Author Archives: Frank Gruber

A Generational Opportunity: Turn Santa Monica Airport into a Big Park

Posted on by
7

Tuesday night the Santa Monica City Council will spend an entire meeting considering the future of the Santa Monica Municipal Airport. It’s a topic that deserves the council’s undivided attention. (And gives me an opportunity to take a break from writing about housing policy.)

I’ve lived in the flight path since I moved to Santa Monica in 1983, and over the years I have made my share of calls to the airport to complain about noisy aircraft. My view, however, has always been that even if airplanes didn’t pollute, even if they never crashed, even if they didn’t make any noise, Santa Monica should do everything it can to close the airport.

The reason is that the airport’s 227 acres are a public asset that is too valuable to be used for private purposes, namely for aviation.

How valuable? At $200 a square foot, a conservative number for land in Santa Monica, the airport land is worth about two billion dollars.

But for the public, two billion dollars is not even close to the land’s true value. Even if Santa Monica had ten billion dollars, it could never again assemble a property this size to buy. The land is part of the legacy of the city, belonging to all of us, and it needs to become a public benefit.

We need to turn the mile-long runway, or as much of it as the City can liberate from the Federal Aviation Administration, and the rest of the open space at the airport, into a park.

Look at a map of the Westside; when it comes to open space, what do you see? The biggest green splotches are golf courses, most of which are private. Santa Monica is chronically under-parked, and the airport land is the last remaining potential site for a great park.

It’s time that this public asset benefit the public.

I hope you have seen the graphics created by the Sunset Park Anti-Airport group, showing conceptually what a park could look like both at a first stage, after the City closes the “Quitclaim” parcel that includes the westernmost 2000 feet of the runway, or what an expanded park could look like if the City can ultimately close the entire airport.

The possibilities are fantastic.

But can we build the park and pay for its operations?

Those who want to maintain the status quo say that we can’t return the park to public use unless we re-privatize it, by using development to pay for the public uses. And I have to report — with considerable disappointment — that the staff report for Tuesday night’s council meeting echoes this position, assuming, with no evidence, that any development would have to be dense and that Santa Monicans would not be likely to support a park that was adjacent to Los Angeles and would serve many from outside Santa Monica.

These arguments, based on fanning dark fears of the future, are wrong. The voters of Santa Monica, based on their track record of supporting schools and libraries, will support a parks bond to build the park. Given the regional importance of the park, regional funds should also be available.

As for operations, based on the increased income the City can achieve by repurposing existing buildings at the airport, and the increased property values and taxes that replacing the airport with a park will lead to, there should be adequate new income for operations.

I found the staff report’s prediction that Santa Monicans would not be likely to support a park because non-Santa Monicans would also use it to be so out-of-touch with the history of Santa Monica as to be insulting. Does any city in Southern California have more of a history of sharing itself with its neighbors than Santa Monica?

All of this needs professional analysis. City Council should direct staff to gather the facts and do the analysis with open minds — but with the goal of finding the solution that serves the public best.

The most egregious aspect of the fear-mongers campaign against change at the airport is that it dismisses the capacity of citizens and their government to make good decisions. The City of Santa Monica owns the airport land free and clear — it’s not like we have a mortgage to pay off. We are free to make good decisions. Fearfully sticking with the status quo would not be one of them.

Back in 1981 the City Council voted to close the airport — that goal has been city policy for a long time. A big park is the best use of the land. This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity. Even once-in-a-century. It can be done.

Thanks for reading.

Housing is Complicated, Post #2

Posted on by
Reply

In my last blog post I wrote about how affordable housing policy has interacted with the politics and economics of development in Santa Monica. In this post I’d like to look beyond that to some of the forces that shape the market for housing.

Housing attracts contradictions. Start with price. People generally complain when housing prices are too high: it’s not good when people have to spend too much of their income on decent housing (or even worse when they spend too much of their income on substandard housing).

But then bad things also happen when prices are too low. Think about the crash in housing prices in the Inland Empire — housing was suddenly much less expensive, but the rapid decline in prices caused a lot of heartache.

Affordable prices for real estate are not themselves a solution to poverty. Think generally about the most disadvantaged areas in Los Angeles County — property values are low, but because of low incomes, housing is still unaffordable to many, and many pay a lot (relatively) for poor quality housing. (Like any commodity, when it comes to housing price and value are related — think of those people paying $500 to rent a room in an illegally subdivided house.)

It costs real money to build good housing. High property values also translate into better public services — it may be an anomaly from our agrarian past, but governments rely on real property taxes. Many ordinary folks rely on the investments they make in real property.

Perhaps when we say that housing prices are too high, what we’re really saying is that incomes are too low.

Housing prices also make a joke out of the classic economics of supply and demand. You’d think that increasing the supply of housing would automatically lower prices, and certainly if there isn’t enough housing rents and prices will tend to increase. But if you believe the solution to high housing prices is simply to build more housing, I’ve got an apartment to rent you in Manhattan.

Many people want, need or like to live where many other people live, and so typically the most dense cities or the most dense neighborhoods in cities, where the number of units of housing is the greatest per acre, have, other things being equal, the highest rents and property values (at least on a per square foot basis).

That’s because these dense neighborhoods are typically convenient to “amenities” that people need or want, from jobs (most important) to shopping to entertainment. Supply is also not, as the economists say, “elastic”: there are always physical or legal restrictions on how much can be built in any given area.

I say that many people want or need to live near other people, because it’s not true for everyone. One mistake that people commonly make about housing is to generalize about housing needs and wants, usually based on their own. The housing policy of the whole country was misguided for decades, generations even, because of a generalization that all Americans wanted to live in single-family suburban houses.

The only good housing policy is a non-dogmatic housing policy. Beware anyone who says that everyone wants to live a single-family home in the suburbs or that everyone wants to live in an apartment in town.

Having said that, one always has to look at the realities of any given situation. In Santa Monica nearly 32% of all land in the city is zoned for single-family homes, but there are few empty single-family lots, and no matter what, virtually all new housing is going to be in some kind of multi-unit development.

It’s also not surprising that housing is expensive in Santa Monica. Many people want to live here, and it’s not only the beach or the weather that attracts them. Santa Monica was always a jobs center, but over the past 30 years Santa Monica added more than 9 million square feet of offices. We also built hotels and invested in our downtown, and employment increased in the hospitality industry and in retail. At the same time the enrollment at Santa Monica College increased significantly.

Little housing was built for these workers and students. Some say that our housing resources should go only to house current Santa Monica residents, but they ignore the reality that economic development in Santa Monica has contributed to a regional need for housing (and a local crisis in commuter traffic).

The demand for apartments in Santa Monica also reflects broad demographic trends affecting housing markets nationwide. The two largest generations in U.S. history, the Baby Boomers and the Millennials (roughly defined as those born between 1980 and 2000) are both increasing demand for apartments (and condos): the former because as they age they are moving out of now empty, single-family nests, and the latter because only the oldest of them have started to form families and look for nests to fill (and for cultural and economic reasons it appears that fewer of them than in prior generations want to live in the suburbs).

These demographic changes have resulted in changes to the form that households take. Some recent research indicates that over the next 20 years, 87% of growth in households will be households without children, and 53% of all growth will be single-person households. I see this in my own family — my 92-year-old father has lived alone since my mother died six years ago, and my 23-year-old son, when he starts graduate school at UCLA in the fall will be looking for his own apartment (on the other hand, he may not find one, which could mean that he’s won’t be living alone and that his parents won’t be empty-nesters).

The challenge for Santa Monica is to respond to the need to house people who work, study, and retire here, while at the same time providing housing for a full range of incomes, including housing for people who essentially have no incomes and would be homeless without assistance. As I said, it’s a challenge.

Thanks for reading.

Housing is Complicated — Post #1

Posted on by
2

I attended a fascinating meeting of the Housing Commission Thursday afternoon. The only item on the agenda was the question, which the City Council will likely take up this summer, whether the City should readjust the parameters for production of affordable housing. These parameters include the limits on income that households can make to qualify for affordable housing, and the amount of rents that affordable housing providers can charge. (The commission heard from a panel of experts, asked a lot of good questions, asked staff to come back with more information, and postponed making their recommendations until their meeting in May.)

Anyone who has paid attention to City Council hearings lately, on matters such as the Village Trailer Park, or what developments should receive expedited planning review, has heard a lot about the different categories of affordable housing. These include extremely low, very low, low, and moderate. These terms all have definitions, but those definitions vary depending upon various factors, such as where the financing comes from to build the housing or what governmental entity is making the rules and for what purpose.

Santa Monica has a definition of its own, which it uses for one purpose. (It uses other definitions for other purposes, too.) This definition was included in Proposition R, which the voters passed in 1990, and which requires that 30% of all multifamily housing built in Santa Monica be affordable to “low and moderate income households.” Prop. R defines those terms with reference to the Los Angeles County median income as determined by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development: “low income” under Prop. R means a household with income not exceeding 60% of the county median, and “moderate income” means a household with an income not exceeding 100% of it. Under Prop. R at least half of the 30% (i.e., at least 15% of all housing production) must be affordable to and occupied by low-income households.

Santa Monicans support the building of affordable housing – in 1999 voters here passed an authorization for the City to build more of it, an authorization that is generally difficult to get passed, and in opinion surveys the cost of housing regularly appears as one of the primary concerns of residents.

One of the many interesting aspects of Prop. R is that while its stated purpose is to make sure that Santa Monica as it evolves maintains its historic economic diversity, with housing affordable to both low and middle-income families, Prop. R also has the potential to limit all housing development. Under Prop. R the amount of market-rate housing development is limited by the amount of affordable housing: the number of market-rate units built under the “70%” is limited by the number of affordable units built under the “30%.” For instance, if only 60 affordable units are built, only 140 market-rate units can be built.

At the same time, the City has always relied on market-rate housing developers to provide at least some of the affordable 30% — particularly moderate income housing that can be financed from private markets without subsidy. With the end of redevelopment, which provided much of the funding for low-income housing, the City will be looking even more to market-rate developers to provide affordable housing by “subsidizing” it with profits from market-rate rents. (The City is also now going to seek housing funds from commercial development.) The equation works the other way, too – if you want a big number of units in the 30%, you need a big number in the 70%.

It should be no surprise then that the politics of affordable housing have always been entangled with the politics of development. Affordable housing advocates, including non-profit providers that have had to deal with anti-development groups the same as for-profit developers do, have often made common cause with the latter to fight restrictive zoning policies. Meanwhile, the largest for-profit developers of housing in Santa Monica have typically built affordable housing to satisfy their affordable housing obligations rather than pay an in-lieu fee because they know that if the 30% figure is low, they ultimately will not be able to build as much market-rate housing.

On the other side of the political equation, anti-development interests have used affordable housing requirements as a means of making development less financially feasible and otherwise more difficult.

Personally, this attention to affordable housing has given me an opportunity to learn about the effects of different parameters on how and what affordable housing gets developed, and about how affordable housing can be financed in the post-redevelopment world. In posts over the next couple of weeks I expect to share what I learn and my thinking on the subject.

Thanks for reading.

Who knew: commute times here are shorter than average. Huh?

Posted on by
6

In the man-bites-dog department, Santa Monica Patch recently linked to a story that showed that the average commuting time for most of the roughly 48,000 workers who live in Santa Monica was about 25 minutes — less than that of workers who lived in most of the rest of the L.A. region.

Actually, the story the Patch linked to was from WNYC, the public radio station in New York, and it was about long-distance commutes into New York City. The article, however, included an interactive map that provided access to data about commuting that the U.S. Census had obtained through its American Community Survey. The map is interactive in that you can enter a zipcode and move the map to that location; by moving the cursor over the map, you get the average commute times for different zipcodes.

The Patch entered a zipcode from Santa Monica (you can do this, too) and found that even though the consensus on the Westside is that traffic is worse here than anywhere else, in fact there is a swath of zipcodes running from the beach in Santa Monica to Westwood and Rancho Park where commuting times are lower than those in most of the rest of the L.A. region.

The average commute for someone who lives in 90404, in the center of Santa Monica, is 24.3 minutes, which is slightly less than the national average of 25.4 minutes. Being anywhere near the national average is quite good for L.A.

So how can it be that it’s often so hard to get around in Santa Monica, but Santa Monicans who work have relatively good commutes? The answer is that there are a lot of jobs in and near Santa Monica. While we often focus on the downside of our city’s being a job center, for people with jobs who live here it’s a good deal.  Because Santa Monica and the Westside have a lot of jobs the average Santa Monican has a shorter commute than the average person who lives in a more suburban part of the region farther from jobs.

And it’s not only Santa Monicans with jobs on the Westside who benefit. My wife teaches at USC and her commute, depending on when she leaves the house, averages around 25 minutes. But more significant, her commute is no worse, and perhaps better, than it was 20 years ago. Because of all the jobs in Santa Monica and on the Westside, when she leaves for work she’s sharing the road with fewer Westsiders; remember when the commuting pattern was the opposite of what it is today? It’s not that there are fewer jobs east of the 405, there are fewer people going to them from the Westside.

I have long argued that in the ’80s the City permitted too much office development — 9 million square feet rather than the 4.5 million forecast in the 1984 General Plan — because that unbalanced development threatened Santa Monica’s historic character as a sub-regional center for both jobs and housing. (Imagine if those extra 4.5 million square feet had been developed as housing rather than offices — our traffic situation would be better and the School District probably wouldn’t need to import out-of-district kids to balance the books.)

But it’s still important to analyze the reality of who (aside from developers) gains from any kind of development.

In this case, it’s not only commuters, but also homeowners who have benefited from the concentration of jobs.  Because people want to live near their jobs, and have shorter commutes, a lot of people want to live in Santa Monica and that goes a long way to explain why home values were relatively stable here during the downturn (and why most current development proposals are for housing). Santa Monicans who expect their equity to help pay for their retirements should be happy that people want to live here.

But we all wear different hats at different times. My wife and I commute, and we also own a home, but we also like to visit friends who live east of Centinela and we like to attend events in downtown L.A. When traffic has you trapped in Santa Monica in the late afternoon and evening, it’s hard to remember your good commute or even think about what the house next door just sold for.

Thanks for reading.

More Real World: Facts about Housing in Santa Monica

Posted on by
2

While there are some well-publicized proposals for building, or re-building, hotels in Santa Monica, most development currently proposed for Santa Monica is for new apartments in commercial zones. Given that development is controversial, it’s not surprising that housing is a hot topic in town.

Some people opposed to building more housing in Santa Monica argue that Santa Monica is being inundated with unprecedented development, that too much of the new housing being built is for “transients,” i.e., young renters, who don’t contribute to the community, that the density in these new developments is such that they will turn into slums, and that with all this new housing, Santa Monica will be overwhelmed with traffic.

Using the Internet tools that I have now, as described in my last post, learned to access, and with the aid of the 2008-2014 Housing Element of the City’s general plan, I’ve been trying to evaluate these claims against reality and history. I suspect that what I have learned will surprise many.

For instance, did you know that in 2010 Santa Monica had fewer renter-occupied units than it did in 1980? According to census data here are the number of renter-occupied and owner-occupied units in Santa Monica since 1970:

Year              Renter-Occupied Units         Owner-Occupied Units

1970                         30,785                               9,119

1980                         34,194                               9,718

1990                         32,520                             12,340

2000                         31,220                             13,277

2010                         33,602                             13,315

When you look at these numbers, what you realize is that in the ’70s, when Santa Monica was supposed to have been a “sleepy beach town,” there was a lot of housing development — a net increase of about 4,000 units of housing, mostly rentals. There was even more building in the ’50s and ’60s — according to the 2008 Housing Element, as of 2007, 19,087 units of housing in Santa Monica still in service, about 40% of the whole, were built during those 20 years (meaning that even more were built then, considering that many have been torn down since). I suspect there were many Santa Monicans then who lamented the changes taking place, but there was a lot of pent up demand for housing from when Santa Monica had industrialized in the War years and after.

In the 20 years after 1980, there was about a 10% reduction in rental units: the city lost thousands of rental units either because they were torn down under the Ellis Act or converted to condominiums under the City’s TORCA program. According to the Housing Element, during the ’90s only 110 units of housing, of all types, were built in Santa Monica, and the total number of occupied units declined.

In the ’90s, however, the City lost a lawsuit that its policies obstructed the construction of housing in violation of state law and in response instituted policies that encouraged development of apartments in commercial zones. Between 2000 and 2010 there was a net increase of about 2,500 units in the city, but even with that increase the number of rentals by 2010 had still not reached the 1980 level.

Obviously, compared to the past numbers, Santa Monica is not experiencing unprecedented development — nor will it even if all the projects in the pipeline get built, or even if all 5,000 housing units foreseen by the LUCE get built. Moreover, as a percentage of the whole, Santa Monica has less rental housing now than it has had in decades.

I bring this up because of the contention that Santa Monica is being overrun by “transients” living in small apartments. In a certain sense, this whole argument is distasteful — speaking as someone who was once 23 years old, and who now has a 23-year-old son, a 23-year-old working his or her first job out of college in a Silicon Beach office should have as much right to live in Santa Monica as a homeowner, or someone who has lived in a rent-controlled apartment for 30 years. (Obviously the latter two have more legal rights to their own dwellings — that’s not what I’m talking about.)

In a town where more than 70 percent of residents are renters, it’s shocking that people use anti-renter rhetoric to fight the building of apartments. Renters, of all ages and economic circumstances, don’t have to prove that they make positive contributions to the community.

Some Santa Monicans contend that these new apartments will turn into slums, but there is no evidence for this. Once again according to the Housing Element, as of 2007 approximately 68% of the housing in the city was built prior to 1970, most of it apartments, a lot of them cheaply built ding-bats. Have those apartments become slums? Does Santa Monica, which is 70% renter, have any slums? The most dense blocks of Santa Monica are in mid-Wilshire — some of the nicest neighborhoods in the city. In the real world of Santa Monica, there is no correlation between how many apartments there are per lot or whether people rent and slums. It’s all rather insulting to renters.

It’s not like everything is hunky-dory. We need to regulate housing growth to make sure we get a good mix of units and demographics, and that we have the infrastructure to support our new residents, in the form, for instance, of parks and transit. But when our worst traffic problems come from people commuting into the city, and when our school district needs to import students from outside the district to balance the books, it makes sense to build more housing here.

Thanks for reading.

The “Real World” — First Post of an Intermittent Series

Posted on by
4

If you participate in Santa Monica politics, one theme you hear often is that the planners and consultants the City hires to give advice don’t know Santa Monica and are out of touch with the “real world.” Santa Monica is truly special in many ways, but maybe because of that the appreciation for our town’s charms gets turned into a kind of “Santa Monica Exceptionalism” that is the opposite of boosterism. You know what I’m talking about — Santa Monica has the worst traffic, the biggest daytime population, the most homeless, the most development, even, to some people who mustn’t read the L.A. Times, the most corrupt politicians.

What I’m going to try to do, intermittently, in this blog is to examine some of the facts about Santa Monica to see how unique we are and what our real world is. Fact is, I got inspired to do this because during my campaign for City Council last year I met some young, data-oriented new friends who have pointed me to some fantastic online tools. One is a website the U.S. Census has established to give the public access to its troves of data. It’s called American FactFinder; using it takes a little practice, but once you get the hang of it, you can make charts, graphs and maps just like you were a real demographer. Another great site is Los Angeles Almanac, which has made census data for each of the cities in L.A. County accessible.

The first question I wanted to learn about was how dense Santa Monica’s population is compared to our surroundings. One common “fact” one hears bantered around about Santa Monica is that it’s the “most dense” city in the region, and I always wondered about that. As it happens, while it’s true that Santa Monica is more dense than the City of Los Angeles which surrounds it on three sides (Santa Monica’s population per square mile in 2010 was 10,664, while L.A.’s was 8,092), many of the small cities in central L.A. County have higher densities than Santa Monica. For example, Maywood’s density is about 23,250 per square mile, and cities like Bell, Hawthorne and Hawaiian Gardens have densities in the 15,000 range.

Well, okay, perhaps not many Santa Monicans spend time thinking about Hawaiian Gardens, and it’s true that Beverly Hills, Culver City, Pasadena, Burbank and Glendale all have densities in the five to eight thousand range. Still, driving around the Westside, or anywhere between the beach and downtown L.A., Santa Monica doesn’t seem comparatively dense. I wanted to find out where Santa Monica fits in its surroundings, population density-wise.

So I went to the FactFinder site and plugged in parameters to produce a map of L.A. County that showed the population density of each census tract. If you want to see the map, click here; wait a few minutes (depending on the speed of your internet connection you might want to get up and stretch); and voila, you should see a map that shows relative population densities for all the census tracts in the county — you can zoom in and out and move around to see more or less detail.

What the map shows is that except for the mid-Wilshire district, the population density of Santa Monica is on the low side, and decidedly less than that of West L.A. or along the Wilshire and Santa Monica Boulevard corridors. The City of L.A. is a big place, and its average density may be lower than Santa Monica’s, but most of L.A.’s west side, on the flats, is more dense.

What does it mean that Santa Monica’s population density is on the low-to-mid range? You might be surprised, but my answer is “not much.” But by that I mean that the issue of population density should be nearly irrelevant for any discussion of Santa Monica’s future, since our density is so unexceptional.

For instance, contrary to rhetorical flourishes, there’s nothing we could do that could lead to the “Manhattanization” of Santa Monica, simply because the population density of Manhattan is nearly 70,000 per square mile.

I can already hear a comment — “but our daytime population is 300,000!” But then Santa Monica is part of the Westside, which has the second-highest number of jobs in the region; what do you think the daytime populations of Century City, Beverly Hills or Westwood are?

That question could be the subject of a future post, but in the meantime, rather than deal with red herrings, straw men and tilt at windmills, can’t we focus on (i) solving the real problems we have and (ii) making Santa Monica an even better place than it is?

Thanks for reading.

Village Trailer Park: Politics and Planning and Planning Politics

Posted on by
2

It seems like a year in S. M. P. T. (Santa Monica Political Time), but it was only a week ago that the City Council approved the Village Trailer Park (VTP) project. I doubt if my saying this will make anyone on any side of the arguments over the project feel any better, but its approval in some form similar to what was approved was inevitable.

The reasons were state law and the city’s needs for the future development of the property.

Regarding the first point, it’s been often pointed out that under state law the developer, Marc Luzzatto, had the right to go out of the trailer park business. I recently read that there used to be 11 trailer parks in Santa Monica, back in the days when towing an Airstream behind the Studebaker was a popular alternative to motels for America’s on-the-road adventurers. At some point since then operating a trailer park became a not very profitable business, and the VTP is the last privately owned trailer park in Santa Monica.

However terrible it is for people to lose their homes, a misfortune that has befallen thousands of Santa Monicans who have lost their apartments over the decades, ultimately under this state law the residents of the trailer park had no rights to stay there beyond the benefits they would receive on relocation. (I have a lot of sympathy for people who lose their homes, not so much for people who use the plight of people losing their homes to stop a development they would oppose no matter what it replaced.)

Luzzatto’s right to clear the property for a new use was, however, only part of the story – the next question was, what could he then do with it? A developer’s options for developing a property are always dependent upon whatever development standards that local government imposes (or can impose). In the case of the VTP, in 2007 Luzzatto agreed to delay evicting any residents indefinitely in return for the City’s promise to negotiate a development agreement with him in good faith.

At that point, the City had to make a choice. Either it could grant Luzzatto the minimum rights to develop the property so as not to violate the “takings” clause of the Fifth Amendment, which would have resulted in some kind of warehouse or big box retail project, or it could grant him rights to build something more substantial that would spin off benefits the City wanted, such as new streets, and create development that the City actually could use, namely housing, and along the way generate less traffic than the warehouse or store.

While this was going on the City was developing the new Land Use and Circulation Elements of its general plan (the LUCE), and even if you have not read a word of the LUCE, a quick look at the pictures would tell you what choice the City was going to make.

And when I say “City”, I ultimately mean the City Council, because the council approved the LUCE (unanimously) and sooner or later four council members were going to agree on a plan like the one that was approved last week.

This doesn’t mean that the planning and political processes didn’t have effects – some good, some not-so-good. The most significant positive change happened when Luzzatto dropped his original plan that half of the development would be offices, and made it nearly 100% residential, with only a small amount of ground-floor offices and retail that will primarily serve the neighborhood. He also agreed to a good package of relocation benefits.

As for affordable housing, which became the flashpoint at the end, the record is mixed. By June 2012, when the Planning Commission voted to move the project (with reservations) to the council for final review, the project, which then totaled 486 units, included 109 rent-controlled apartments plus another 38 rental units that would be dedicated “affordable.” The project that was approved last week, with 377 units, also had 38 affordable units, but the difference was that in the 2012 project 11 units were affordable to extremely low-income households, while in the new project only three will be affordable to extremely low-income households. The city counts extremely low units as worth two very low units, and so the June 2012 plan delivered more affordability (and much more housing overall).

What happened in the meantime was that last summer, after the Planning Commission approved sending the project to the council, Luzzatto, responding to the outcry against the eviction of existing trailer park residents, voluntarily produced a revised plan under which instead of building all of the affordable units himself, he would donate a parcel of the property fronting Stanford Street that could first be used, indefinitely, to house ten trailers and which afterwards could be developed for affordable housing.

Luzzatto’s compromise proposal turned out to have unfortunate consequences for both him and the project; the council approved the project after the election in November but in December the newly-elected Council famously reversed the approval because in the view of four council members, two of them new, Luzzatto was no longer building enough affordable housing.

As we know, this led to litigation, and negotiations. The plan that the Council approved last week restored affordable units that Luzzatto would build, but left open the fate of the Stanford Street parcel to a future process, after up to ten trailer park residents stay in trailers there for up to ten years. Meanwhile, compared to the June 2012 plan, there will be about 100 fewer units built overall to house the many Santa Monica employees who want to live where they work.

But for Luzzatto’s gesture of trying to save 10 spaces for trailers last summer, one must conclude that the council as it existed in August 2012 would have approved something based on the June 2012 plan and the Planning Commission’s recommendations. On the long-term that would have been better for everyone, since now even the ten trailer park residents who get to stay in the Stanford parcel won’t be there indefinitely.

This is what happens when a planning process turns into a political process, but then no one said planning wasn’t political.

Thanks for reading.

Aside from Me and 10 Other Candidates, who Lost that City Council Election?

Posted on by
1

In my previous post, I wrote about what interests in Santa Monica politics “won” when Tony Vazquez won the fourth seat on the Santa Monica City Council in last November’s election. If, as I maintained, the winners were Santa Monicans for Renters Rights (SMRR), labor (as represented by Unite Here), and those who want to close Santa Monica Airport, who lost?

It may be logically impossible, but the losers were both developers and the anti-development faction.

Although I didn’t enjoy losing the election, to me it was at least positive for the city that Tony Vazquez won, because he was not a hero or villain for either the developers or the anti-development faction. Neither Santa Monicans United for a Responsible Future (SMURF), the developer’s PAC, nor the Santa Monica Coalition for a Livable City (SMCLC), the city’s leading anti-development group, endorsed Vazquez. Nor did Santa Monicans for Responsible Growth (SMRG), the anti-development PAC put together by the Huntley Hotel.

In fact, the election showed that development is not the deciding issue in Santa Monica that so many people seem to think is. The candidate who finished in fifth place, 1,100 votes behind Vazquez and almost 3,000 votes ahead of Richard McKinnon in sixth place, was Shari Davis. Although SMURF had endorsed her, her political base was in the education community and she had little history one way or another in Santa Monica land use politics.

Or consider that the two leading candidates, Ted Winterer and Terry O’Day, each received about the same number of votes (17,714 for Winterer and 17,122 for O’Day); both candidates had SMRR’s endorsement, but on the growth/anti-growth equation, they were portrayed as polar opposites, Winterer being seen as anti-development and O’Day as being pro-development. (I’m making no judgment here about the reality of their respective and comparative views on development, only on the perception.)

Now that we have the results of the new Residents Survey, none of this should be surprising. Santa Monicans have a broad understanding of the issues and appreciate how local government works. It shouldn’t be a shock that they elected two incumbents, one former council member, and one planning commissioner.

But “losing” the election meant different things for the developers and for those who oppose development.

The developers lost not because they failed to elect Shari Davis, who, as I said before had not participated much in development politics, but because their heavy-handed involvement in the election cost them in terms of credibility and trust. By spending nearly half a million dollars, much more than any candidates or other groups spent, they offended many voters and enraged the anti-development faction. Their campaign has made it harder now for Terry O’Day and Gleam Davis to vote in favor of any development, particularly any projects proposed by developers who contributed to the SMURF campaign, because the anti-development side will accuse them of being influenced by the campaign support.

On the other hand, the anti-development faction lost any claim that they represent the majority of residents, because the election showed how few voters cast their votes based upon an anti-development platform.

The anti-development faction, in the form of the SMCLC and SMRG, supported only two candidates in the election, Winterer and Planning Commissioner Richard McKinnon. McKinnon, by virtue of the support he received from SMRG, was the first non-SMRR candidate in Santa Monica history with anti-development support who received significant financial backing. He finished with 8,039 votes.

One educated guess I’ve heard is that in this election the endorsements from SMRR and Unite Here counted for about 10,000 votes. While Winterer and O’Day have support from different factions within SMRR who may have voted for one and not for the other (some SMRR voters are strongly anti-development, and some are what in Santa Monica passes for pro-development), it’s reasonable to estimate that they each picked up about 7,000 votes on their own.

Both Winterer and McKinnon have appeal beyond the anti-development faction, but from the numbers it’s reasonable to say that 7,000 is probably a good estimate of the number of voters (including SMRR voters who voted for Winterer and not for O’Day) who cast their vote primarily on the anti-development issue.

The total number of voters this year in Santa Monica was 47,945. Do the math – we’re talking 15 to 20 percent of voters. While no candidate this year came close to receiving the votes of a majority (because many voters don’t bother to vote in the local election, and because many who do vote don’t cast votes for all four seats), it’s clear that no one can win election to the council who runs exclusively or even primarily on an anti-development platform.

That being said, 7,000 votes is nothing to sneeze at, and in 2008 the anti-commercial development RIFT initiative received 18,410 votes, about 36% of the votes cast. That number is consistent with the finding in the Residents Survey that 43% of Santa Monicans consider the amount of development to be a serious issue. (Although I have to ask, who would say the amount of development isn’t a serious issue? Not me.)

Anti-development residents comprise an important voting bloc in Santa Monica. But the agenda for the majority of Santa Monica residents is much broader than any one issue. Can we keep things in perspective?

Thanks for reading.

About that City Council Election: Who Besides the Winning Candidates Won?

Posted on by
Reply

I posted Sunday about the City’s newly released survey of residents, which showed that Santa Monicans are not only happy to live here, but also generally credit our city government with doing a good job tackling a long list of important tasks.

The survey results provide a good lens for analyzing last November’s City Council election. Yes, that election, the one in which I was a losing candidate. Naturally, since losing, I have been thinking about what the election might have “meant.”

From a winner/loser perspective, the election was always between candidates who were trying to win the fourth seat on the council, since no one handicapping the election expected the two incumbents, Terry O’Day and Gleam Davis, to lose, and everyone expected Ted Winterer, a popular Planning Commissioner, who had across-the-board support and was running for the third time, also to win.

The fact that most groups making endorsements endorsed these three candidates reflected the expectation that they would win: everyone likes to back winners.

As it happened, Tony Vazquez, who had served on the council in the ’90s, won the fourth seat. In his (well-run) campaign, Vazquez ran almost as if he were an incumbent up for reelection. That was an excellent strategy in a town where, as the survey shows, 92% of the residents love to live here. In Santa Monica, it’s good to be an incumbent — the Tea Party wouldn’t get much traction here.

But winning election in Santa Monica requires getting your name out to the voters in the midst of a national election, which is not easy. It’s not just a matter of sending out mailers, which get tossed in the recycling bin fast. It requires forming coalitions of voting blocs. Vazquez put together a winning coalition, and to understand the dynamic of the election one needs to understand his coalition.

The first element of that coalition was Santa Monicans for Renters Rights (SMRR), which was by any measure the big winner in November. SMRR has dominated local politics for three decades, but this was the first time SMRR-endorsed candidates won every slot in the elections not only for City Council, but also for the School, Rent, and College Boards. SMRR also passed Measure GA, which changed the method for determining rent increases for rent-controlled apartments. The election proved that among the city’s happy voters, SMRR has the most trusted brand name.

But Vazquez’s victory was not preordained; not since 1981 had SMRR elected candidates to fill all the council seats being voted on in a regularly scheduled election. True, SMRR benefited from the fact that no non-SMRR candidates with name recognition equivalent to that of Herb Katz, Bob Holbrook, or Bobby Shriver were running, but electing all SMRR-endorsed candidates was nonetheless a remarkable (and unexpected) achievement.

While SMRR’s support was crucial, Vazquez could not have achieved his victory without the other elements of his coalition, notably the labor movement and the movement to close Santa Monica Airport.

In Santa Monica, Unite Here, the union that represents hotel workers, is the primary representative for labor. Unite Here endorsed the same four candidates as SMRR; Vazquez, for his part, has strong long-term labor credentials, and this wasn’t a surprise. Working with SMRR the union staffed an extensive door-to-door campaign and Vazquez did well in all the renter-dominated precincts.

It’s worth noting that of the organizations that traditionally endorse candidates in Santa Monica, only SMRR and Unite Here endorsed Vazquez. The police and city employee unions, and the education group Communities for Excellent Public Schools (CEPS) did not. Neither did the PAC that local developers and hotels formed (“Santa Monicans United for a Responsible Future”), nor did the PAC that the Huntley Hotel formed to support anti-development candidates (“Santa Monicans for Responsible Growth”). Clearly, looking back over 30 years of elections for council, the SMRR/Labor victory was dramatic.

The third element of Vazquez’s winning coalition was the movement to close Santa Monica Airport, and it was also important. This election marked a turning point for the anti-airport groups, which became more directly involved in the election than they had been previously, reflecting the fact that with the FAA Settlement Agreement expiring in 2015, the airport is becoming a huge issue.

Vazquez was one of four candidates given the highest anti-airport rating by Community Against Santa Monica Airport Traffic (CASMAT). Shari Davis, the candidate who came in fifth, lost to Vazquez only by about 1100 votes and she outperformed Vazquez on the city’s north side. But Davis was perceived to be the candidate most supportive of maintaining the status quo at the airport, and she lost to Vazquez by 863 votes in Sunset Park and Ocean Park, the neighborhoods that are “in the flight-path.”

So, if SMRR, Unite Here, and the anti-airport movement were the winning interests in the election, what interests were the losers? I’ll consider that question in my next post, but hint: they were two sides of the same coin.

Thanks for reading.

Happy City, USA

Posted on by
3

Every two years the City of Santa Monica hires a polling company to conduct a survey of public opinion, and the latest report has just been released. Jason Islas wrote a good summary of the report for The Lookout, but it’s worth taking a look at the report itself. (Which is accessible through the City’s staff report —the whole survey can be downloaded as a PDF from a link at the end of the report.)

What the survey shows is that Santa Monicans are aware of and care about a full range of urban issues and have a sophisticated understanding of how city government responds to those issues. But when reading the report one needs to take into account that the pollsters ask two kinds of questions: open-ended questions and direct questions, and the distinction is important for understanding the results.

When investigating what issues residents think are important the pollsters start with an open-ended question, asking their respondents, without giving any suggestions, to name one or two “most important issues” facing the city. Asked this way, no single issue (which was “too many homeless”) was mentioned by more than 29% of the respondents; one other issue, traffic congestion, was mentioned by 28%, and after that there was a quick drop off — 13% mentioned lack of parking, 10% cited too much development, and so on.

So from this it appears that there aren’t many issues that excite residents; good news at least is that when given two chances to bring up a problem, no more than 29% of Santa Monicans agree on any given problem as being important. At least this indicates that there is no single issue that has masses of us in a panic.

But the message is different if you look at the answers to questions where the pollsters name issues that might be important and the respondents aren’t limited to only two responses. When the survey asked residents to evaluate the importance of seven specific issues, clear majorities found that four issues (traffic (63%), affordability of housing (63%), number of homeless (62%), and lack of parking (57%)) were “very” or “somewhat” serious issues; lesser percentages believed that the three other issues were very or somewhat serious (amount of development (43%), crime (20%), and youth violence (15%)).

The universe of concern expands even further when the pollsters ask about city services. The poll asked respondents to evaluate 23 specific city services (from providing emergency services, to keeping traffic flowing, to providing affordable housing, to providing services to youth, etc., etc.) as to how important they were; what do you know, but according to the survey, majorities of Santa Monicans believe that all 23 services are important.

I said two paragraphs ago that how the questions are asked leads to a different message, but I want to amend that – in fact it’s the same message. Santa Monica residents have a broad understanding of what role a city government plays in managing our society, and an understanding of how complex the problems are. They’re not panicked about anything: when asked about how good a job City Hall does in providing each of those 23 types of services, on every issue only minorities of respondents said they were dissatisfied with the City’s performance. By a ratio of 2-1 respondents said they believed they had the opportunity to voice concerns to the City.

On the most basic question — when the pollsters asked them how good a place Santa Monica was to live — 92% said it was either an excellent place to live (60%!) or “pretty good.”

Yet some people still wonder why incumbents get reelected and why Santa Monicans for Renters Rights, the dominant political organization for 30 years, is the Number One brand name in local politics.

Much political discourse in our town invokes crisis – we seem to bounce from one to another, in response to whoever is complaining, and how loudly, about something at any given moment. They always say they represent the residents.

But our residents cannot be generalized about – except perhaps in the City’s motto: “Populus felix in urbe felice.”

Thanks for reading.