Yoga instructor goes to the mat against San Diego over citations

The battle between a yoga teacher and the city of San Diego is heating up.

- ALEX WIGGLESWORTH

NELVIN C. CEPEDA San Diego Union-Tribune PEOPLE attend a yoga class at San Diego's Sunset Cliffs Natural Park in 2020.

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.