Our Lisa Halverstadt late last week unveiled that the city’s housing agency hasn’t handed out new tenant-based vouchers to households on its waiting list since August 2022. Background: The San Diego Housing Commission is responsible for Section 8 vouchers. The agency hands them out and oversees them for the city of San Diego. These vouchers help families pay a portion of their rent (they are responsible for an amount based on 30 percent of their income). The waitlist: Lisa reports that as of earlier this year, nearly 58,000 families were asking for rent help. But two main factors are preventi ..read more

State senators had some questions for one of their former colleagues, Ben Hueso, when he appeared before them April 24. He was advocating against a bill from state Sen. Steve Padilla that would prohibit the San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board from handing out waste discharge permits for any landfill in the Tijuana River watershed. He’s aiming the bill right at Hueso’s client: National Enterprises. The company is trying to get permits for a more than 300-acre landfill and recycling center on the far eastern edge of Otay Mesa. We need a landfill there, Hueso says, because the existin ..read more

As California grapples with a crushing housing shortage, two ballot measures would change the way local governments authorize or pay for affordable housing and other public infrastructure projects. One of the measures would lower the threshold for local governments to pass new taxes to support infrastructure and affordable housing. Another one would eliminate a provision of the state constitution requiring voter approval for “low-rent housing.”  California initiatives can come to a vote in two ways: proponents can gather signatures, or lawmakers can pass bills to place them on the ballot ..read more

Tens of thousands of struggling San Diego families are vying for Section 8 vouchers to help them pay the rent, yet the city’s housing agency hasn’t handed out tenant-based vouchers to families on its waiting list for nearly two years.  Surging San Diego rents and insufficient funding mean this startling reality is unlikely to change anytime soon – barring a major influx of federal dollars.  The San Diego Housing Commission doles out and oversees thousands of Section 8 vouchers in the city. In recent years, its list of families seeking rental subsidies has soared along with housing c ..read more

Senior investigative reporter Lisa Halverstadt has been watching the city of San Diego’s real estate deals for years. Consider 101 Ash St.: a notorious real estate endeavor in which the the city entered a lease-to-own deal for a downtown high rise. The building sits behind City Hall and was a prime locale to house city workers. But the deal was quickly engulfed in scandal and asbestos. After years of lawsuits and a criminal investigation, taxpayers paid more than $200 million dollars and the building remains vacant. So, when Mayor Todd Gloria unveiled a big new deal for a big new building to ..read more

Vista could become the latest North County city to shift to a public-safety first approach to homelessness. Our Tigist Layne reports that Vista Mayor John Franklin last week proposed that the City Council prioritize its shelter beds for Vista residents, crack down on criminal activity and dump the so-called housing first policy adopted by the state and federal governments. The proposal, which is expected to come to a future vote, closely matches a similar shift approved by the Escondido City Council earlier this year. Worth noting: A move away from housing first could cost both cities state a ..read more

Vista may soon have a new homelessness policy, and like the one approved in Escondido a couple months ago, it calls for a crackdown on criminal activity, shelter priority for Vista residents and a rejection of the Housing First approach.  It’s a continuation of a larger trend in San Diego County where more and more cities are changing how they deal with homelessness, even if it goes against past precedent set by state and federal initiatives.  At last week’s City Council meeting, Mayor John Franklin introduced a homelessness policy draft that is almost identical to one adopted by th ..read more

Nearly a month ago, Mayor Todd Gloria unveiled a plan to transform a Middletown warehouse into the city’s largest-ever permanent homeless shelter. The proposal instantly generated an avalanche of questions about how the deal came together, the warehouse’s owner and the proposed lease terms. It turns out the mega shelter proposal started with an epiphany and a cold email. Our Lisa Halverstadt got the story on how real estate and hospitality guru Doug Hamm put the property he now owns on the city’s radar in October – and how he’s been caught off guard by the blowback the shelter proposal has re ..read more

When I first started as Voice of San Diego’s education reporter, I didn’t know much about education. So, like any good reporter, I did some digging. That’s how I stumbled onto American Public Media’s “Sold a Story,” podcast. It exposed me to one of the highest stakes conflicts I’d never heard of: the “reading wars.”  At their core, they are a battle between methods to teach kids to read and they’ve been around for decades.   In one corner are practices like the whole language and balanced literacy models that, while they’ve relied on faulty strategies, have been ubiquitous in school ..read more

Look familiar? We pulled this post from the Morning Report. Subscribe to our daily newsletter to stay up to date on the latest news. Click here. Marian Kim Phelps is out as Superintendent of the Poway Unified School District.  The embattled district leader has been under fire since November, when students and parents alleged she had harassed members of the Del Norte High School softball team on which her daughter plays. The harassment allegedly stemmed from a May incident at a banquet for the softball team during which some members did not clap for Phelps’ daughter.  In Februar ..read more