OB Rag

by Michael J. Stepner and Mary Lydon / Times of San Diego / Feb. 4, 2026

For decades Paris, Barcelona and Brooklyn have been held up as models for humanely scaled, mid-rise housing neighborhoods.

This density is created by four-to-six story residential buildings. These communities have high rises and retail woven throughout, with pleasant walkable, tree-lined streets.

Here in San Diego, the award winning, 230-acre Civita urban village in Mission Valley stands in as our local model.

Mid-rise housing is part of Mayor Todd Gloria’s “Neighborhood Homes for All of Us” initiative. This type of housing is both necessary and appropriate — but it must be in the right location and provide the type of housing that affordable to those who need it.

The city’s 1979 General Plan stated in its urban design section that “the quality of the community is of overriding importance to the individual, since the most basic human needs must be satisfied close to home.” This is as true today as then.

Currently there is a lot of mid-rise housing being built. It is being built along commercial corridors and in the older neighborhoods.

By Shane Harris / Times of San Diego / Feb. 5, 2026

I live near Balboa Park, and I want to be clear about something from the start: my opposition to paid parking has nothing to do with convenience — mine or anyone else’s. This isn’t about saving a few dollars at a meter for me.

It’s about who gets pushed out when we turn one of the last truly public spaces in San Diego into a revenue stream. It’s about foster youth on group trips, families stretching every dollar, seniors on fixed incomes, volunteers who give thousands of hours to the museums, and working people whose livelihoods depend on foot traffic in the park.

Balboa Park was never meant to be City Hall’s cash register. For more than a century, it has served as San Diego’s shared civic commons — a place intentionally gifted to the people with the understanding that access would be open, equitable and free. That promise is now under threat, not because the park failed, but because the city chose to use it as a shortcut to address a budget problem it created for itself.

On Feb. 9, the City Council will once again take up the issue of parking fees in Balboa Park.

By Sue Taylor

Dear San Diego City Council Members:

I was born in the City of San Diego and graduated from Point Loma High School. I worked for the City of San Diego for 41 years, and I am also a volunteer with the San Diego Police Department. I now live just outside the City limits, about two and a half miles from Council District 9.

I want to directly challenge the claim that only City residents “pay for” Balboa Park. That claim may be convenient, but it is not how the City’s finances actually work.

Yes, only City residents pay property tax to the City. But what is consistently left out of this discussion is that most of any property tax bill does not go to the City at all. It goes to schools and the county. For a typical City household, only a few hundred dollars a year from their property tax actually ends up in the City’s General Fund. At the same time, a very large share of the City’s General Fund comes from sales tax and the hotel tax. Those taxes are paid heavily by non-City residents and by visitors.

OB Rag Staff Report

This follow-up to our December 2 “D2 Candidates: Follow the Money” report has the latest figures from Campaign Disclosure Reports (Series 400). Our continued review of these public records fulfills the Rag’s promise to “scrutinize the candidates in the 2026 primary: who they are, what they’ve done, what they say, and most importantly, where their money comes from.”

District 2 includes Ocean Beach, Mission Beach, Pt. Loma, the Midway, and Clairemont.  Councilmember Jen Campbell is “termed out,” so the district will have a new Councilmember next year.

Josh Coyne

Coyne is in first place in D2 fundraising totals with $93,002. That money includes a $30,000 loan he made to his campaign. According to the Voters’ Voice Initiatives, Coyne raised 6 times more money from outside D2 than from inside. Many of his contributors are business leaders and lobbyists. They include:

By Frank Gormlie

Ever since armed ICE agents shot and killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis within a two week period this year, the mood of much of the country has turned against ICE and its enabler Donald Trump. Both Good and Pretti were acting objectively in protest of the masked, deadly agents terrorizing neighborhoods in the Twin Cities area.

Yet, this tragedy is not the first time armed agents shot and killed protesters in America. In early May of 1970, in the midst of college students nation-wide demonstrating against President Richard Nixon’s expansion of the Vietnam war with his invasion of Cambodia, National Guard troops fired into crowds of unarmed students at Kent State University in Ohio, killing four — two were not even demonstrating; one was a ROTC cadet and another was on her way to class.

The uproar that followed these senseless killings swept across the country like a tsunami and created a debilitating crisis for the establishment, Nixon’s administration and America’s higher education system. I know. I spent five years studying what happened that May on over 700 college campuses, and wrote a book about it in 2024 — The May 1970 Rebellion.

The former Rite Aid property in Ocean Beach has been sold for a cool $12.6 Millions. The 1.66 acre site at 4840 Niagara Avenue has been a tempting plum to pluck for months since Rite Aid closed and now it has happened. The retail building — which used to be a Mayfair market before Rite Aid — is 20,155-square-feet.

One of the largest  commercial real estate and investment firms in the country — if not the world — CBRE — facilitated the sale, with agents from CBRE (Chase Bank Real Estate) representing both the seller and the buyer in the transaction.

At this moment, we don’t know who the buyer is, but we do have a call into the CBRE media agent listed in the recent announcement dated Jan. 28, 2026.

A senior vice-president of CBRE, Reg Kobzi, was quoted in the announcement:

“This transaction underscores the enduring appeal and scarcity of well-located, parking-rich retail assets in San Diego’s coastal communities. Big-box retail opportunities like this former Rite Aid with on-site parking in Ocean Beach are extremely rare, reflecting strong investor confidence in the area’s fundamentals and tenant demand.”

By Kate Callen / February 4, 2026

A constant reminder of our city’s slow collapse sits in the side yard of my house. It is a beat-up black trash bin, and it isn’t going anywhere.

Weeks ago, without notice, crews swept through my neighborhood to haul away the old black bins. Residents like me who didn’t have them at the curb missed the boat.

Trash collectors told me the bin would be picked up the following week. That didn’t happen. And it didn’t happen the week after that.

When you drive around your community, you might see these stray bins lurking about. Some people leave them at the curb like a defiant middle finger. I belong to the group that hides them. I don’t want my neighbors thinking, “Does she really believe the city will pick that up?”

The funny thing is that my bin had been sidelined for more than a year. Remember how the original bins cracked over time? And people would press duct tape over the cracks?

Dozens of demonstrators gathered in front of the Rady Shell, Monday, Feb. 2, protesting the high electrical rates of San Diego Gas and Electric. It was held outside of DTECH, an annual meeting that bills itself as the largest gathering of utility professionals in the country.

One of the speakers at the meeting’s keynote session at the Rady Shell was none other than SDG&E President Scott Crider.

The protesters, from a number of environmental and community groups, pressed the utility of its high rates, a sore spot among San Diegans who have made their complaints louder lately. A big reason — SDG&E’s plan to increase rates again, which could make San Diego one of, if not the most, expensive cities when it comes to utility rates.

The U-T reported:

According to the California Legislative Analyst’s Office, average rates for SDG&E, Pacific Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison increased between 48% and 67% from 2019 through 2023. A blog post in 2023 by the Haas Energy Institute at UC Berkeley reported SDG&E had the highest electricity rate in California. …

by Niko Padilla / The Daily Aztec /  January 29, 2026

Along Newport Avenue in Ocean Beach lies The Harp, where you can often hear live music before you even see the bar, as the sounds of funk, rock and reggae music fill the street with life.

As the OB Farmers’ Market takes place over the street on Wednesday nights, you can often see a crowd gathered at the window, listening to the music, as customers, friends, family and sports fans have a drink and play a game of pool inside. These nights offer special opportunities for connection. They are more than just people coming together for a drink, but a unity between the music and the listener.

The Harp is owned by Miles Doughty, lead singer of Slightly Stoopid, Jeremy Diem, CEO of Hodad’s and long-time friends Tyson Green and Steve Ashton, who are familiar faces behind the bars in Ocean Beach. The four friends have taken over the legacy of this longtime local spot for just over a year, as they continue to improve upon what it once was.

“What we’re cooking up over here is something to be enjoyed for years to come,” said co-owner Green. “A quality music venue that people can come, hang out with their homies, and enjoy some intimate music.”

Amid all the crap that we as Americans are having to deal with coming out of the Trump administration, there is good news.

Local communities across the country along with some state and local officials are resisting attempts by President Donald Trump to house thousands of detained immigrants in their areas in converted warehouses, privately run facilities and county jails. These are immigrant prisons.

In red states, red counties and red towns and  cities, people are pushing back so hard that ICE officials are having troubles finding locations for their detention centers. In Texas, in Oklahoma, in Utah, in New Mexico, in Virginia, proposed ICE facilities are running into brick walls by grassroots resistance.

Why is this happening? MSNOW reports:

Federal officials have been scouting cities and counties across the U.S. for places to hold immigrants as they roll out a massive $45 billion expansion of detention facilities financed by Trump’s recent tax-cutting law.

The fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti during immigration enforcement actions in Minnesota have amplified an already intense spotlight on U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, increasing scrutiny of its plans for new detention sites.

For instance, officials in Social Circle, Georgia, El Paso, Texas, and Roxbury Township, New Jersey, all have raised concerns about their locales being used and they all cite a lack of water and sewer capacity to transform warehouses into detention sites.

The American citizenry have to withstand a daily barrage of stupid, crazy and frightening declarations that emanate out of the White House — but none are more scary than a recent statement by Trump on a conservative podcast Sunday, Feb. 1, when he said Republicans should “nationalize” American elections.

“We should take over the voting, the voting in at least many, 15 places.The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”

Trump was on the podcast of former FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino.

In a MS NOW report of the broadcast from earlier today, writer Steve Benen wrote:

Partway through the interview, Bongino briefly referred to crime rates, to which Trump responded with a meandering rant across a variety of unrelated subjects, including his bizarre beliefs about election administration.