OB Rag

By Natalie Raschke / Op-Ed SD Union-Tribune /Dec. 13, 2023

There’s no place like home for the holidays. This is especially true for families like mine, who’ve experienced homelessness. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, both my husband and I could no longer work as bartenders and, with many restaurants closing their doors, job opportunities in our industry were scarce. At first, we lived off our savings and unemployment, but after a while we were unable to afford the rent in our two-bedroom apartment in Ocean Beach where we lived with our four children. To cut costs, we moved into an RV for 24 months, then spent another six months living in a van.

By Sara Blanche Hayes
Jennie Gray Connard is a passionate and fierce woman. She’s a wife, a mother, a new grandmother, a business owner, a director, a choreographer. She’s a certified powerhouse in the San Diego community theater scene. And, after seven incredible years of running The OB Theater Company, she and her husband Bill have no choice but to shut down for good.

“The thing I loved and will miss the most was Bill and I sitting together in the back of the theater on opening night, after tech week and feeling that beautiful, intense, loving energy spilling out from all of those wonderful people.”

Here’s San Diego Magazine’s Neighborhood Guide to Ocean Beach – “Where to shop, eat, and play in the bohemian beach town,” (unedited) by Lili Kim.

Ocean Beach is the quintessential laid-back, free-spirited California beach town. While much of its retro culture has persisted through the decades, OB has also welcomed many modern restaurants, bars, and shops, attracting a new generation of food lovers and sandy surfers.

Here’s where to chow down, hang out, and gear up next time you’re wandering Newport Avenue and its nearby streets.

Fox5 reports that a 14-year-old boy was sent to the hospital Tuesday with a fractured pelvis due to a collision at Ebers and Point Loma Avenue while the other driver, a 47-year-old man, was arrested for felony DUI.

The unidentified teenager was riding a Talaria electric off-road dirt bike northbound on Ebers Street while the adult male was driving a Land Rover LR3 southbound on the 1400 block of Ebers Street. This was around 7:53 p.m.

In the end at Tuesday’s City Council hearing on Mayor Gloria’s Housing Package, it was 7 to 1 “yay” to one “nay”. The long, contentious debate over the controversies of the plan that’s lasted weeks if not months came to a conclusion – the last time the council voted on the package, it was 5 to 3 against – but with one “hold-out” this time around – who had her own reasons for denying Gloria a full, unanimous endorsement.

The most important controversy being Gloria’s proposal to allow affordable housing developers to build the units “off-site” — that is not on the property where all the other units are being built, units allowed under the city’s current law. And that was the controversy the last time this package appeared, only to be closely voted down. The Rag called it a “give-away to developers.”

What’s happened in the interim is

New life has been breathed into plans for a multi-pool aquatic complex at Liberty Station’s NTC Park. The plans have been around for years but after multiple delays, funding and interest dried up.

But now after the city of San Diego has completed a feasibility study, the project is experiencing the most momentum it has had in years, says Stephen Rodi, chairman of the Peninsula Aquatic Complex Council and president of Point Loma High School’s aquatic boosters program, as quoted recently by Pt Loma-OB Monthly.

Details of the feasibility study are expected after the holiday season, Rodi said.

The lead residential activist organization, Neighbors For A Better San Diego, is requesting that the San Diego City Council delay any discussion about — or vote on — the proposed amendments to the city’s “Complete Communities Housing Solutions”.

It’s their position that the Council must not act on these proposals until the Planning Department presents it with a thorough analysis of the impact of its proposed modifications.

The following email was sent by Geoffrey Hueter, chair of the group, to San Diego City Council Members on Monday, Dec. 11:

From Campaign website:

Who is Geneviéve Jones-Wright?

Geneviéve is a native San Diegan born and raised by her single mother Mae, who retired from UCSD Hospital after working 25 years as a custodian, instilling in her the importance of community service, commitment to family, faith, and helping others to succeed.

While in the fourth grade, Jones-Wright decided to pursue the law after she was inspired by the achievements of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. Geneviéve graduated from San Diego’s Patrick Henry High School, received a bachelor’s degree from the University of San Francisco, her law degree from Howard University School of Law, and her Master of Laws from California Western School of Law in San Diego.

by Ernie McCray 

I’m remembering
walking up a stairway
in Amsterdam
through narrow doorways
looking into nooks and crannies
in Anne Frank’s hiding place,
an annex attached to a home
where she chronicled
in a diary
that stands as a gift to humanity,
the trials and tribulations
of her people,
Jews,

Here is a chart of the King Tides for December 2023, with tidal predictions from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography reporting station at the Scripps Pier in La Jolla:

By Mat Wahlstrom

On Tuesday, December 12, the City Council will be pressured to approve the same “Housing Action Plan 2.0” amendments to the “Complete Communities Housing Solutions,” without changes, that the council rejected less than a month ago amid community uproar, due in part to lack of any data presented to demonstrate what it has accomplished so far.

And all for no better reason than that our current “strong-arm mayor” form of government enables authoritarian refusal to take “no” for answers rendered in democratic process.

This is reason enough for the council to reject them, and I encourage you to tell councilmembers that. (It’s Item #335 on the agenda.)

But in case you want to know more: