted to share it.

By Michelle Goldberg / The Spokesman Review – New York Times /Sat., Nov. 9, 2024 

When Donald Trump won the first time, I spoke to a journalist friend in Turkey to commiserate. I told her about all the protests that were planned, and she gently tried to prepare me for disappointment. She and her friends had protested Recep Tayyip Erdogan when he was prime minister, she said. But in time, the protests subsided, and life within a country of diminishing freedoms ground on. This conversation stayed in my mind throughout the Trump presidency as a warning against letting down our guard. When Trump was finally ejected from the White House, I felt patriotic pride in the endurance of the anti-Trump resistance, which had never for a moment accepted his grotesquerie as our new normal.

It won’t be that way this time.