This June, San Diegans will be voting on the Barrio Logan Community Plan. I’ve seen the map, and it’s complicated. It has Residential Zones, Business Zones, Buffer Zones and seemingly every option in between. I’m still not sure if the blue area is the ocean or another type of land use.
Fortunately, I don’t have to agree with every detail to know that I’m voting for it. I understand that the Community Plan is Barrio Logan’s Pride Flag, and that’s enough for me.
At this point, it’s hard to imagine Hillcrest without a towering Rainbow flag, but I remember what it took to get it built. Hillcrest community and business leaders saw the Castro flag-envy of LGBT San Diegans and turned it into a concrete plan. They gathered neighborhood support by addressing concerns and making changes, and then took their vision to the Uptown Community Planning Group, who approved a slightly scaled down version. The City Council overwhelming approved the plan, and the flag was unfurled by Pride.
The Barrio Logan Community Plan followed the same path, up to and including City Council approval. Before it could be unfurled, though, opponents bought enough signatures to trump the Council and put the plan on the ballot in June.
There’s nothing wrong with that procedurally, except when paid gatherers lie to get signatures. I could cite any number of intellectual reasons to be against such initiatives, but I think the emotional one is more important here: not so long ago, and perhaps even now, the LGBT community could have lost the Pride Flag to a similar ballot measure.
It sounds ridiculous until you think about history and voter trends. Consider the baseline of November 2008, when only 54 percent of San Diegans voted “No on 8,” despite a state electorate so progressive it gave rights to farm animals. If you exclude Hillcrest and put marriage equality to a vote of everyone else, it probably fails.
What about 2012, when the Pride Flag (and Harvey Milk Street) could have gone to the ballot like the Barrio Logan plan? It probably depends on when. It’s hard to imagine the November voters that elected Mayor Filner voting against the Pride Flag. While support for pension reform and LGBT causes are not mutually exclusive, the 66 percent of voters who supported Prop. B make me less confident about the June 2012 electorate.
So why didn’t the Hillcrest Pride Flag go to the ballot? Probably because the Manchester boycott showed potential sponsors that being against LGBT rights was a financial loser. Since then, we’ve had a gay interim mayor and elected the first San Diegan and lesbian speaker of the Assembly.
The stakeholders of the Barrio Logan plan may not have the same advantages, but they did come up with a plan to better their neighborhood. The City Council approved it. In June so should you. Outside interests shouldn’t get another vote on a plan that Barrio Logan is proud of, any more than they should have gotten the chance to take down our flag.
On June 3, Vote YES on Proposition B & C, this will uphold the new community vision for Barrio Logan! Everyone deserves equality even the residents in Barrio Logan.
Thank you for standing with Barrio Logan residents like myself. We deserve the right to be able to self-determine what our neighborhood should be. We don’t have the right to dictate what goes on in Clairemont, La Jolla, Rancho Santa Fe or Hillcrest and vice versa. Each community is unique and those residents deserve to plan what happens within their boundaries.
Yes to communities planning for themselves!
Yes on B & C!