something like the 7 bridges but shorter. We mean a walk where you go slow, notice things, and feel like you're actually somewhere - not a nature trail or a beach path, but a neighborhood. Streets, alleyways, mixed-use blocks, historic housing stock, whatever makes it worth walking slowly.

Share the neighborhood and a rough route. If you've done one of our Walk & Talks, this is a good place to share what you highlight for visitors.

San Diego's zoning makes it functionally illegal to run a small neighborhood-serving business out of a residential building. A corner grocery, a cafe, a shop, a tailor or seamstress, a small workshop, a barber. The city's Micro-Enterprise Kitchen Home Operation (MEKHO) program is trying to change that in select areas, but has a lot of limitation for anyone else trying to bring some vitality to their neighborhood.

What would you open, or what would you want your neighbor to open, if the rules allowed it? Share the neighborhood and your idea.

These responses feed directly into our Home Enterprise (HEU) and Accessory Commercial Unit (ACU), shophouse policy work.

I have no idea how I missed this. I haven’t seen anything about it on instagram. Maybe I’ve fallen behind on their podcast.

If you’re a student, it’s free and I encourage you all to go. Otherwise it’s $65 prior to September 1.

One of the newer additions to San Diego's food scene MEHKOs (Microenterprise Home Kitchen Operations) are licensed home cooks selling meals from their homes.. We want to map the best ones alongside underrated food trucks and street vendors, or other little shops that don't show up on Yelp or Google Maps.

Micro-businesses are one of the best ways for a city to lower the bar for entrepreneurship, give people opportunities to build a living or family wealth, to create walkable neighborhoods. They let people take small bets on themselves before making major investments into leasing a larger restaurant or shop space and equipment.

Not only that, but they help the city generate more reliable tax revenue because these small businesses support the immediate community, have less tied up in debt and can survive economic downturns, and are also the businesses that their neighbors rally to save.

There are so many other benefits to building strong towns that these micro-enterprises have.

Share the name, neighborhood, and what to order. We'll compile the best into a neighborhood guide.

Share name & location in the comments and then vote for your favorites with upvotes.

Bonus points for parks that don't show up on every "best parks in SD" listicle. (sorry if you’re local to Kate Sessions or Balboa Park [say the specific part of the park if it's Balboa Park and less well known])

We’ll organize some events at these parks and then you can come hang out with us.

Join Strong Towns San Diego every 2nd Tuesday for our monthly community meeting and happy hour at The Gärten in Morena.

We gather to welcome new members, share local updates, and plan next steps for building a stronger, community first, and more financially resilient San Diego, one small bet at a time.

This is our home base for building a better San Diego, block by block, street by street.

Whether you care about walkability, housing reform, ending highway expansions, or better budgeting at City Hall, you’ll find people here who want to get things done. We share updates, host special guests, and collaborate on real solutions to make our city work better for people.

RSVP is unnecessary, but helps us plan (We're hoping to ditch Meetup soon so that you're not constantly hounded by requests to pay for their pro account...sorry)

🕕 Time: 6:00–7:00 PM meeting, happy hour to follow in The Gartën
📍 Location: 5328 Banks St Ste B · San Diego, CA. Back patio of Lost Cause Meadery (find the red door - back right corner)
🍕 Food & Drink: Come early to grab food or drinks from Pizza Cassette, Lost Cause Meadery, and Oddish Wine. They're all great local spots worth supporting. Spending money here helps keep places like this alive. We love welcoming, walkable third spaces that bring people together.

🍻Note: Beer from Deft Brewing must stay in the front courtyard...we’ll head there for happy hour after the meeting. Wine & Mead are welcome at Lost Cause.

***

💬 Why Monthly Meetings?

These meetings are where we align our priorities, build relationships, and coordinate local action. Other events like Walk & Talks and pop-ups will continue throughout the city, but this is our consistent place to connect, strategize, and support each other.

***

🚲🚌🚈 Getting There

The Gartën is easily accessible by transit and bike:

• Trolley: 5 minute walk from Morena/Linda Vista (Green Line) and 10 minute walk from Tecolote Road (Blue Line)
• Bus: Served by Routes 105 & 44, both within a few blocks
• Bike: Bike rack and lock-up area available right out front
• Parking: Limited onsite and street parking available, but we encourage you to try walking, biking, or transit if you can!

See you there!

The new Strong Towns San Diego website is live: https://www.strongtownssandiego.org

We made a major overhaul to the backend that will allow this to become a full San Diego urbanism content and event hub.

We’re hoping to do away with Meetup shortly due to how predatory that platform is, especially to people that don’t already have an account. Our new RSVP will be name and email only (to prevent duplicate RSVP) with optional newsletter sign-up included.

We’re also working on adding a page that shows all urbanism related events in San Diego. It will include filters for orgs that we like and partner with, city meetings and hearings, and all be filterable and subscribable. We know how hard it was for ourselves to find these groups locally when we started out and want to make sure that whatever niche you’re looking for, whether we’re organizing it or directing you to the organization that is, that you can get involved.

But even bigger is for the past year or so, we’ve been drafting policy positions and letters to city leaders and op-eds and haven’t found a good platform that gives us the ownership we would like, so we built it ourselves. No ads. No subscriptions. No big corporation that owns our platform ready to pull the rug on us when they decide they’re not profitable enough and want to raise rates on orgs like ours.

First up is our Finance Decoder analysis: 17 years of San Diego’s own financial data (FY2009-FY2025), run through the same fiscal condition indicators used to evaluate cities in Canada. Sustainability, flexibility, and vulnerability, tracked year over year instead of buried in a 300-page ACFR nobody reads. Full writeup here: https://www.strongtownssandiego.org/posts/the-finance-decoder-what-17-years-of-san-diegos-financial-reports-actually-show

If you’ve ever wanted to know whether the city’s financial position is actually improving or just looks that way in press releases, this is the tool. Even if you’ve seen our earlier Instagram carousels on this, the full writeup has even more details.

We’re also looking for writers. Approved contributors get a login (just needs a Gmail account) and can draft directly in the site’s WYSIWYG editor, then submit for review before anything publishes. We want range: policy, land use, transportation, local history, whatever you’re qualified to write about. Reach out via mod mail, Instagram, or email us at strongtownssandiego@gmail.com if you want in.

If you have an existing blog, podcast, website, or substack, we can also share on our website and direct people to your source with a short summary of what they’re getting and a link to your content.

We’re excited for the future and will be posting here.

No permits, no city approval, no asking for permission. $500, a weekend, and whatever your neighbors are willing to do together.

Paint, plants, furniture, signage, chalk, a bench, a Little Free Library, a community bulletin board. What would you actually do, and where? This is how Strong Towns thinks about tactical urbanism - the smallest possible bet that tests whether something works before anyone spends real money on it.

Come plan with us.

---

**Strong Towns San Diego** | [strongtownssandiego.org](https://www.strongtownssandiego.org)

A reliable public restroom is one of the most underrated indicators of whether a public space actually welcomes people. It takes a lot for a public restroom to leave a positive impression, so if you’re posting it here, it must be worth the trip.

The ones that are locked, broken, or just gone…please submit a Get It Done report.

We’re planning our next event. Should we pick somewhere with excellent public bathrooms?

I know there have been tons of posts over the years asking for things like “best theater experience” and answers offering the best mix of quality picture, sound, seating, size, etc.

All I want to know is which theater offers the closest aspect ratio to the 1.43:1 aspect ratio that true IMAX is presented in.

I also am hesitant to accept the Ruben H Fleet screen as the answer since it’s curved and will distort the projection unless you’re sitting in a center seat.

I don’t care about audio or seat comfort or screen size.

Thanks

Experiencing a weird behavior on Mac. I saw an almost identical Windows issue posted in this same sub last year, but no solution.

1. I search for something on Google (using the address bar)
2. I click the result I want. The result opens in the same tab.
3. If it's not what I'm looking for, I hit the Back button, but it doesn't work. It acts as though this current page is the first in my history.

Why is this happening and how do I fix? This wasn't like this before. I could always hit "Back" and go back to my results.

I know how to fix this in Chrome for Android. There's this config page where the value is set to -1 and you change it to 0.

• Go to chrome://geckoview/content/config.xhtml
• Search for browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers
• If it's set to -1 change it to 0

Can't find it in Firefox for MacOS.

Thank you!

MacOS Tahoe Version 26.4.1 (25E253)

Firefox 151.0.1 (aarch64)