Trust Between Southeastern San Diego Flood Survivors and Local Government Is Dead

This post has been updated.

On Wednesday, I sat under a carport in Shelltown with several flood survivors. A few weeks earlier, four generations of family members escaped through the window of the house; they huddled together on top of that exact carport. But at this moment, I was reading them the second sentence of an email Mayor Todd Gloria sent out this week.

“My team and I have been on the ground in the impacted communities since day one,” I read out loud.

There was a brief pause. Then they all burst into laughter.

The idea that local leaders have been there, that they have been leading recovery efforts, that they even care is so opposite to these people’s experience that Gloria’s statement hit them like a wave of the absurd.

“Maybe for a photo op!”

“Not on my street!”

“I haven’t seen him!”

The flood waters have receded, but in these southeastern San Diego neighborhoods a crisis of trust is now ripping through the streets. From block to block the narrative is the same: City officials knew for years the flood canals were clogged and did nothing to clean them. After the floods, city leaders didn’t jump into action to provide relief; it was neighbors and homegrown nonprofits.

The residents of these historically Black and Latino neighborhoods can draw but two conclusions. At best, city leaders don’t care if they are forced from their homes. At worst, city leaders want them gone.

“We’ve been hearing that a lot. There are a lot of folks who believe there is some intentionality behind all of this,” Justin Lipford, community engagement director of the YMCA of San Diego County, told me.

In other words, city leaders purposefully allowed Shelltown, Southcrest and Mountain View to flood, so that other people could take the land.

City officials, of course, have offered many explanations for why they never cleaned Chollas Creek. The amount of money for stormwater improvement is dangerously low. Certain environmental regulations were hard to get around. They have also said the amount of rain was so severe that cleaning the canals would not have stopped the floods. But none of this has resonated with the flood survivors. Would so many calls for a channel to be cleaned have gone unanswered in La Jolla they wonder?

Now, they are all forced to watch as the fabric of their community is torn apart.

Jessica Calix adored her neighbors in Southcrest. She rented a two-bedroom for $1,650 per month — unheard of in today’s rental market. Now, she’s stuck in a motel, searching for a new place. She can barely find a studio apartment in the same price range.

That’s bad for her and other renters, Calix said. But it’s good for landlords.

“Landlords will clean their places up and rent them for an extra thousand dollars or more now,” Calix said.

Roughly 70 percent of people in Shelltown, Southcrest and Mountain View are renters, according to US Census data.

And it’s not just renters being pushed out, according to the rumors going around. Stories of cheap cash offers for waterlogged houses are also making the rounds.

If city leaders cared, the thinking goes, they’d help the flood survivors get stable, temporary housing. That would give them the security they need to not sign away their leases or homes for cash. But that stability still hasn’t materialized.

The flood displaced more than a thousand people — the full count is still not available – from their homes. A hodgepodge of nonprofit and government entities stepped in to provide motel vouchers. But now those vouchers are ending, and county officials are taking over motel placement. But the county program has had trouble getting up and running. An official admitted earlier this week that some people likely might be forced out of their current rooms before new ones are available.

This is only more evidence to the flood survivors that their government either doesn’t care or actually wants them gone.

“They’re trying to wipe out our legacy,” Clarissa Marin told me.

“You mean they want to wipe you off the map?” I asked.

“That’s exactly what they’re trying to do. What else would it be?” Marin said.

The relationship between government and Shelltown is only made worse when politicians talk about their successes dealing with the floods, Marin said.

“The more they have these emergency meetings with with 30-minute Powerpoint presentations, talking about how many lives they saved and how they were on the ground Jan. 22, only makes it worse, because everyone knows no one was there.”

As we sat under the carport, I asked if anything could be done to restore trust. Marin wanted an apology and, simply, for local leaders to do their jobs.

“Start with, ‘I’m sorry,’” Marin said. “And then show the communities that you’re actually willing to put the necessary controls in place that would protect everyone.”

I asked City Council President Sean Elo-Rivera about this.

“Regardless of whether [cleaning the canals] would have made a difference in preventing the floods, we should own the fact that the communities affected were due a lot more than they’ve gotten and I’m sorry for that to the extent I’m responsible,” Elo-Rivera said. “And even to the extent I’m not responsible, I signed up for this job and I now own all the bad decisions of the past until we remedy them.”

Elo-Rivera’s office sent a memo in December asking for one stretch of blocked creek in Rolando to be cleaned. It wasn’t and an entire affordable housing complex flooded. He also previously held a press conference on Beta Street – one of the area’s to experience the most severe flooding in Southcrest – to draw attention to the city’s intense stormwater needs. Now, Elo-Rivera is pushing for a November ballot measure that would create a tax for flood prevention and other water quality issues.

He acknowledged flood survivors have every right to be furious. And he worried about the broken trust. He said he’d heard the refrain that local leaders purposefully allowed the flood to happen.

“At the end of the day there’s a relationship between government and the community. And just like any relationship, the longer you allow it to erode, the harder it is and the longer it takes to restore it… If something [bad] happens before you restore it, it’s broken for good,” Elo-Rivera said. “But this is the project. How we restore and earn that trust back… That is the biggest project any of us have in San Diego.”

Not everybody under the carport thought the city purposefully allowed the canals to become clogged.

Anna Ramirez had been letting others do most of the talking. She and her sister waded out of the floods, with her 3-year-old daughter in a large storage bin — both of them holding a side, as they pulled it through the water.

“My whole life, living here, it’s just always been neglected. We’ve been asking for help all these years and we’re still asking for it and we don’t ever know if we’re gonna get it,” Ramirez said. “They don’t care. They never have.”

Floods are nothing new to Shelltown. Thirty years ago, serious flooding hit parts of the neighborhood, Marin said. Her aunt went door to door, getting signatures for a petition to the city to fix the storm drain problems, she told me.

Jesse Preciado, a spearfisherman, who put on a wetsuit and unclogged a drain on his street during the floods, weighed in on this theme.

“We’ve been asking for 30 years already for a solution. [After the floods] it took them two days to clear the canals out. So we know they could’ve done it,” he said. “It’s a plan to get all the poor out, to get these low-income, ugly houses out of the way and build new houses. It’s a game plan.”

I asked Ramirez what she thought about that — whether she thought it was neglect or a plan.

“I agree with what he said, actually,” she told the group.

She went on to tell us the full story of what happened to her on Jan. 22.

She was at home, on a piece of property with multiple bungalows shared by her other family members. Her father called to say that it might flood. She moved two of the families’ cars and by the time she returned water was already inside her home.

First her and her sister got the baby out. Then she realized that another sister was in another unit and might be asleep. She went back alone and found her sister standing in the doorway in shock. She dragged herself along a fence to show her sister the way to higher ground.

As she made these trips back and forth, different neighbors kept calling for help. A pregnant woman’s belly was fully submerged. Someone else held a baby up above their head. Ramirez helped multiple people back to safety. Her and another neighbor pulled one person out of their window, because the doors wouldn’t open.

At some point, Ramirez could no longer get out. She had to get on a roof with other neighbors.

Soon after, the waters receded. She got down and walked to the edge of a nearby fence, where a firefighter was standing.

“And you know, at that point, I’m like, ‘Why?’” she said. “Knowing that they were standing there the whole time and they didn’t go in and help us. It’s just frustrating to know how close they were and they didn’t go in and save anybody.”

Correction: This post previously stated that City Council President Sean Elo-Rivera held a press conference on Beta Street during his campaign for City Council. It was after he was elected.