Welcome to Broadway Heights.
Its welcome sign introduces you to the southeastern San Diego neighborhood in gleaming gold letters. It also implores you to drive safely.
That’s just the first sign of this community success story, a place that boasts one of the lowest crime rates in San Diego.
Well organized and 192 houses strong, Broadway Heights has worked to prevent its own children from being drawn to crime by engaging them in the community-building process.
Kiari Sanders keeps the welcome sign gleaming. Justin Young’s in charge of keeping his street, Tiffin Avenue, clean. Deanna Howard’s job: teach her computer-savvy peers the importance of proper penmanship.
Our writer Adrian Florido explores Broadway Heights’ story.
- The Fact Check Team has been busy: We look into claims that the Union-Tribune’s circulation has gone up, find another City Hall type got it wrong on the number of layoffs and post this week’s Fact Check TV, which also runs every Friday during NBC 7/39’s 6 p.m. newscast.
- Rich Toscano finds yet more evidence the local job market is improving. Last year, a survey of local businesses hinted at better employment conditions but it conflicted with data from regular survey of San Diegans. Toscano determined the survey of businesses and its positive results would carry over. Sure enough, check out the graphs now.
- The latest San Diego Explained video is ready. This week’s installment: Explaining why UCSD has so few black students, which became a central issue after the college’s recent racial tensions.
- The comments section has sparked a good conversation on our Sunday night story about efforts to allow the city’s downtown redevelopment agency, the Centre City Development Corp., to increase the cap on the amount of money it can collect and spend in its lifetime.
Elsewhere:
- Swimmers beware: A succession of storms has stripped San Diego beaches, creating the danger of rip currents and deep offshore holes. Lifeguards are warning of hazardous conditions up and down the coast this summer.
“The storms just tore our beaches apart,” one lifeguard tells the Union-Tribune. “It’s been a good 10 to 15 years since we’ve lost this much sand.”
- News organizations received access to search warrants in the John Albert Gardner III case yesterday. The North County Times focuses on the story of an 11-year-old Rancho Bernardo girl who told police Gardner stalked her the day before he killed Chelsea King.
The girl was walking home from Bernardo Heights Middle School when a man she identified as Gardner drove past her in a black car and parked. “An unidentified woman in a car behind Gardner’s thought something was suspicious, warned the girl and offered to follow her until she reached her nearby home,” the NCT reports. The man then turned around and left, according to the paper.
The Union-Tribune focuses on details that had Gardner drinking beer and smoking cigarettes on the trails around Lake Hodges the day he killed King.
- The NCT explains what documents you should bring with you if you go to Arizona now that the state has passed a new immigration law that requires police to check someone’s immigration status if they have “reasonable suspicion” that they are in the country illegally.
- A UCSD professor has found that depressed people are more likely to regularly eat chocolate bars. In fact, the researcher said she couldn’t rule out the popular treat as the actual cause of the glumness.
There is a contingent of chocolate aficionados in our office. We also have a few who don’t like it very much. Sounds like a perfect test case: We will now observe both groups intently and pass along our findings to UCSD.
We just need a regular supply of chocolate. And chocolate placebo.
— ANDREW DONOHUE