San Diego leaders have turned to more punitive, short-term strategies in their search for homeless solutions, reports our Lisa Halverstadt.
Earlier this year, as street homelessness surged, the public demanded answers.
Mayor Todd Gloria and downtown Councilmember Stephen Whitburn pitched a camping ban they said would make it easier for police to push homeless people off the street. They appear to have been right.
Police have issued few tickets, based on the new ordinance, as Halverstadt reports. Concentrations of homeless encampments downtown, however, have seriously decreased. The new ordinance allows police to issue multiple warnings, as they push homeless residents to either move along or move into shelter.
It’s unclear exactly where unhoused people have gone.
Nearly 500 have been staying at safe sleeping sites recently opened by city officials.
Halverstadt also takes a look at so-called CARE courts, which aren’t solely designed for addressing homelessness, but have been pitched as one solution to severe mental illness on the street.
What We Learned This Year is a reporting series about some of the biggest stories of 2023. Read more here.
Sneak Peek: On Friday we will run the last story in the series (Hint, it’s about stadiums and scandals.) You can read all the stories in the series here.
The Top 10 VOSD Stories of 2023
2023 was a big year for the Voice of San Diego newsroom.
We chased storms, uncovered scandals at event venues, exposed disparities in education and pissed off a lot of lovers of Instagrammable bars. Voice intern Hannah Ramirez pulled together a list of the top 10 most read stories of 2023.
She spoke to each reporter about their stories and pulled together some predictions for 2024.
Check out the top 10 stories here.
Behind Voice: It’s Gonna Blow!
We spent the last week looking back at some of the stories we covered in 2023. Now, it’s time to look ahead. We’re rolling out a Voice reporting project on all things that we predict are going to be big in the new year. We’re calling it: It’s Gonna Blow.
If you’re a loyal VOSD Podcast fan, you’ve heard us talk about this concept before. But here’s a little explainer from our resident wordsmith, Jakob McWhinney.
The phrase “It’s Gonna Blow” comes from the name of a documentary about San Diego’s wild and wonderful music scene of the mid-1980s to mid-1990s. Many in the music industry then predicted that we’d be the next Seattle — that is to say, the next big hunting ground for landmark bands. (Keep an eye out for an upcoming podcast episode featuring the documentary’s director.)
That didn’t quite happen, as the documentary shows, so we’ve taken “It’s Gonna Blow,” to mean things that seem like they’re bound to happen but don’t. San Diego has a lot of examples of that. With this reporting project, however, we’re expanding it to not only include things that are perennially on the verge of happening but also things that seem almost certain to happen, whether they’re in the world of education, the environment or beyond.
Note: We don’t have a Morning Report tomorrow or Monday. We will be back in your inbox on Tuesday. Happy New Year!
In Other News
- Here’s what you missed at this year’s Holiday Bowl Parade. (Union-Tribune)
- Law enforcement officers found the bodies of a missing San Ysidro couple in a parked car at the Golden Acorn Casino on Tuesday. The couple’s children had reported them missing three days before Christmas, NBC 7 reports. Police are treating the case as an apparent murder-suicide.
- Local waves are in the 9 – 12 ft. range, with occasional bombs up to 15 ft. (Union-Tribune)
- Jaedon LeDee is having a standout year for the San Diego State men’s basketball team. Sportswriter Mark Zeigler profiled LeDee and his plans to “relax” for the holidays. (Union-Tribune)
The Morning Report was written by Will Huntsberry and Andrea Lopez-Villafaña.