OB Rag

Tomorrow — Friday, August 23 — is the deadline for the OB Rag’s “Worst ADU in San Diego” contest. If you haven’t yet sent in the address of a local ADU eyesore, time’s running out.

This contest set out to convey how the modest “granny flat” concept has spawned grotesquely large buildings on small lots. Along the way, it opened a heated debate about the social and ethical aspects of building massive ADUs:

By Bruce Coughran and Eric Duvall / Pt Loma-OB Monthly / August 21, 2024

Have you ever thought to yourself, “Gee, I wonder whatever happened to the old Point Loma House hotel”?  No? Never even heard of it, you say?

How about those enormous and fantastic colored glass domes that used to sit on the very top of the ridge that we call Point Loma? Talk about a landmark! Those domes were spectacular, sparkling in the sun by day and illuminated at night.

They say that between the turn of the last century and the Second World War, any mariner approaching Point Loma from the Pacific would see those domes long before they would see the new (1891) Point Loma Light.  The domes were even indicated on all the navigational charts of the period.

By Tom York / Times of San Diego / August 22, 2024

There’s been lots of news about outside investors roiling the market for single-family homes in San Diego, snapping up an ever larger portion of properties that come to market. The trend especially focuses on two New York City private equity firms, Blackstone and BlackRock.

Well, now we have added evidence about private investor activity.

According to residential real estate web portal Refdin, investors were quite active in San Diego’s residential housing market this past spring.

Less than a half hour after Point Loma High let out for the day on Wednesday, August 21, gunshots rang out on Zola Street — about a block from the school. Two people were killed, a mother wounded and her son was arrested as the suspected shooter.

When police arrived, they found the wounded mother, who is in her 80s, in the front yard of her residence. She was taken to a hospital with “very serious” injuries.

Her 60-year old son was also in the yard and was arrested without incident.

Roll-up For Cannabis Equity

By Terrie Best

The year was 2010. For medical cannabis patients in California it was a time of raids, confusion and painful interruptions to cannabis access. Activists were very organized and engaged in fighting for patients in courts; showing up to raids and badgering San Diego district attorney Bonnie Dumanis to clarify the laws meant to protect sick and dying patients.  Dumanis would not stop her raids, she led a fierce fight and victimization against us. But she and other anti-cannabis DAs in California inadvertently mobilized an oppositional force that has political implications to this day.

Meanwhile in 2010 Los Angeles, Steve Cooley, their district attorney, was a complete disaster too. He had raided medical collectives and added support for implementing proposition 8 (anti equality) to his arsenal of hate. If you care to look up any of his “tough on crime” rhetoric in the form of his braying press conferences, they are likely still on the internet. BTW, where is Cooley now? Not on stage with the winners this week.

Then there was Kamala Harris, district attorney in San Francisco who came out early for marriage equality. She wasn’t horrible on cannabis and was tagged as a liberal during a time when Democratic DAs were being pulled to the right by the harmful drug war nonsense that almost broke us.

By Geoff Page

On Monday, August 19, Channel 5 Fox News did a story on, well, signs. A person might wonder why a news station would do a story about signs. Fox was not motivated by a tip about a fascinating, untold sign story. Fox was showing how this city’s administration works by doing the city’s bidding.

The story was about new signs the city posted on the pier. A little background first.

The Rag carried a piece on these signs July 31.

In that story, this writer related telling the lifeguards about the missing sign on the pier, warning surfers to stay 75 feet away from the pier, that had been there for decades. Not trusting the lackluster reaction from the local lifeguards, the following email was sent a week later, on August 8, to the lifeguard management.

by Ernie McCray

I’ll forever remember
Snoop Dogg
at the Olympics
in Paris,
images of him
that range
from being quietly playful
and downright hilarious,
at all times gregarious,
embracing the spirit of the games
as though it was the dawning of the
Age of Aquarius,
carrying the Olympic flame
like many a blunt
he’s set aflame;

The Callen Report

By Kate Callen

You may see Ocean Beach as a beloved coastal village with a timeless Main Street and a storied history.

Shawn DiMartile and Mike Tighe see it differently. To them, OB is a cash machine. And they intend to pull as much money out of it as possible.

OB has dealt with aggressive builders before. But the battle over the 4705 Point Loma Avenue project, which goes before the San Diego Planning Commission next Thursday, August 29, is particularly insidious because it has been fueled by Todd Gloria’s grab-it-and-sell-it land use policies.

DiMartile and Tighe are the founders of Takeoff Capital, the real estate investment firm behind the project. In a one-hour investor webinar available on Vimeo, they sang the praises of Gloria’s “Complete Communities” program, and they commodified the many charms of life in OB.

“The Point” will be a 3-story, 20-unit complex.

Earlier this week, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow issued a warning to America that those Republicans on election boards across the country could refuse to certify the 2024 election results if Trump loses in November.

In an op-ed in the New York Times (behind paywall) Maddow wrote:

“Election boards across the country now include Republican officials who have not only propounded Mr. Trump’s lies about the last presidential election being ‘stolen,’ they have tested how far they can go in denying the certification of the vote.”

The spread of what Maddow called “refusenik Republicans” started back in 2020, she argued, when Trump and RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel pressured two election officials to certify vote totals in a key Michigan county. As The Hill stated in a recent article about this:

Since then, a number of election officials across at least eight states have been charged for alleged efforts to interfere with the certification of the 2020 election and 2022 midterm results, Maddow noted.

The Project Review Committee of the OB Planning Board meets Tuesday night, August 20, at the OB Rec Center at 6pm. It has two projects up for review. They will be meeting again in the Activity room at the end of the hallway on the left.

The sub-committee of the full board does a first review of a project and then usually makes a recommendation to the board

Bunt Residence, 4711 Del Monte Ave.

This is a Process 2 review of a permit to construct a 2-story dwelling unit over a subterranean garage and construct a 2-story “companion unit”.

by Shi Bradley/ Times of San Diego / August 20, 2024

The OB Rag is holding a contest and inviting submissions from the public to identify the “Worst ADU” in San Diego county [ Ed: actually just the City of San Diego]

Until Friday, Aug. 23, The OB Rag is looking for the worst accessory dwelling units (ADU) in the city. Winners will receive gift cards to a variety of local restaurants.

The contest is an effort to raise public awareness about the real-world impacts of what critics call predatory construction of ADUs, including the construction of multi-story apartments and large-scale home projects crammed into tiny areas of a neighborhood.