This week, City Hall’s budget decisions began coming home to roost.
San Diego city leaders had to cut $100 million in spending to keep a balanced budget last month. As one way to find some savings, they decided to close half the public restrooms at Mission Bay. The budget process is very hard to follow and I dare say some citizens tuned out when the topic of bathrooms came up.
But now the doors are locked and the people have nowhere to piss.
“We pay our taxes and this is what we’re gonna get, after everything? It’s not fair,” one woman told NBC 7.
This anger over the closures puts City Hall’s defining crisis into stark relief.
Charles Modica, the city’s independent budget analyst, said it to me like this a few weeks ago and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it: “Expectations for what services the city can perform are out of line with the revenues people are willing to trust the city to have.”
The city desperately needs voters to approve new revenue to even be able to keep its current level of government services going — much less provide new ones. And yet voters have a deep distrust of City Hall. As I wrote at the beginning of June, the percentage of people who believe the city is on the wrong track has grown immensely.
This is starting to feel like a death spiral.
City Hall cuts services to balance the budget. Voters get angry. City Hall asks for new revenue for services. Voters say no.
Any political leader who wants to be truly effective — rather than just hold office — will have to find a way to break the cycle.
About Those Epic Vacancy Rates
Most of the major local news outlets have covered a very interesting piece of housing news: Apartment vacancy rates are at 6.2 percent, the highest they have ever been in the 2000s
The last few years, a lot of new apartments have been built in San Diego, so this increased vacancy rate isn’t really a surprise. The question is does the supply boom and increased vacancies mean anything good for affordability, as housing advocates have told us it would.
The news stories mostly pointed to the same data that show rents have been stagnate, but haven’t gone down. There’s other data that points in a different direction.
In March, KPBS reported that rent declined more in San Diego than in all of the 20 largest housing markets except for one. Rent for a one-bedroom apartment went down 5.6 percent and for a two-bedroom it went down 7.5 percent. These declines coincided with a big increase in listings.
That’s far from nothing, but we probably shouldn’t base our final judgement of housing policy on a study by Zumper.
At the neighborhood level and within economic stratas, supply is clearly affecting price. A building boom in market-rate apartments downtown has meant that prices have gone down and landlords are offering more deals on market-rate apartments downtown.
The question is how much further do the effects ripple out — or, ugh, trickle down. It’s very reasonable to think the price of older, cheaper apartments near downtown have also benefited from the building boom. In Golden Hill, where I lived until recently, this seemed to be true anecdotally. The overall decline in price for one-bedroom and two-bedroom apartments noted by KPBS would also back this up.
But there’s clearly a limit. Building more market-rate condos in certain parts of the city is going to have a limited impact on other apartments in other neighborhoods — especially in the near term.
My friend Jesse Marx recently wrote in the Jumping Off Place that some research shows a “weak” connection between supply and price. Journalists and researchers now have a case study in waiting to try to figure out — between weak and strong — how the influx of new apartments will affect San Diego.
In the meantime, it’s imminently clear that city leaders are going to have to come up with strategies beyond build, build, build to make a meaningful, wide scale difference for working class people trying to keep a roof over their heads.
Spencer Pratt to Get Local GOP Hyped
In August, the Lincoln Club Business League will host a dinner in San Diego to honor 250 years of the American experiment. Who better to get the party hyped than recent-election-integrity-questioner Spencer Pratt.
Pratt, the reality TV star, had appeared as if he would make it through to the run off to face incumbent Karen Bass in the race for LA mayor. However, as the weeks ticked by and the mail-in votes rolled in, Pratt got displaced from the run off. He’s now raising questions about California’s electoral process.
“Spencer Pratt represents a new kind of American voice: entrepreneurial, fearless, and willing to shake up the conversation,” said Kevin Faulconer, president of the Lincoln Club Business League in a press release. “At a time when voters are looking for leaders who understand how to communicate in a changing world, Spencer brings a perspective that is timely, relevant, and exactly the kind of energy we want at this year’s Annual Dinner.”
Everyone needs to go to the restroom sometime – 13 public restrooms shut down for lack of $0.5 million. A fraction of those people will ever go to the $28 million Pride Promenade. What should the totally broke City spend tax dollars on? The City Council and Mayor voted for the Pride Promenade – which is why no San Diego citizen will be voting for a sales tax increase. Fundamental services for everyone first, build want-to-have projects AFTER all of the services are funded with what’s left. The spending debates should only be about OPTIONAL projects, not fundamental health services, like public restrooms. Restrooms for $0.5 million out of a budget of $6 billion is 0.008%. If you can’t find 0.008% somewhere from a $6 billion government budget for a fundamental health service, you shouldn’t be running the government.
If money from bond issues could be legally constrained to go to the stated purpose of the bond and not the City’s general fund some trust might be restored. In 2010 or thereabouts I voted for a bond that would install air conditioning in schools. Since not all a/c installation could be done at once, some of the money was used to install lighted football stadiums at high schools- something I would never have voted for. Since then I no longer believe that City will spend bond funds on what they say they will.
The proposed AC in schools was from a school bond measure for San Diego Unified School District, not the city.
As someone who used to vote for the city of San Diego tax increases, I’ll tell you why I don’t support them now: I do not trust that the city council and mayor can make good decisions. There are so many examples of poor decisions where they squandered the city’s funds or otherwise screwed up: the 101 Ash Street debacle, overpromising and underfunding pensions, promising 20% employee raises that the city didn’t have the funds to support, restriping streets with bike lanes that eliminate traffic lanes and parking (and that only a special interest group that is chummy with the politicians actually wants), the bait-and-switch trash fees, the idiot plan to charge for parking at Balboa Park, etc.
I’m also disappointed by the “money shuffle” practice, where new tax revenue is purported to supplement existing spending but instead is used to supplant existing funding to liberate equivalent funds for whatever general fund purpose they want (e.g. the hotel tax for homelessness services).
After so many poor decisions, I frankly don’t know how the city council and mayor could earn back my trust.
Yup, just like this one. San Diego City Councilmembers recently approved spending $2.2 million to turn 100 ft of alley at the end of B Street leading to the Santa Fe Depot into a pedestrian corridor. There doesn’t seem to be a coherent thought process. We’re fortunate that 30 mil a year for the homeless warehouse was shot down. Voters saw this coming at the last attempt of a tax increase. There absolutely needs to be an overhaul before committing to any new taxes.