Battle over free public yoga classes pits 'NamaSteve' against a SoCal city
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Set us as preferred The battle between a yoga teacher and the city of San Diego is heating up.Steve Hubbard, known as “NamaSteve,” recently filed a third lawsuit alleging the city has violated his rights by citing him for teaching free public yoga classes.And in a separate ongoing civil case, the city has issued nearly two dozen subpoenas seeking a broad array of GPS and social media data on Hubbard and his associates, according to his attorney Bryan Pease.“Free speech is the bedrock of our democracy,” said Pease, who filed the most recent lawsuit on Hubbard’s behalf June 22 in San Diego County Superior Court.“If you start chipping away at it and preventing people from doing something as simple as speaking in a public park, in this case about yoga, you create a dangerous precedent.”The San Diego city attorney’s office declined to comment, citing the pending litigation.At the center of the controversy is a sidewalk vending ordinance San Diego adopted in 2024 that also prohibited yoga classes of four or more people at shoreline beaches and parks without city permission.
A federal appeals court last year found the prohibition to be unconstitutional.Hubbard and another yoga instructor, Amy Baack, first sued San Diego in federal court in June 2024, alleging the ordinance violated their 1st Amendment rights.One section bans providing services without a permit and includes yoga as an example.
Another prohibits giving lectures in public parks without city permission.In January 2025, a federal judge ruled that portion of the ordinance overburdens free speech rights by prohibiting anyone from providing any lecture in any San Diego public park or beach.Yet park rangers continued to cite Hubbard under that section, issuing two misdemeanor citations in May 2025, as well as a third that cited a different section of the ordi...