Politics Report: Midway’s Dog Days 3%
By Scott Lewis10% Will Huntsberry31%
8/1/2026, 7:00:00 AM
Topics: California Politics, San Diego Politics, Urban Planning, Housing Crisis, Environmental Regulations, Election Campaigns, US Foreign Policy, Homelessness Crisis
Keywords: Midway Rising, Sb 958, Ceqa, City Council Candidates, Nicole Crosby, Richard Bailey, Affordable Housing, Transportation Plan, California Environmental Quality Act, San Diego, County Poll, Tax Hike, Real Estate Transfer Tax, Payroll Tax, Sales Tax, Dan Rottenstreich, San Diego County Health And Safety Act, Rep Sara Jacobs, Israel War Funding, Gaza, Lebanon, Humanitarian Aid, Josh Coyne, District 2 City Council Race, Downtown Partnership, Homelessness, Housing Development, Bike Lanes, Adu
BS Summary: This article contains 10 faulty reasoning types, including Appeal to Emotion, Biased Writer Voice, and Straw Man, with Framing Effect as the most egregious example at 9.3% saturation with 218 hits. Analysis detected 574 faulty-reasoning hits from 2,347 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 11% and a BS Rank of 3% (25,034 of 25,732 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 97.30% of the article peer group.
This week, via the Sacramento Report and our Why It Matters segment on KPBS, we have tried to get the latest on SB 958 , the legislation provoked by the Midway Rising project and the court ruling that threw out the ballot measure that lifted the height limit in Midway.
We thought it was a good idea to check in with the City Council candidates to see what they thought about SB 958.
First, what it does: Not much?
It basically says that if a project meets certain conditions (read lots of money and housing) any impacts on the environment from just the height of the buildings can’t be considered significant impacts as that matters to the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA.
That would make it slightly harder for groups to use CEQA to stop development across the state.
However, it has become a lightning rod for people opposed to Midway Rising, as was apparent at a town hall in Point Loma Tuesday.
So what do Nicole Crosby and Richard Bailey, the candidates running for City Council in the area think?
Crosby said she feels like it’s misunderstood.
“It doesn’t erase all the CEQA issues and doesn’t change the fact that Midway needs revitalization.
If it doesn’t get through this fall, we’ll have to start all over.”
She said her focus is on other aspects of Midway Rising.
“There needs to be a real transportation plan that isn’t just shuttles to Old Town.
We need that regardless of what’s happening in Sacramento,” she said.
And she relayed a theme that came up at that Town Hall: She’s concerned that the affordable housing promised in the project would not be delivered or would be built somewhere else.
“If I were on Council right now, we’d need a plan to ensure that they built affordable now, not just market-rate housing.”
We asked the Midway Rising team to address this.
It’s likely the long-delayed lease with the city would have requirements and the city presented a plan to the state about how it would phase in the housing.
“According to the documentation submitted by the City, the project will develop 4,250 housing units, of which 2,000 will be affordable, in five phases over a 17-year period.
The phasing plan provides that by the end of each phase of development, at least 25 percent of the housing units will be affordable and includes guardrail provisions that only allow construction of the next phase once minimum affordability requirements are met.
The phasing plan also ensures that at completion of the project, at least 47 percent of the housing units will be affordable,” wrote David Zisser, an assistant deputy director at the California Department of Housing and Community Development.
On SB 958 and Lunar Cycles
When state Sen.
Akilah Weber Pierson presented her bill to the Assembly Standing Committee on Natural Resources in June, she warned it was necessary because of the court ruling that threw out San Diego’s ballot measure lifting the height limit constraining construction in the Midway neighborhood.
“I’m presenting SB 958, which ensures that housing development throughout this state is not hindered by an unprecedented ruling while still upholding the state’s environmental standards,” she said.
And then she said this:
“Despite years of analysis and multiple EIRs, the most recent ruling from the California’s Fourth District Court of Appeal determined that environmental review when related to building height needed to include aspects that were not typically analyzed, including impacts on airflow, atmospheric conditions, lunar cycles, and wildlife attraction,” she said.
Lunar cycles?
How tall are these buildings going to be??
We went to the ruling to find that reference.
There were two references from the Court:
“Artificial night lighting can impact nocturnal species by modifying predation rates, obscuring lunar cycles, or causing habitat avoidance.
It can also disturb diurnal species roosting in an adjacent habitat.”
And then a knock on the city’s failed strategy of pointing to previous environmental impact studies for the community plan for the Midway area.
The city’s representatives believed that since the zoning and density would stay the same, the removal of the height limit never deserved extensive study.
The court disagreed:
“Simply repeating the findings of the PEIR without analyzing the potential impacts of removing the height limit in the Midway-Pacific Highway area is inadequate.
Will noise reflected or refracted from taller buildings disturb sensitive species in or adjacent to the Midway-Pacific Highway area?
Will light from rows of buildings near the San Diego River disturb the lunar cycles of sensitive wildlife?”
OK, so the buildings would not themselves change the lunar cycle just maybe confuse the birdies who follow the moon.
County Poll: County on Wrong Track
Dispatch from Lisa Halverstadt: I pulled back the curtain yesterday on county-funded polling meant to help a controversial board subcommittee get a handle on local voters’ takes on potential tax hike options.
The early 2026 polling showed the county has lots of work to do to get a tax increase across the finish line.
One major reason: 56 percent of the 727 registered voters polled by FM3 Research think the county is on the wrong track.
The poll I obtained after a records request showed the frustration was mostly consistent in districts countywide but a bit higher in District 4, which includes covers neighborhoods from Clairemont to Skyline and communities as far east as Rancho San Diego.
Sixty percent of District 4 voters aren’t cool with where the county’s going.
A major theme: San Diegans in favor of tax hikes want to tax the wealthy.
Tests of hypothetical tax measures showed the most support for a real estate transfer tax and payroll tax that would both focus on folks with deeper pockets.
When pollsters asked voters who said they’d likely vote yes on those proposals to say a few words about why they’d back the measures, many said they supported taxing the rich and argued they could afford it – and that rich San Diegans should pay their fair share.
Some who said they’d vote no, however, said that approach was unfair and would punish success.
Meanwhile, awkwardly: One of the options tested in the poll was a hypothetical half-cent sales tax measure – not the specific, detailed one on the November ballot.
A hypothetical sales tax measure didn’t do so well in the poll .
Dan Rottenstreich, who is managing the campaign for the San Diego County Health and Safety Act, dismissed concerns about what this polling might suggest about that measure because he said it includes specific, popular line items and has the backing of an appealing coalition.
Another one of Rottenstreich’s takes on the poll: “The county polling does reinforce a broader point: San Diegans are frustrated by an economy in which the wealthy keep getting richer while essential public services face cuts.
But the relevant question for November is whether voters support this specific plan to protect San Diego County’s healthcare, public safety and clean water.
Our research shows strong support because voters recognize what’s at stake: the health, safety, and resilience of our entire region.”
One San Diego Congressional Rep Voted Against Funding Israeli War
Earlier this month, an insurgent effort in the House of Representatives tried to stop $3.3 billion from flowing to Israel’s war operations.
It failed, but more than half of Democrats supported it.
That’s not how the vote split among San Diego representatives.
Only Rep.
Sara Jacobs, the youngest Jewish member of Congress, voted to pull the funding.
The other three Democrats — Reps.
Scott Peters, Juan Vargas and Mike Levin — voted no, as did Republican Rep.
Darryl Issa.
That’s a shift for Jacobs — as it was for many Democrats.
When I profiled her in 2024, I wrote about her thought process regarding a previous vote to give Israel billions.
In that case, she chose differently.
That bill included humanitarian aid for Gaza, as well as money for Israel’s military, which is its own kind of dark paradox.
“People talk in the abstract about being for this or for that.
But that’s usually not the question.
The question is, are you more for this than that,” she said of difficult votes.
Jacobs is interesting — not only because she is one of the few representatives to ever visit Gaza and has family living in Israel — but because she straddles the traditional and progressive camps like few others.
She’s not a completely reliable vote for The Squad and her critique on the current state of the American system feels much more watered down than that of the proper left.
But she has been apt to vote outside of the Democratic Party mainstream ever since entering congress — as when she was one of just 37 Democrats to vote against the defense budget, a previously unthinkable move for a San Diego representative.
Her staff said she wasn’t available for an interview, but in a joint statement here’s what she and 26 other congresspeople wrote:
We do not support providing an additional $3.3 billion of American taxpayer dollars to be used for Israeli military operations in Gaza and Lebanon—operations which have killed tens of thousands of civilians, led to the indiscriminate destruction of civilian infrastructure, and caused severe and ongoing humanitarian catastrophes.
These are just the latest in a long string of human rights violations inflicted on Palestinian civilians.
For nearly six decades, Israeli security forces and military authorities have enforced the occupation of the Palestinian territories, including through restrictions on freedom of movement, arbitrary detention, torture, and extrajudicial killings.
What Josh Coyne Learned
Often, an excellent time to talk to candidates for office is after they lose.
They all enter a calm state of reflection and candor and it’s never not interesting.
A lot of people expected Josh Coyne to do better in the District 2 City Council race than he did.
He came in a distant third.
And now he’s left his day job as a longtime leader in the Downtown Partnership, where he oversaw a lot of the organization’s homelessness response.
I thought it was a good time to check in with him.
Here’s our Q&A, edited for clarity.
Politics Report: Well, in general, what are you going to do now?
Josh Coyne: “I’m going to let the universe decide, open myself up.
You know, I worked almost two years to position myself in the campaign.
I was doing two jobs all the time.
I didn’t take any time off.
You come back and you just reassess, right?
So I’m gonna take some time and figure out what’s next.”
What did you learn about running for office?
Coyne: “I learned it requires a lot of vulnerability and honesty with yourself, and I learned that running for office is different than working on a campaign.
You have to put yourself in the driver’s seat and put your positions forward, your policies forward, have people ask you what you think.”
What did you have to be honest with yourself about?
Coyne: “I wasn’t sure how to position my thoughts around the growing tension about housing and development in a district that has some challenges and has a big project.
It’s an important topic for me as someone who runs a homeless shelter, right?
The idea of being anti-housing or anti-growth just wasn’t naturally aligned.
“But I also don’t like losing.
I remember the fork in the road.
Do you bury that a little bit?
And just kind of go down a road of, you know, empathy and listening and validating what a lot of the district is feeling around growth?
Not everyone.
A slight majority.
Or do you be honest and vulnerable with yourself and be out there and say ‘We’re a growing city.
We need to have more housing.
We need to get midway built.’
Do you just kind of go with it?
What did you decide?
Coyne: Well, I mean, you could see I was one of the most pro-housing candidates out there.
Were you surprised by the antipathy to housing and development?
Coyne: “I was, actually.
I was surprised by that, and I was surprised by the bike-lane, the anti-bike-lane movement.
It’s a deep-rooted misunderstanding and vitriol.
I heard about it time and time again knocking doors in that district.
“I think sometimes the way these things have showed up in their communities that has really got them very frustrated.
There’s this bike lane that ends in the middle of nowhere or there’s, you know, this random ADU that’s popping up and I have construction in my backyard and there’s no parking and I can’t park.
“The hardest part for me was, as someone who worked at City Hall and knows how policy works, the City Council has no ability to stop that a project.
It’s all ministerial.
Right.
There was no way that I could have said I would stop the development at Talbott and Rosecrans.
I just knew that that was impossible, you know?
But that’s what they wanted.”
You had a big role with the downtown partnership in homelessness.
It’s still, obviously, on everybody’s mind, still a big thing.
It’s still present in my mind.
What have you learned about the best ways that we could address it?
Coyne: “There are a lot of competing reasons why someone may find themselves homeless.
We have to do a better job of coordinating and collaborating among the people who care a lot.
San Diegans generally care about people who are homeless.
We interpret their direction as frustration instead of a desire for empathy, right?
No one wants Robb Field to be the way that it is.
But people generally don’t understand why, as a society in the 8th largest city in America, we don’t have a way in which we can report and get outcomes to find those folks a better place to be.”
If you have any feedback or ideas for the Politics Report, send them to scott.lewis@voiceofsandiego.org or will.huntsberry@voiceofsandiego.org.
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