By Geoff Page
The regular monthly meeting of the Midway-Pacific Highway Planning Group on Wednesday 19 was dominated by the homeless problem in the Midway area that is badly out of hand. There was also a stealthy visit by a couple of cycling advocates who argued in support of the city’s plans to gut planning groups because they believe the groups stand in the way of their cycling agenda.
Homeless
The mess on Sports Arena Blvd., by the Goodwill facility, kicked off a major discussion about the homeless problem in the Midway area. That large encampment is only the worst face of the problem, the problem with the homeless is everywhere in the Midway area.
This piece of Sports Arena Blvd. may not be familiar to everyone. It is on the south side of Rosecrans at the big Rosecrans-Sports Arena Blvd. intersection. Oddly, the big intersection was not engineered to allow driving across Rosecrans onto this last section of Sports Arena Blvd. through to Pacific Highway.
The only way to access this road is through the parking lot where the Big 5 store and Burger King are located. It is also not possible to make a right turn onto this piece of Sports Arena Blvd. from Rosecrans headed east because the turn is barricaded. The only other way to enter this road is from Pacific Highway at the far south end.
This is all to show that the traffic volume on this road is very low compared to the rest of the Midway area, making it ideal for what has happened.
The encampment runs from south of the Goodwill facility almost all the way to Pacific Highway; it is a major settlement. There are lots of tents and other types of shelters. Bikes and bike parts piled up. Kids. Trash. Dogs. It looks like the Third World.
A couple of months ago, the whole thing was cleared out after a great deal of complaining by business owners, residents, visitors, and the planning group. Apparently, the clean-up had barely concluded when the homeless began drifting back and rebuilding the encampment. This writer saw the original encampment and has seen the new encampment. It looks like nothing was done.
The complaints reached another crescendo and the city went into action again on January 14. They posted, or planned to post, a 72-hour Notice of Abatement but inclement weather caused a postponement. According to the mayor’s representative Kohta Zaiser, it was not possible to post such a notice during bad weather. He appeared to indicate this was part of the approved process for taking such an action.
Zaiser said they planned to post the new 72-hour notice at the beginning of this week. Considering the nice weather last week, it was not clear why the notice was not posted early last week. If the weather turns rainy, it could delay the process again. He also described a multi-agency outreach effort that preceded the final step of the 72-hour notice. He said there are about 180 people in the encampment. The plan was to contact all of them and offer a menu of services designed to get them off the streets.
Zaiser said that seven people had accepted shelter services so far. He stressed that these numbers were just the first report and expected to have updated numbers by the Friday following the meeting. The new numbers were not available as of this writing.
The people who attempt this kind of outreach work are very candid about the dismal record these efforts have. The rub for those being offered services are the conditions that come with the services. No drugs or alcohol rules are a big barrier to success. If people feel the rules are not worth what they would be getting, they will not participate.
Group chair Cathy Kenton, started off the discussion with a heartfelt complaint about the process that seems to be constantly stalling any progress in helping Midway deal with this runaway problem. This latest glitch of some bad weather stalling the clean up another two weeks was part of the process.
Kenton has long experience in the Midway area and speaks quite passionately about the area and how she perceives it is treated by the rest of the city. She complains that Midway gets dumped on and there is truth to that. A new homeless shelter and two hotels for refugees were planted in the Midway area with no notice to the planning group.
Kenton mentioned a new dumping happening with no notice to the group, a tent city to be put up in the parking lot of the County Health Services Complex on Rosecrans.
Having attended Midway meetings for several years, it is possible to say that Kenton had never spoken with such despair. The people in this group are shouting for help as they watch the area get worse every day with little being done by the city. Some sitting board members who live in the area spoke about moving away because they were so discouraged
In addition to the Sports Arena problem, there is another large encampment on Kurtz — there are several smaller encampments scattered around and some individual ones. Board member Todd Howarth said the area on Hancock Street is also very bad. According to Zaiser, all of these are being acted on with this next effort, but not all at once.
Board member Judy Holiday made a passionate plea that the sidewalks be scheduled for immediate cleaning because of the state they are in now.
A woman asked when the city will clean up the mountains of trash along that section of Sports Area Blvd. and other areas. She described huge piles of trash that have accumulated from the homeless population that is attracting rodents and trash picking.
A question was asked about progress on the subject of conservatorships. Basically, a conservatorship allows people to be taken off the street, without their consent, for their own benefit. This can be used for the mentally ill or severe drug addicts or alcoholics. As can be imagined, this is a complicated issue fraught with personal rights problems.
Zaiser said the city is looking into it along with the county. He said the county has to be on board — for some reason.
The homeless discussion continued when Lisa Jones, Executive Vice President, Strategic Initiatives, of the San Diego Housing Commission gave her update on the new homeless facility at the old Pier One Building. Jones has faithfully attended each planning group meeting since the existence of this project was sprung on the group last summer.
In her update, Jones explained that the shelter that they refer to as the “Harm Reduction Shelter,” opened December 15. Six people from the city’s big outreach effort had “enrolled” in the shelter so far. She said they had 13 current enrollments and approximately 12 more people coming soon.
Jones did not say where these 25 people came from and, oddly, no one asked. It was not clear if the six people from the outreach effort were included in the total or not.
This writer sent an email to Jones asking how many shelter residents came from the Midway area. Jones responded that she was not able to provide the number of shelter residents that came specifically from the Midway area. Jones was sent another email asking if the information was not available or if she had it but could not release it. As of this writing, the answer was not received.
The reason why it is important to know where the residents have come from is because of an initial concern the Midway group expressed when they first learned of this new shelter. They asked then if the Housing Commission was going to fill its facility with the local homeless population or bring people in from elsewhere.
The group was clear it did not want to see more homeless brought into an already badly impacted area. When asked this question back then, Jones said they would try fill the facility with the local homeless population but could not guarantee that people would not be brought in from other areas. Judging by the numbers, it appears that is exactly what has happened.
Jones stated in her email that the Housing Commission directed the outreach teams titled “Community Harm Reduction Teams,” to focus on the Midway area and the East Village area at the same time. One has to wonder what effort it takes to come up with names like “Harm Reduction Teams.” One also has to wonder what harm is being reduced, harm to the homeless or harm to the general community.
Instead of the new facility helping to alleviate their problem by removing homeless off of Midway streets, it just looks like Midway was dumped on again. And, there was a new, serious concern about this facility.
When Jones first described what they planned to do at the old Pier One store, she said the residents at the facility will be able to leave the place during the day whenever they want to. Some in the Midway group expressed concern about the kinds of people who may be residents.
That concern came up again because of a recent beating in the area. One of the persons attending the meeting witnessed an unprovoked serious beating of a citizen by someone wielding a skateboard. It was clear the incident very much affected the woman as she gave her account.
The question to Jones was, how could they tell whether or not the assailant was a resident of the new facility brought in from some other part of town. Jones replied there would be no way to know unless the police contacted the person. For some reason, this did not happen after this incident.
In the end, the homeless discussion was a serious plea for the city to do something to help an area drowning in unpleasantness and actual crime. Discussions about homelessness seem to come up at every Midway meeting but the tone of this meeting was more dire and depressed than this writer has previously witnessed.
People may have disagreed with Midway about Measure E, but the homeless problem is serious for everyone. Midway deserves the city’s full attention.
Stealth Continues
During a discussion of the major changes the city wants to make to the planning boards, the Midway group heard from two members of BikeSD’s Board of Directors, Paul Jamason and Nicole Burgess. They did not, however, identify themselves that way. Burgess did say she was from the Peninsula Community Planning Board, giving the impression that her remarks were the opinion of the PCPB.
They were there to lobby for the city’s planned drastic changes regarding planning groups but neither one stated that overtly. It was how they spoke that told the story.
The “mobility community,” that consists largely of cyclists, has complained mightily over the past years about planning boards being full of old geezers and geezettes who do not agree with their vision of life. They see the boards as standing in the way of progress – their idea of progress.
Instead of running candidates and voting in the people they want, which would be the normal procedure, they decided to attack the planning board system as a whole. The majority of the recommended changes came from a group named Circulate San Diego. Check them out here. https://www.circulatesd.org/. The changes are Draconian and will result in a nosedive of volunteerism because it won’t be worth the trouble for anyone to volunteer.
The gist of the proposed planning group changes consists of two prongs. The first prong is disassociating the boards from the city to the extreme of cutting them out of the project review process. That is the heart of the planning board’s existence, and without that, citizen review of projects and things happening to the community ceases.
The second prong involves dilution by merging planning board areas. For example, think of merging OB, Point Loma, and Midway. What better way to muffle OB’s strong voice for OB than to make such a merger? With a merger like this, OB would only be a very small voice. Imagine if representation in the new super group wound up with no one from OB on it or just one or two people.
The Midway group is as wary of the changes as other planning boards, the loss of autonomy is a major worry.
When Jamason spoke, he repeated the mantra of this mobility group that the planning boards don’t fairly represent the communities. He went on for some time with his remarks.
Jamason said one of the problems with people getting on planning boards is that they are time-challenged. He said renters have to work two or three jobs to afford to live here and to say we want you to also volunteer for these committees is asking a lot. Jamason did not, of course, cite a source for his information that renters have to work two or three jobs just to live here, but it sounded good.
Jamason said, “We have this additional layer of regulation or local control around land use, it’s a big ask.” Jamason considers the planning board review as just an unnecessary layer of oversight. That it is the one place where citizens get to review projects does not matter to Circulate San Diego, in fact, they consider it a nuisance.
Jamason said, “I’m curious to see how we (We? He lives in Kensington) can get greater representation of people who have not been historically represented on these planning groups. I’m looking for ways to address that and I’m all ears.”
His remarks sounded like he was sympathetic and positive but were meant to punctuate the mobility community’s position that it is a fact that planning boards don’t represent the communities. The problem is, that is not a fact and it is not correct.
Jamason mused on ways for better outreach like a local paper and various social media. He said, “Younger people don’t read publications so look to things like TikTok and Facebook wherever the kids are nowadays, I am no longer in that category.”
He said a lot of people don’t know planning groups exist. Thank you Captain Obvious. Anyone sitting on a planning board today could say that and all planning boards struggle with this.
But, Jamason finally got to his real point.
“Maybe we need to consider the role of community planning groups if we can’t get fair representation because people don’t know they exist.”
There was a big discussion of these changes at the Community Planning Committee, or the CPC, the group of all the planning group chairs that meets monthly. Jamason attended their recent meeting and had this to say.
I was kind of surprised by the level of suspicion and even outright contempt towards this reform process from some of the planning group representatives because these issues have been identified for several years now but we had planning group chairs saying ‘where did this come from,’ ‘Joe Lecava used to be a developer.’
My planning group chair at our planning group said this was all a plot by Circulate San Diego to make the city more developer friendly. I don’t think this is useful. I think there are significant representation issues, transparency issues with these planning groups and these are trying to be resolved by the city now and so I think any input that folks have on how to make these groups more representative and more transparent and find solutions to these critical problems which is kind of the feedback I’ve gotten from some planning board members. I’m very hopeful this process can help improve community planning groups.
The last sentence belied Jamason’s, and by association BikeSD’s and Circulate San Diego’s real message.
Look at Jamason’s choice of words. “Significant representation issues.” Significant to whom? “Transparency issues?” And he calls these “critical problems.” Again, to whom.
On planning group boundaries, Jamason says they need to be changed by combining some groups to address perceived disparities.
Then, Jamason went after the alleged Midway “opponents” and the call for affordable housing in the redevelopment. He said:
“I hear that argument a lot, ‘We don’t support housing unless its affordable’ but I think we can see with these opponents is that it is really not about affordable housing it’s about keeping new development out I guess because they want to keep the traffic down.”
The only loud opposition voiced by Point Loma and OB was about removing the 30-foot height limit. This mobility group is trying to rewrite reality. They are turning opposition to removing the height limit into all manner of evils, racism, wealth protection, a desire to keep the unwashed far away from the other communities. A bigger bag of shit this could not be.
The comment about keeping the traffic down was only meant as sarcasm, meaning all the privileged Point Lomans care about is too much traffic messing up their days. It was meant as an insult.
Jamason brought up the example of Grantville. He said there was a new trolley station and more housing around it was approved but none has been built because the residents of Allied Gardens have opposed it. Jamason claimed it was because the residents wanted easy ingress and egress to their community and he said he thinks “that is what is going on around here.”
First, the longtime residents of Allied Gardens have every right to defend their way of life. Second, comparing Grantville to the Midway-Point Loma-OB area is ridiculous. But, it seems that was all he had.
The real surprise was hearing the things Burgess had to say. She sits on the PCPB and also sits on the OBPB transportation subcommittee. But, in her comments, she disparaged both communities.
Burgess said:
“It’s unfortunate that Point Loma and Ocean Beach doesn’t want to see that beautified (meaning the Midway area) and see that become what it really can be. I’m really disappointed in the lawsuit (fighting Measure E) and I really hope our city can overcome and I’m grateful we do have a leader in Todd Gloria that is wanting to challenge that”
Frankly, this statement was complete crap. Point Loma and Ocean Beach have never voiced the opinion that they did not want to see the area improved. As stated previously, the fight was over the height limit only. Burgess is hewing the line of twisting opposition to Measure E into something it was not, total opposition to any improvement in the Midway area.
Listening to the PCPB representative voice these opinions, that this writer knows the PCPB has not expressed, was alarming. Burgess’ support of removing the 30-foot height limit in the area runs counter to the community she supposedly represents. And, she threw OB under the bus too.
Then, she finished up with a bit of very bad acting, to the point of being insulting. She was musing on the changes and then she said this as if it was an epiphany that just came to her in the middle of her musing.
“The Point Loma community is actively fighting Midway a lot of times… so maybe there is that we need these community groups to be larger so that we actively have these all-inclusive conversations.”
There it was, another plug for merging planning groups. This was clearly the point Burgess wanted to make but it was so soft pedaled with that bit of acting that it seemed like a harmless suggestion, just an idea. The problem is, it is not a harmless suggestion, it is designed to further the mobility community’s agenda.
Kenton and other board members stepped in after all of this from Jamason and Burgess and defended Midway. Kenton said the changes amount to “throwing the baby out with the bathwater.” She was against combining groups into super groups.
Kenton then made a completely rational suggestion:
“If there are problems with some of the planning groups, then let’s fix those planning groups not take everything away from planning groups in general.”
The real problem is from groups who want to influence the public discussion by going to planning group meetings and being dishonest in how they present their point of view. Frankly, it looks like they have studied the developer’s handbook and are using those tactics to further their agenda.