We’re cookin’ with gas! At least for now.
This week on the VOSD Podcast, hosts Scott Lewis, Andrew Keatts and Andrea Lopez-Villafaña review how we got here — a time when pundits, local and national, are debating what gas stoves mean to us as a society and whether the fumes they spout are harmful to humans and the environment. (Because when has burning natural gas ever hurt anybody?)
To our hosts, this is another moment when San Diego’s policy has caught up with reality. Because we’ve been planning to phase out gas-burning appliances for a while, as Voice reporter MacKenzie Elmer wrote this week.
As the great gas stove debate crackles across the internet this week, Lewis, Keatts and Lopez-Villafaña reviewed San Diego’s approach to phase out gas stoves — and how the long-term plan to curb climate change and electrify the city emerged during the Faulconer administration. Further, the current debate echoes local initiatives in recent history, such as SANDAG’s proposed driving fee, which aim to progress the region but often get kneecapped or nixed altogether.
The Housing Aid Lottery Isn’t Worth It
Often when you see a new homelessness story, the numbers are all about population size — or how many folks are newly homeless compared to those who lost shelter for the first time.
But Voice’s Lisa Halverstadt reported this week on a different data point: paying rent.
Data from a countywide database that tracks people receiving homeless services revealed that many residents got into their new homes without financial aid. As Keatts discussed in this week’s podcast, and Halverstadt found in her reporting, the paths to secure housing subsidies or land legit affordable housing are so hard that most unhoused residents just do without.
Why not bring the activist behind San Diego’s Climate Action Plan, Nicole Capretz, on the pod and have her detail how targets were arrived at and how the plan will be implemented?