Seventeen years ago today, the Wilcox family relocated to San Diego from the Washington, DC-metro area. We came to care for my father-in-law, who would live another decade and pass away—age 95—in his own bed. He likely would have gone sooner and/or been confined to a nursing home otherwise.
My wife and I should have fled Communist California—and the slave mentality induced here—in 2017, soon after her dad died. But ongoing concerns about our only child kept us here longer. Our daughter’s brain injury, in March 2023, justified the financial hardship of staying. She survived—something unlikely had we, from a long distance, taken doctors’ advice to end life support rather than by being present choose to continue it.
San Diego is scary now. The city encourages the overbuilding of overly expensive housing—whether skyrises or backyard so-called Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs) encroaching on traditional neighborhoods. Construction noise is constant.
Landlords are even converting residential buildings’ parking garages into tiny, studio apartments. Parking rapidly disappears, as such, along with rarely utilized bike lanes removing even more.
Then there are the homeless, of which there are too many. A recent Supreme Court ruling upholding camping bans in public spaces lets the city clear out encampments and tent cities. But that solves no problem and merely shifts it from one location to another.
Crime rises, with Gaslamp Quarter being a good example of how bad the problem is. The once-trendy area increasingly looks more like Skid Row and the scene from film LA Story where robbers line alongside people taking money from an ATM.
The majority of the most dramatic changes started about four years ago. As such, the quaint, charming city we moved to is more or less gone. So why aren’t we?
I used Samsung Galax S24 Ultra to shoot the Featured Image, today. Vitals: f/2.2, ISO 50, 1/1600 sec, 13mm (film equivalent); 11:09 a.m. PDT.