San Diego home sales slow
Good Morning, I’m Debbie Cruz….it’s Thursday, November SECOND.
U-S-D’s Athletic Director steps down following hazing allegations
More on that next. But first... let’s do the headlines….
California owes nearly 20 billion dollars to the federal government for money it borrowed to pay unemployment benefits during the pandemic.
CalMatters is reporting that the debt could put the state in a precarious position.
State legislative analysts worry unemployment claims could surge again if their bleak economic forecasts come true.
That would further drain the coffers and force the state to rack up even more debt.
The County Health and Human Services Agency is looking to partner with organizations to provide cabin shelters to people experiencing homelessness.
Around ONE-HUNDRED pallet cabins will be made available to organizations through the shelter program.
The cabins are similar to “tiny homes” and will fit one or two people.
They will also have storage space, a door that locks and outlets. Organizations selected for the cabin program will need to have funding and infrastructure for setup and site maintenance.
The one and a half million-dollar sleeping cabin program was approved in 20-22 by the San Diego County Board of Supervisors.
An update to a story we brought you yesterday
U-C San Diego released a statement saying the charges against academic workers were dropped after the union who represents them, quote, agreed to accept the accountability proposed by the university, unquote.
59-workers had been charged with disrupting a university alumni event in May.
Three of them were later arrested for allegedly using chalk to deface campus property.
A joint statement says that the school and the union agreed to keep future protests peaceful and consistent with standards for appropriate labor actions, including following laws against vandalism and damaging university property.
From KPBS, you’re listening to San Diego News Now.Stay with me for more of the local news you need.
THE ATHLETICS DIRECTOR AT U-S-D HAS STEPPED DOWN…HIS SUDDEN DEPARTURE COMES AFTER A LAWSUIT ALLEGING HAZING WAS FILED AGAINST THE UNIVERSITY.
EDUCATION REPORTER M.G. PEREZ HAS BEEN FOLLOWING THE STORY AND HAS THE LATEST DETAILS.
Bill McGillis has been Executive Director of Athletics at the University of San Diego since 2016. In a press release, Wednesday, the university announced he was leaving immediately for other professional opportunities. His departure comes a week after the school’s newest freshman football quarterback filed a lawsuit with allegations of hazing and sexual assault involving U-S-D upperclassmen players. The university is conducting an internal investigation of the football team… and its president has promised that players found responsible for violating school policy will face disciplinary action. University officials did not make any connection to the director’s departure and the lawsuit…Filed by quarterback AJ Perez…who left school pending the outcome of his complaint. MGP KPBS News
THE HOUSING MARKET SEEMS TO BE SLOWING DOWN… IN SAN DIEGO COUNTY AND BEYOND.
REPORTER JACOB AERE LOOKS AT WHAT THAT MEANS FOR HOMES IN THE REGION … AND ONE A-NOMALY IN NORTH COUNTY.
CoreLogic, the company that tracks real estate data nationwide, says Southern California home sales … including San Diego County… hit one of the lowest levels ever last month. San Diego real estate agent Voltaire Lepe says he and other agents are feeling the pinch, especially over the last few months. His sales are down about 50 percent. “The current state of the housing market today I would say is on a downward trend as far as less sales. And I believe prices are also going to drop or are dropping right now slightly because demand is down.” Despite high mortgage rates, San Diego County recorded its highest-ever priced home sale last week … with an oceanfront Del Mar property going for $44.1 million. JA KPBS News
A RESEARCHER AT UC SAN DIEGO IS LOOKING FOR ALTERNATIVES TO LITHIUM ION BATTERIES. SCI-TECH REPORTER THOMAS FUDGE LOOKS AT WHAT COULD BE A CHEAPER, MORE SUSTAINABLE WAY TO STORE ENERGY.
Today, lithium Ion batteries power so much of what we use. Electric cars, laptops and of course, our smartphones. Kent Griffith, a chemistry professor at UCSD says lithium ion hard to beat.
“Let’s get one thing sort of straight. Lithium ion is the best technology that we have, right? That’s why it is almost universally used in terms of how much energy it can store.
But lithium is a limited resource that has to be mined. One thing Griffith is investigating is the creation of sodium ion batteries.
“We know that we have effectively an infinite amount of sodium. So if we could make the switch to sodium ion batteries, we wouldn’t ever have to worry about running out of sodium. So there is a sustainability aspect to it and there’s also potentially a cost aspect to it.”
He says sodium batteries wouldn’t store as much energy as lithium but they’d be cheaper and practical in situations where the battery doesn’t need to be lightweight. Testing of prototypes is underway. SOQ.
Coming up.... Why volunteers are guarding a Dia de Muertos ofrenda in Hillcrest. We’ll have that story and more, just after the break.
SAN DIEGO RESEARCHERS THINK THE VIBRANT MARINE ENVIRONMENT NEAR LA JOLLA COVE IS DIRECTLY LINKED TO THE UNDERWATER CANYON JUST OFFSHORE.
ENVIRONMENT REPORTER ERIK ANDERSON SAYS... SCRIPPS INSTITUTION OF OCEANOGRAPHY SCIENTISTS ARE SPENDING TIME THERE TRYING TO UNLOCK THE OCEAN DYNAMICS THAT MAKE THAT ABUNDANT SEA LIFE POSSIBLE.
The crew aboard the Research Vessel Beyster spent a week dragging sensitive machinery through the water around a submerged La Jolla canyon. They’re hoping to understand the complex processes that feed the rich ecosystem under the surface. Oceanographic engineer Sara Goheen says the team uses a winch system to raise and lower a CTD device which measures conductivity, temperature and depth. The team is tracking dye released near the canyon several days before. “we’re just yo-yoing it. Driving nonstop transects of the canyon back and forth. (00:01:49) To see if we can see the dye that we released on Tuesday. Which is letting us measure basically how the seafloor here is shaping what the water does when it’s hitting there and how the energy is dissipating or how energy is building up more. Or basically just what the canyon does to the area.” The four-foot-long tube resembles a model rocket. It can be raised and lowered quickly through the different ocean layers giving researchers a snapshot of the water column from surface to ocean floor. “this is the crash guard. This is actually going to be removed when we’re deploying it. This is just for on deck, because they are crazy delicate” There’s another tool that does roughly the same thing, but much slower. Instead of pulling and dropping that device as quickly as possible, it is designed to take its time. “It falls at a half a meter a second. It’s got these umbrella wings that actually open up in the water column so that it has a nice steady descent rate and it free falls. And we need it to free fall nice and slow so that the sensors on the tip of it, we have two different ones. One for sheer and one for micro temperature can go down through the water column almost like a phonograph needle.” And the information it gathers helps researchers understand the different layers of the ocean and how turbulence affects them. The warmer water near the surface is separated from deeper colder water by the thermocline. That’s an active barrier between warm and cold and it is also where the dye has persisted for nearly a week. Researchers added audio snapshots of the water column thanks to an acoustic device strapped to the side of the ship. “We can’t use lasers, things that use light in water. Because as you know probably by looking into the ocean, you can’t see very far down, so light attenuates very very quickly in water.” Post doctoral researcher Liz Weidner says the acoustic signals are sent to the bottom of the ocean every few minutes. The return echo helps fill in the gaps that the larger instruments miss. “We can also track the position of the thermocline. We can probably track it with very high resolution. We’re probably having an acoustic profile every one to five meters, which is much higher resolution than the CTD that we’re dropping and bringing back up. That’s maybe every hundred meters.” And for a solid week the vessel spent every day with instruments in the water tracking the dye in the constantly moving ocean. Researcher Matthew Alford hopes that data will help explain the underwater turbulence. “This information is providing us with fundamental fluid mechanics about how the ocean works that is super climate relevant. “Oceanographers think the underwater turbulence brings nutrients from the deeper waters to the warmer surface layer of the ocean. That feeds all manner of plant and animal life contributing to the vibrant undersea environment. “Simulations like this one have been done for years, but for this one I really like to see the structures in the dye. Two things. You can see how incredibly complicated the turbulent structures are.” Alford compares the underwater waves to the ones surfers might see on the surface. The tidal and wind driven ocean forces hitting the slope of the canyon fuel the water’s movement. The resulting patterns are complex but predictable. “This dye begins at the boundary, but very quickly, due to convergences in this process, gets shot out into the interior here. This three-dimensional aspect of the turbulence is not captured in the models that we have right now.” In the weeklong experiment, the dye released in the ocean teaches researchers about the underwater waves. And understanding the vigorous and complex turbulence that feeds life near the canyon is a small step toward understanding larger ocean processes that can affect things like climate. “Climate models have grid cells, you know, they divide the ocean into grid cells and the smallest grid cell in a state of the art climate model is San Diego County sized so everything that happens in La Jolla Canyon is not represented in climate models properly so we have to teach them how to represent that in what’s called parameterizations.” Better climate models will lead to better understanding of the changes that are coming as the oceans warm with the rest of the planet. Erik Anderson KPBS News
VOLUNTEERS ARE GUARDING A DIA DE MUERTOS OFRENDA IN HILLCREST. LAST YEAR'S OFRENDA WAS VANDALIZED.
REPORTER KATIE HYSON VISITED THE ALTAR IN THE HEART OF THE L-G-B-T-Q-PLUS COMMUNITY.
Nat music Obligo a que te olvide el pensamiento . . . Beneath the towering Pride flag wave brightly colored papel picados. Candles flicker around framed photos of loved ones who have died. And their favorite treats. Hot tamales. Concha. Fireball whiskey and a lone cigarette. At the center, a pair of work gloves worn black with use. Tucked among the frames are icons of the gay community. Leslie Jordan. Betty White. Marsha P. Johnson. And Mexican singer Juan Gabriel, whose song plays as traffic passes. A woman crowned in flowers sits guard. Last year, folks that didn't understand the ofrenda ended up destroying it. Karla Quezada-Torres says she is one of a dozen volunteers who have been guarding the ofrenda all day and night. She says the community ofrenda gives people a chance to grieve together. Sometimes that takes a lot more strength and courage . . . to embrace each other during a moment of pain. Many of the faces in this ofrenda are noticeably young. Quezada-Torres says that reflects death by suicide, homicide and AIDS among the LGBTQ+ community. But more than grieving, she says, they celebrate their lives. Amor eterno, e inolvidable . . . Katie Hyson, KPBS News
That’s it for the podcast today. As always you can find more San Diego news online at KPBS dot org. Join us again tomorrow, for the day’s top local news. I’m Debbie Cruz. Thanks for listening and have a great day.
