Ask a Hipster — Advice you didn't know you needed
Big Screen — Movie commentary
Blurt — Music's inside track
Booze News — San Diego spirits
Classical Music — Immortal beauty
Classifieds — Free and easy
Cover Stories — Front-page features
Drinks All Around — Bartenders' drink recipes
Excerpts — Literary and spiritual excerpts
Feast! — Food & drink reviews
Feature Stories — Local news & stories
Fishing Report — What’s getting hooked from ship and shore
From the Archives — Spotlight on the past
Golden Dreams — Talk of the town
The Gonzo Report — Making the musical scene, or at least reporting from it
Letters — Our inbox
Movies@Home — Local movie buffs share favorites
Movie Reviews — Our critics' picks and pans
Musician Interviews — Up close with local artists
Neighborhood News from Stringers — Hyperlocal news
News Ticker — News & politics
Obermeyer — San Diego politics illustrated
Outdoors — Weekly changes in flora and fauna
Overheard in San Diego — Eavesdropping illustrated
Poetry — The old and the new
Reader Travel — Travel section built by travelers
Reading — The hunt for intellectuals
Roam-O-Rama — SoCal's best hiking/biking trails
San Diego Beer — Inside San Diego suds
SD on the QT — Almost factual news
Sheep and Goats — Places of worship
Special Issues — The best of
Street Style — San Diego streets have style
Surf Diego — Real stories from those braving the waves
Theater — On stage in San Diego this week
Tin Fork — Silver spoon alternative
Under the Radar — Matt Potter's undercover work
Unforgettable — Long-ago San Diego
Unreal Estate — San Diego's priciest pads
Your Week — Daily event picks
Whatcha gonna do when your well runs dry?
Nice reporting, Leorah. I was just over at the well site today and can report all is quiet and abandoned. The chain link fencing and mess of pipes and equipment are on site, but no operations. The City should clean that up now! I walked south on the unpaved 32nd Street route, mainly to see what I could of the Richard Brackenbury house, built in 1917 by Frank Mead and R Requa, from the 32nd St side. It is or just was for sale (address 1008 Edgemont Place), and the interior shots in the real estate listings revealed a fantastic Spanish Eclectic design. I suspect the original front faced 32nd, not Edgemont. I can only imagine how lovely the site was when the house was new. The quiet and the views would have been wonderful. The adjacent lots you mention, purchased in 2006 by 32nd & Broadway LLC, never got developed into the apartments/condos that were envisioned. The well-to-do owners owe a huge amount of back taxes and developer fees, and filed for bankruptcy in 2009. Golden Hill property owners are not low income, as was suggested in the article. The owners' renters are, maybe. But a careful look at many, many property owners reveals much wealth. And not all are absentee owners. Some live right in GH. It's far more likely that things can be done in GH that no other community would allow because the local planning group isn't powerful or very effective at advocating. People who want to push things on the GH community know how to pull strings, or get themselves voted onto the planning group, and tend to advocate selfishly, in their on interest, only when they want something or can profit or gain power. The interviewee knows all about that. How about a follow-up report on what the City intends to do with the mess they made?— March 28, 2014 7:37 p.m.
Handwriting on the wall for city’s anti-graffiti bid
One more thought - Remember the lawsuit in Mission Hills about the man paralyzed by a falling palm tree? The City lost that suit, and a co-defendant was the contractor (West Coast Arborists) hired by the area MAD to trim the palm trees. There SHOULD have been double services in that area - the regular City tree trimming AND the private MAD contractor services - but there was not. So figure it out: Privatization is the worst thing that can happen to taxpayers. Let's have a good, well-funded, logical City-staffed maintenance service, and stop forcing the privatization schemes on selected neighborhoods.— March 7, 2014 6:41 p.m.
Handwriting on the wall for city’s anti-graffiti bid
A refinement to the first commenter's information: in some assessment district areas, Urban Corps isn't the graffiti-removal contractor paid for using assessment funds. Other contractors sometimes win the bid war when Requests For Proposals are publicized by the maintenance district boards. So, a property owner in one of these districts is paying for the citywide Urban Corps contract via general taxes, and for privatized services by a competing company in an assessment district. What happens to a phoned-inn graffiti report or an email to Urban Corps in this case? What happens to a report to the City in this case? Are there unspoken agreements with City personnel and Urban Corps to relay the reports to the privatized graffiti crew? The Park & Rec and Economic Development departments should answer this question. My view is that the City's goal is to have every neighborhood privatized, through assessment/special benefit-district property taxes, so that they can get out of the neighborhood maintenance/cleanup business completely. But that would be illegal, because State law is that government service cutbacks aren't allowed under the "special benefits" concept of assessment districts. City Atty, opine on this???— March 7, 2014 6:32 p.m.
Potential canyon development in South Park
I think the most curious aspect of this property sale is the seller (longtime SD architect/Park preservationist Henri Jacot) and the sale price, which is currently publicly stated to be $250,000. Jacot, at age 88 in 2011, was honored by the Committee of 100, an organization of several thousand members dedicated to park preservation. A UT article stated "The retired architect ... has lived on the east side of the park for more than 50 years. He led the Balboa Park Protective Association when it fought, in vain, against building the modernistic Timken Museum of Art east of the San Diego Museum of Art and the art museum’s west wing." $250,000 for 0.6 acre? Really?— February 15, 2014 8:55 a.m.
Potential canyon development in South Park
Are writing about the parcels fronting 28th Street park between Fir and Elm? http://docs.sandiego.gov/citybulletin_publicnotic… The notice mentions development of 5 residences. If so, the land consists of parcels that have long been privately held, since South Park was platted in about 1905 (parcel nos. 5392140100 and 5392140200, which have been merged into one parcel with the first number). http://www.apal.co/RV/23774/442068#.UuiHnPvTlE4 The previous owner sold the land on 5/2/2013 to Donavan (SDPB Holdings LLC) for an amazingly low price (~$250,000), per current records. Surely this is not the final sale price! The parcels appear to provide plenty of room for 5 homes, matching the four residences on Granada that will back them, plus another large multi-family unit, on their east side. The new homes have to be accessible by fire and police and owners, so I imagine that there is a request to vacate public land for roadway development at the west end of the dead-end Fir to provide access. Fir Street never was paved to go through to what would have been 28th between Fir and Elm, so I don't think it's too shocking to request the city to provide an easement to create a bit of street that had never been never been built in this one spot. It will be an unpleasant shock to the property owners on Granada, however, as they will now be like other homeowners on Granada, and have rear neighbors on 28th Street, instead of undeveloped space. It's amazing that these 28th Street lots have never been developed.— January 28, 2014 8:52 p.m.
Former dean sues University of San Diego
Wow. It's frightening that a manager who confronts seriously aberrant employees can be accused of poor management skills. Kroc, Luck, and Shirk. Peace studies. Secret recordings. Wow. Keep us posted on how this resolves, please! And how uncomfortable that Shirk's Twitter name is [shirktwit][1]. I'd have chosen something slightly more respectable, if I were a University director. Also, can't resist mentioning that a Pennsylvania native, now University director in San Diego, who is accused in May of 2013 of storing nude photos of himself on the SD University computer, retweets on Nov 27, 2013, a small Sarasota, FL, story about a naked man. A wide-ranging interest Mr. Shirk has, indeed. [1]: https://twitter.com/shirktwit http://www.sandiegoreader.com/users/photos/2013/d…— December 19, 2013 6:01 p.m.
San Diego's Code Monitoring Team: Foxes guard the henhouse
Good investigative reporting. The current Code Monitoring Team principals named here have many community planning group connections and long histories in land use/development businesses. Nine lives, indeed. I hope to see the Brown Act strictly enforced for this unelected group in the future. To Mr. La Cava: simply examining histories and actions of people isn't taking a cheap shot. If the record is one of self-serving and corrupt behavior, that's the record that was created. The *Reader* article is appropriately titled: foxes eat chickens - it's what they do. If the chickens could decide on the overseer of their community, they would not choose a fox. They would at least like to know when the foxes were meeting and what they were planning. A lot of chickens might be able to overwhelm a few foxes. To Janet O'Dea: Community Planning groups are not always what they appear to be. Code Monitoring Team allies in the business community and City DSD, in 2010/2011, infiltrated the Greater Golden Hill Community Plan update meetings, with a goal of suppressing any negative discussion of companion units ("granny flats"). The City, with complete support by the SD Planning Commission and the realtor/builder business community, was then quietly changing the Land Use code to allow these second units in single-family-zoned neighborhoods such as South Park. The tables at the Greater Golden Hill meetings each had a at least one pro-companion-unit community member who worked for the City, was the partner of a City worker, or was in the building/development trade, but who did not identify themselves as being such, to monitor and suppress any antagonistic discussion of companion units. This happened: if the discussion at a table led to the subject, the plants would say "Oh, I don't think this is the right place to discuss this..." and the whole consensus set-up would move the talk quickly away from bringing that issue up to the room at large. That said, one of the CM Team members, a very good fox, attorney **Rebecca Michael**, has a long history of rallying the realtor/developer community to change the code to allow companion units. In [2005, she wrote an article][1] for the SD Daily Transcript decrying the code. The Planning Commission voted unanimously to allow second units in 2011, as [reported in the Reader][2]. I'm sure that the CMT had a great deal to do with that. [1]: http://www.sddt.com/reports/article.cfm?RID=319&S… [2]: http://www.sandiegoreader.com/weblogs/ive-got-iss…— December 19, 2013 8:07 a.m.
City Attorney's Office responds to sexual harassment lawsuit on Filner's behalf
You are cited in the [LA Times][1], Dorian. "*the document, first revealed by reporter Dorian Hargrove in the San Diego Reader*" [1]: http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-attor…— September 14, 2013 3:12 p.m.
City named in yet another lawsuit over shoddy and improperly maintained parkspace
I think there's not much of a case here. It's pretty reasonable to expect to sink into a wet, muddy field. It the school district or city or whoever is legally in charge of maintenance was watering the field, that's hardly negligence; watering *is* maintenance. Maybe have the sense to walk around it next time?— September 8, 2013 7:52 p.m.
neighborhoods/south-park -- South Park
Who in South Park lost their pet male red-cheeked Cordon bleu finch (Uraeginthus bengalus)? He has been eating millet seed in my back yard for two mornings. Very pretty native of sub-Saharan Africa. http://www.sandiegoreader.com/users/photos/2013/s… Also, there's another kind of pet bird we are hearing in South Park, and we'd really like to know what it is. It makes a very loud whistly "twee-ooh" sound repeatedly. The sound seems to be coming from somewhere around Bancroft/Elm/32nd/Edgemont. Anyone know the type pet bird that makes this sound?— September 3, 2013 11:20 a.m.