Another State of the City with No Live Audience

It feels like we’re in the middle of a very awkward transition between treating COVID-19 as a disease we’re collectively trying to contain and one that is part of the spectrum of respiratory diseases humans face without much fear every year. If you get the virus now, you have to manage rules for going back to school and work that are related to collective action to stem the pandemic and yet the virus is being allowed to spread uncontained as though we were already moving on.

This week on the podcast, I got to come back as co-host after my own family’s COVID-19 disruption (we’re all good but the kids can’t go to school for a while). Voice of San Diego Managing Editor Andrea Lopez-Villafaña and I discussed the state of the virus in this strange moment.

We also broke down some very interesting comments about homelessness from Mayor Todd Gloria in his State of the City speech this week. The mayor hopes to be able to authorize a lot more people a lot faster to take control of the lives of individuals experiencing mental illness in conservatorships.

We also discussed a curious story out of Chula Vista where the mayor called a City Councilmember a “gringo” and it led to a $16,000 discrimination investigation. That story was by our intern Julia Woock and you can read it here.

Finally, I got to dive in more deeply to my latest obsession: Why I may never look at the Sports Arena the same way again. It’s the fascinating history of San Diego’s Frontier neighborhood – a diverse community with schools, affordable housing, rec centers and churches. You might never have heard about it and that’s because the city deliberately eradicated it. Here’s the story about where it came from and why it disappeared.

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