San Diego’s homeless population is getting short shrift from the federal government. In 2013 we noted that, despite having twice the number of homeless as other cities, San Diego inexplicably gets half the funding those cities receive. In the two years since we last highlighted the disparity, nothing has changed. “HUD officials said they are working on changing the way they distribute the money,” Kelly Bennett reported.
The ongoing snub hasn’t kept local homeless advocates down, though. A new “housing first” model has traction and is blowing new wind into the sails of organizations working on combating homelessness. “San Diego was one of 25 cities chosen across the country for a grant toward ending chronic and veteran homelessness,” Bennett wrote.
• One advocate for the homeless wrote in to the LA Times to highlight some of California’s laws that are targeted at harassing or citing the homeless for offenses like sleeping, sitting, or lying down.
Are Police Allowed To Do That?
A recent video that showed San Diego police barreling through the door of a local business and pummeling a man they mistook for a burglar raised a lot of eyebrows. Our Catherine Green wondered what the proper limitations of police response might be in similar situations, and posed some questions to a law professor. Like, does suspected gang affiliation excuse police aggression? Maybe, when it comes to handcuffing suspects for safety. “That’s a completely different thing from saying, ‘Well, this guy might be in a gang so I’ve got to punch him in the face once or twice,’” said Alex Kreit of Thomas Jefferson School of Law.
Chargers Get Real
The mayor’s task force trying to figure out a new plan for a football stadium heard from the Chargers’ Mark Fabiani Monday.
And Fabiani released, to the public, a bullet-point list of his remarks. It immediately caused a stir. Lobbyist Rachel Laing called it a “firebomb.”
They were principles that Fabiani said the task force should respect as they go about their work. Among them, Fabiani wrote, was that the group shouldn’t just come up with any plan just to have a plan. “It might be that — despite the great effort that has been expended — there is at least at this time no publicly acceptable solution to the stadium issue in San Diego,” his statement said.
Scott Lewis noted that the memo “reads like divorce papers” and was “an unprecedented framing from the team of how unlikely a deal is.” The LA Times’ Sam Farmer said it sounded like they’re ready to leave.
The U-T’s Tom Krasovic asked fans if they would still support the LA Chargers. But the paper’s editorial board referenced Lewis’ point and said they thought it was a more optimistic stance if a little mean to Mayor Kevin Faulconer.
• CityBeat spoke with Fabiani about the work done on this same issue in 2012, when the city paid someone to study the same stadium problem. Fabiani discussed the details of that effort and provided the public’s first look at a summary of the so-called Lazard report, a report which the city said never came to fruition. We had a lot of questions about that report back then, too.
• The U-T this weekend tried to suss out what role the county might play in the financing of a new stadium.
Give AirBnB A Chance
One North Park resident who rents out his home’s extra space on the website AirBnB wrote in to take issue with how users of the service were cast in a recent letter we published. “One resident made the case against short-term rentals, noting increased crime, noise, parking problems and trash,” John Anderson wrote. But his experience has been the opposite, he wrote, since the service requires his guests to be fully identified and rated, and to establish their reputation prior to booking his space. “Both parties have a vested interest in abiding by the rules,” he wrote.
• KPBS followed up on our coverage and noted that revenues related to the shared rental spaces increased dramatically. “The city saw an increase of almost 400 percent in taxes and fees from the same time period last year,” KPBS wrote.
News Nibbles
• San Diego’s newest City Council member is young, but he’s already amassed a lot of experience with city politics. (KPBS)
• Local and state leaders are all mulling separate tax increases to deal with ever-increasing funding gaps to maintain roads and infrastructure. (U-T)
• “California state prisoners are killed at a rate that is double the national average.” (NBC 7)
• A 14-foot tall robot is coming soon to the neighborhood of Logan Heights. (CityBeat)
• California has proposed to trim its gas tax by 21 percent. Diesel consumers aren’t so lucky; their tax is going up. (U-T)
• The west coast lockout of port dock workers includes the port workers at San Diego’s 10th Avenue Marine Terminal. (KPBS)
• Oops! Fox 5 San Diego apologized after they aired a story that depicted a picture of President Obama as a suspect in a local sex-assualt case. (Times of San Diego)
• Obama is also not the anti-christ, the Lexington Dispatch admitted this weekend.
Seth Hall is a local writer and technologist. You can email him at voice@s3th.com or follow him on Twitter: @loteck.