Streetsblog California, Streetsblog San Francisco, and Streetsblog Los Angeles are published by the nonprofit California Streets Initiative. Our operations over overseen by a board of directors. When new leadership emerges on our board, we like to introduce them to our readers.
This year, the board added five new members: Steve Horn, Dan Crosby, Andre Villasenor, Pedro Peterson, and Jeanie Ward-Waller. Over the next couple of months, we'll introduce all of them to our audience (although you probably already know at least Jeanie). Today, we'll start with Steve Horn, who is not only a new board member, but our first board chair/president who doesn't live in Greater Los Angeles.
Background
Steve Horn grew up in one of the most distant northern suburbs of Chicago - so far north that it’s in Wisconsin. Kenosha, Wisconsin, on Lake Michigan, is the most distant northern suburb of Chicago.
“I actually grew up across the street from that rail line, and that was the train that my mom took to work every day,” said Horn. “She worked in Evanston, Illinois, which is much closer to Chicago. It’s one of the southernmost suburbs on that north line, but just north of the city.”
That early experience made him fascinated with public transit - being on transit, seeing public transit, anything related to public transit. He says he definitely took its easy availability for granted, with the local train stop within easy walking distance.
“As a kid, I knew I wanted to be a reporter. I read a lot of newspapers as a kid, and thought I was gonna be a sports reporter.”
“And then I got really interested in politics in high school. By then, I knew that in college I would either major in journalism, public relations, or communications.” But journalism was what he found he really liked, so for the next decade or so he worked as a reporter focused on climate change and energy issues.
Horn lived in the Midwest until later in the 2010s, when he moved to San Diego, where he became a reporter focused on local issues. "Then when the pandemic happened, I lost a job," he said.
"It was the first time I had been laid off after basically a decade in the profession. I was covering climate change at that time for an outlet called the Real News Network. And that was really the first point where I was asking, 'do I want to stay in journalism? What do I want to do next?'"
He got one more journalism job after that, but was already thinking along the lines of what his next move would be. So he switched to "the thing that I didn't want to do at the beginning of my career -- advocacy and communications -- working on a lot of the same issues I had been covering as a reporter," he said. "I’m still energy-sector focused, looking at climate change and trying to advocate for an energy system that's more sustainable and actually confronts the reality of the climate crisis." Now, his full-time work is mostly focused on research in those areas.
A Streetsblog Reader
"I became a Streetsblog reader right around the time I moved to San Diego," said Horn. He got a job as a local reporter for the largest community paper in the region. That was in North County San Diego, covering cities like Oceanside, Encinitas, Carlsbad, Escondido, and San Marcos.
"In San Diego, there are lots of intense debates over transit, transportation, and highway widenings," he said. "These existed before my move there. But while I was a reporter, there was a big proposal put on the map by SANDAG [San Diego Association of Governments], called the Five Big Moves. It was this really ambitious plan, especially by San Diego standards. It would have completely overhauled the reliance on driving, and would have connected the whole county with faster, better public transit. It would have been a multimodal move towards a modern way of moving people around the city, and given them more choices as to how to get around."
"For me, this is really interesting. I wanted to start covering this regularly, get really steeped in this stuff," said Horn. "I had a background as a climate reporter, but it was much more focused on energy, on covering the oil and gas industry."
"But the policy debates on this issue got me thinking: how am I going to follow this stuff every day? That’s when I came across Streetsblog."
"I signed up as a reader right around then, probably 2018 or 2019, and started covering those issues a lot in San Diego as well." His San Diego coverage naturally was connected to debates over housing, including the housing shortage, where does housing go and where should it go. A big debate has been whether housing should be infill, in already dense settings, or whether it should be built in canyons and open space areas. "Those juncture points got me more interested in following these issues," he said.
Housing, climate change, what the biggest sources of greenhouse gas emissions are: those have been Horn's focus. "I just started really going deep on these issues, becoming a regular reader of Streetsblog. That was my entry point," he said.
The SANDAG plan originated over a decade ago. In fact, it was a topic that Streetsblog covered before Streetsblog California existed. But it was Streetsblog's coverage of the Five Big Moves that got Horn engaged and interested.
"And then it wasn't that long after that when I got in touch with [Streetsblog]. I liked where you were. It took me a while to get comfortable enough around the issues, but once I did, I felt like I had a good understanding of multimodal transit, of how housing ties into the issues of sprawl and density. This also came up in my local coverage."
Horn reached out to Newton and Melanie Curry, Streetsblog California editor, to see if Streetsblog could extend and expand its coverage of San Diego.
"And then the pandemic happened, there's all other kinds of societal issues and life issues to deal with," said Horn. "And that fell off the radar."
Newton can remember the exact date that follow-up call was supposed to happen - his cat’s birthday, March 27, 2020, about two weeks after everything went haywire.
"In 2019, there was a lot of conservative backlash in San Diego to that Five Big Moves plan. By 2020, though, it wasn't even just that - transit ridership had really fallen off the cliff because of COVID." There had also been a proposal from the Metropolitan Transit System (MTS, San Diego's regional transit authority) to put a tax on the local ballot to support public transit in the city. "All of those initiatives took a hiatus, but that was when I started following this stuff closely, both in my personal time and then as a reporter," said Horn.
Streetsblog San Diego?
Streetsblog had been working to find a way to fund more regular coverage of San Diego, and had gotten close when the pandemic hit. What if Streetsblog had a writer on the ground in San Diego, whether part-time or full-time? What would they be covering right now?
"There's really two main things going on that are taking up a lot of time on the ground for advocates," said Horn. "One is a ballot initiative, similar to the 2020 ballot initiative, that would increase funding and resources for multimodal transportation within the City of San Diego. It's a little bit different than Five Big Moves, which was county- and region-wide, but still extremely important since the city of San Diego is by far the biggest municipality within the county."
"The other one, which is always ongoing in San Diego as a car-centric, stereotypical Southern California big city, is safety. One thing that I think would differentiate Streetsblog’s coverage from what you see every day here is that, while the regular press might publish headlines about someone dying or being killed by a car, they don't really give the bigger context of why this is happening. They don't discuss what it is about San Diego streets that makes them unsafe."
But there are some positive things happening in the region, said Horn. SANDAG is working on creating more bikeable areas, more bike paths, and more bike lanes.
"San Diego is a weird place, so it kind of gets lost sometimes in the big scheme, even though it's the third biggest metro area, behind San Francisco/Oakland/ San Jose and LA. But there are plenty of interesting initiatives taking place with bikes, as well as with the trolley system. With its expansion, the trolley now covers most of the city, mid-city and down to the US Mexico border wall. Those things could definitely use more amplification, more depth, more connection to the statewide context."
What Would You Change?
Streetsblog has a favorite interview question: if you could change one thing about transportation in California - magically, with no hearings, disputes, or arguments - what would you do?
Horn is ready with an answer. "Why would you drive an hour and a half or an hour and 45 minutes when you could get on public transportation for the same amount of time or whatever the equivalent is? If you could choose between being in your car for that amount of time or being on public transit for that amount of time, many more people would choose transit than do now. So I would make transit more accessible than it is now everywhere."
"That would be my number one thing to change - because then there are a lot of other things that could come from that. Centering development around transit stops, for example. And that just goes back to my origin story of how I got interested in this issue. Why was it such a no-brainer for me? It's because it was right there in front of my face."
"That's what I would hope that most people in the United States could have, especially in urban and metropolitan areas where most people live. And making public transit more accessible would go a long way towards the big picture issue that we're dealing with: climate change from greenhouse gas emissions. People would not have to rely on automobiles, and would have more choices. They would feel like they don't have to drive in their car to get everywhere, and that would cause a rethinking of day-to-day patterns and activities."
