"I'm Tired." sighed the headline by J. M. Garcia. San Diego's little downtown newspaper got my attention that morning, so I went to the sidewalk news rack, opened the door, folded the little paper under my arm. This was going to be a must read for my Trolley commute. Hurt still lingered from stepping quietly by several homeless people laying against building walls and in tents around B Street and 9th Avenue, near Bankers Hill.
Hello readers in France, Canada, and the Netherlands. Thank you so much for your readership.
San Diego's summer season is heating up, drawing regional, national, and international tourists. If you haven't been here since pre-COVID, like many cities in American, San Diego has changed and is still in transition.
San Diego is a beautiful city. It has parks, waterside recreation, convention centers, an urban transit system that includes a trolley, city/county buses, and even a historic trolley car that circles our downtown a loop. It has historic churches, cultural centers, shopping centers, art galleries, music venues, coffee houses, accessible bar -nightlife-restaurant clusters and an accessible zoo-although a not quite so accessible airport in the middle of renovations.
Some say our main malls are disappearing like the dinosaur. Relics of mall mania gone wrong, when tourists visit the heart of our city, Horton Plaza Mall will have morphed into a residential center in multi-level luxury for those who can afford to inhabit it.(more about that at a later date. We have luxury housing. Downtown's San Diego's Gaslight District and East Village,is booming with luxury gentrification in full display.
San Diego, however, also has a large homeless population. It really needs more affordable housing.
If you didn't get a chance to read the article by J.M.Garcia in the San Diego Downtown News June 2022, you missed an informative, thought provoking work of local journalism.
Some say, perhaps housing is one of the city's major problems. Not enough affordable housing for the demand presented by the common people. As an answering machine's disembodied yet concerned voice patiently explained, contact delay with an available leasing agent was due to a high volume of calls inquiring about rental units--San Diego is in a housing crisis!
Some say more and more everyday people face difficulty securing safe and affordable housing. Difficulty? Having exhausted all options and with dwindling finances they take to the streets. and The wealthy and middle class can afford the inflated prices that fall or rise daily seemingly based on a real estate-hybrid stock market model.
Some say that a middle class family of four should have at least $40,000 to spend on a comfortable life after taxes. A working class family of four living off of less that $40,000 who is not on government subsidy is often, out of luck when it comes to a place to live in San Diego. According to other general indices, $40,000 a year income does not qualify a family of four as being middle class, $60.000 does. https://fortune.com/2022/04/20/who-is-middle-class-2021-pandemic/ Welcome to "not quite" post-pandemic San Diego.
San Diego's unhoused family residents of four, on an average, earn somewhat less than the qualifying national monetary amount for poverty. A single resident needs to earn at least $30,000
Poverty Thresholds are periodically updated based on the census. Depending on how the data is analyzed, Income Tables for Poverty Thresholds for 2021 By Size of Family and Number of Related Children Under 18 Years show that the lowest qualifying 2021 amount for one person under or over 65 is actually lower than $20,00 PER YEAR. https://www.census.gov/topics/income-poverty/data/tables.2021.List_186653616.html
Well, recent San Diego Regional Task Force on Homelessness estimates are that 8, 427 residents are homeless/unhoused with 4,106 unsheltered San Diegans and 4,321 individuals in shelters.https://www.rtfhsd.org/updates/2022-point-in-time-count-data-released/
As J.M. Garcia notes in the San Diego Downtown News, we do have programs, outreach, drug rehabilitation programs for those who need them. Mental health issues loom large. Many homeless people just want decent housing in which to live.(pg.1)
Garcia also discusses the variety of homeless in San Diego neighborhoods
and on downtown streets, including elderly due to housing issues.(Pg 3) Those with more challenging, disruptive life situations are usually those with whom San Diego's housed residents have negative interactions.
And to be honest, I also see on a daily basis more physically disabled, chronically ill, and shadow orphans as I call them (runaway children and youth) on the streets at all hours of the day or night.
Many situations exist in lives of those who have no permanent home.
Looking into their lives, sharing a good morning, a smile, or a hello as their eyes meet yours is painful.
The reality is raw, disheartening, brutal.
Bravo for J.M. Garcia.
Musewoman,
delores fisher
Works Cited
Garcia, J. M. "I'm Tired." San Diego's Increasing Homeless Crisis Takes Its Toll. San Diego Downtown
News Vol 23, Issue 6, June 2022, (pp1,3)
Leonhardt Megan, Fortune Here’s who is considered middle-class—and how they fared during the
first year of the pandemic https://fortune.com/2022/04/20/who-is-middle-class-2021-pandemic/
PIT/WeAllCount Press Release, "2022 Point In Time Count Data Released." San Diego Regional Task
Force On Homelessness https://www.rtfhsd.org/updates/2022-point-in-time-count-data-released/
United States Census Bureau, "Income and Poverty Tables."
https://www.census.gov/topics/income-poverty/data/tables.2021.List_186653616.html
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