As a resident of Oceanside since 1992, I have watched with despair as the city has become a dumping ground for the county’s (and nation’s?) homeless and a poster child for the wealth and land inequality tearing the nation apart.

Whether it’s our own City Council giving away city land so desperately needed as a public park, or the last undeveloped coastal covenanted open space wrested away for the developers’ hotels in downtown with ersatz promises of less blight and homelessness, whatever chance there ever was of bringing this hopeful city up to the coastal standard has dimmed.

Isn’t there some mechanism by which we can force La Jolla, Del Mar, Solana Beach, Cardiff and Rancho Santa Fe to hammer in high density “affordable” housing so we aren’t forever burdened with that obligation? How many more landless poor renters can we sock in before angry hushed whispers of “land reform” abrade our lips?

Edmund Bentivengo
Oceanside
Aug. 19, 2023

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