Tag Archives: LUVE initiative

The local vote: preliminary post-mortem

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Shell-shocked after the presidential vote, I’ve been slow putting my thoughts together on the local election. In fact, when analyzing local elections it’s a good idea to wait a few weeks until the final results are certified. The results rarely change (except occasionally in a close City Council race, as Ted Winterer will ruefully acknowledge), but until all the absentee and provisional ballots are counted, one can’t speak about important matters like total turnout, or how different neighborhoods voted.

But in the meantime I can make a few points.

The defeat of Measure LV. Again, the final numbers aren’t in, but it looks like LV, the “Land Use Voter Empowerment Initiative,” performed the same as its predecessor anti-development initiative, the “Residents Initiative to Fight Traffic (RIFT) did in 2008. RIFT got 44% of the votes cast on it, and right now LV is also at 44%. RIFT got about 36% of all votes cast—we won’t know that number for LV until we have the final returns.

While there are Santa Monicans who want no more development, and many residents who will vote yes on anything that promises to do something about traffic (and in a certain sense who can blame them?), there is a solid majority that does not want to plan by ballot box and/or will not arbitrarily restrict future development based on arguments about traffic or community character.

The vote was consistent not only with RIFT, but also with past votes to allow the development of affordable housing (in 1999) and to adopt the 1994 Civic Center plan. The last time a measure aimed against development passed in Santa Monica was the 1990 vote on Michael McCarty’s beach hotel. In the meantime, despite opposition from some elements of the anti-development side, Santa Monica voters have passed many bond issues and taxes, including this year’s Measures GS and V.

They want to manage change intelligently, but most Santa Monicans are not afraid of it.

The LV side has already blamed their loss on the big money spent against LV. But the 2014 vote on the competing airport measures showed that massive expenditures do not persuade Santa Monica voters. The aviation industry spent almost a million dollars, outspending the anti-airport, pro-park campaign by about six-to-one, but still lost overwhelmingly.

Santa Monica voters are sophisticated. Once they have enough information to make up their minds (which takes a campaign because most residents don’t pay attention to local politics), they make up those minds. The anti-development side can’t have it both ways – they can’t claim repeatedly and vehemently that only they represent the residents, and then consistently lose elections. Not, in any case, without implying that residents are ignorant dupes.

Perhaps Residocracy and the Santa Monica Coalition for a Livable City will take these results to heart and start describing themselves as speaking for “many” residents, which is powerful enough. I doubt it. Speaking for others is a hard habit to break. One might also hope that they would stop describing people who disagree with them as corrupt, but what was startling in this campaign was how viciously the LV’ers attacked opponents who had long been slow(er)-growth standard-bearers. All of a sudden stalwart controllers of growth like Kevin McKeown and Ted Winterer were the tools of developers, on the take. I tip my hat to them for taking the abuse; I hope that they are aware that they were only getting in the back what opponents of the no-change mindset get thrown in their faces everyday.

As for the City Council election, it was no surprise that the four incumbents won easily. The shocker was that Terry O’Day came in first. I assumed that since he was the only incumbent running without the endorsement of Santa Monicans for Renters Rights (SMRR), he would be the trailing winner. In my recollection, neither Bob Holbrook nor Herb Katz, the council’s longtime non-SMRR members, ever finished first. O’Day also voted for the Hines project. He came in first nonetheless.

This year SMRR didn’t endorse O’Day and two years ago SMRR didn’t endorse Pam O’Connor. Both were elected. But for elevating the development issue above all other issues affecting Santa Monica, SMRR would now be in a situation where all seven members of the council owed their election to SMRR, or believed they did. Instead, now SMRR is back to where it was when Holbrook and Katz were the two independents.

I’ll have more when all the votes are counted.

Thanks for reading.

 

LV: I take it personal

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Over the weekend my son Henry wrote a note to his Facebook friends explaining why he felt so personally threatened by the candidacy of Donald Trump. Henry, who is getting a Ph.D. in Ancient History at an Ivy League university, has no personal reason to worry about Trump. He has a lot of “privilege,” which he’s well aware of, and he’s not going to need an abortion.

What he wrote was that he feels, however, that Trump is attacking him personally because Trump attacks the kind of place where he grew up, namely Santa Monica, part of greater Los Angeles, a dynamic, multi-ethnic metropolis. In his words, Henry “grew up in the America that Republicans fear, the America that Donald Trump attacks.”

Henry’s piece made me reflect on why I am viscerally opposed to Measure LV, here in Santa Monica. I’ve been writing about LV the past few weeks, focusing on the policy and political issues. Dry stuff. But as I thought about it, much of my reaction to LV comes not from my policy wonk side, but from my personal experience.

I consider LV an attack on two generations of Grubers: my father and my son.

Why? Well, as for my father, as my parents crossed into their eighties, they were living in Philadelphia, far from any of their three children. They were “getting up there,” but as always they were cleared-eyed about the future. They knew they would need help.

Based on new zoning Santa Monica had adopted for downtown in the ’90s, for the first time developers were building apartments downtown on land zoned commercial. I wrote a column about the new apartments after seeing a billboard advertising them. My folks read the column and asked me about moving here, into one of them. I encouraged them to do so, and in 2003 they became the first tenants in a new building on Sixth Street, a little north of Colorado.

The proponents of LV despise the apartments that have gone up in downtown Santa Monica over the past 20 years. They say they ruin the character of Santa Monica. But to my parents that apartment on Sixth Street has been a godsend. My mother died in 2007, but my father still lives there. At 95 he doesn’t get out much, and he has nearly 24-hour care, but the apartment has preserved his way of life.

The apartment has been a godsend for me, too. The apartment is three blocks from my office, and I have lunch with Dad three or four times a week, and brunch on Sunday. We go out to dinner often—one of our favorite places is a Japanese place, Ninjin, around the corner. I can’t imagine how things would have worked out if my parents couldn’t have moved here.

What about the other Gruber generation, i.e., Henry, that I say LV attacks? At some point in the hopefully not-to-distant future Henry is going to have his Ph.D. and, assuming universities are still teaching about the Romans, he’s going to be looking for a job. Little would make him happier than to get one in L.A.—because he loves L.A. and he’d love to raise his family in Santa Monica. Fortunately, there are many terrific colleges and universities here that might hire him.

But let’s face it—a generation ago, when many of the proponents of LV were buying their houses, a college professor could afford a house in Santa Monica, but today? Forget it: if you’re young and you’re not a tech millionaire, how are you going to buy a house here?

Okay, but Henry is “urban” enough that, like many in his generation, maybe he doesn’t need a single-family house. What about a condo, or a nice apartment? Under LV, those aren’t going to be built in Santa Monica. The City already, rightfully, does a lot to preserve our residential neighborhoods, and little will built in them. Our new zoning thoughtfully directs new housing to commercial zones, like along the boulevards and downtown, and on former industrial lands, where no residents are displaced and connections to transit are usually good.

LV, by design (its author, Armen Melkonians, told the City Council that Santa Monica doesn’t need more housing) will prevent that kind of housing from being built.

In the name of preserving the character of Santa Monica, a character that has been evolving for a century, and a character that for 60 years or so has seen most of the city’s population live in apartments, the proponents of LV wish my Dad’s apartment had never been built and wish that a future home for my son, a son of Santa Monica, will never be built.

Sorry if I take it personally, but LV is an abuse of the character of our city.

Please Vote No on LV.

Thanks for reading.

LV does not stop gentrification—it encourages it

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Of all the strained rationales that otherwise progressive Santa Monicans resort to for supporting Measure LV the one most difficult to understand is that LV will stop gentrification.

Measure LV is designed to stop the development that would be allowed under the general plan land use and circulation updates (LUCE) adopted in 2010 and the zoning ordinance passed in 2015. The proponents of LV argue that this amount and kind of development would cause gentrification. This development would mostly be, as most development over the past 20 years in Santa Monica has been, multi-unit housing downtown and in other commercial zones.

Under LUCE and the new zoning, housing development is expected to continue to occur at the rate of about 250 units per year, annually about a one-half of one percent increase over Santa Monica’s approximately 50,000 existing housing units. Under 1990’s Measure R, at least 30% of these units must be deed-restricted affordable to low- and moderate-income tenants. Under LUCE and the new zoning, nearly all of these units will be built on land zoned for commercial development, i.e., not in neighborhoods.

According to LV’s proponents, development of these residences would cause gentrification. Could this be true?

How to define gentrification has been the subject of much academic discussion, and the word is used in various circumstances. What people who fear gentrification in Santa Monica mean, however, when they use the term, and what they fear, is that previously low rents and housing prices in neighborhoods (chiefly the Pico Neighborhood) are increasing so as to be out of the reach of historically low-income residents. They fear that new residents with higher incomes are moving in, increasing pressure on housing costs, and displacing long-time residents.

The causes of this influx are Santa Monica’s increased attractiveness, such as has resulted from the rebirth of downtown over the past 30 years, the city’s good schools and other services, and the higher-paying jobs that came to Santa Monica as offices and post-production studios replaced factories. Residents concerned about gentrification even fear the effect of the Expo light rail (even as they welcome it): a neighborhood, Pico, that was once “across the tracks” now is “along the tracks” and near Expo stations, adding to the value of real estate and making apartments there more desirable.

There’s no question that housing costs have increased in Santa Monica, including in former low-rent districts like Pico. Rents and housing prices have been increasing all over the L.A. area, including in low-income areas, as a result of a housing shortage that has been much discussed, but Santa Monica has housing costs that are among the highest in California and thus in the country. (Santa Monica also has a lot of upscale apartments, which raise the average rent.)

These high rents have attracted developers. Starting about 20 years ago the City began encouraging developers to build apartments in commercial zones, particularly downtown. The purpose was to take development pressure away from neighborhoods. In the late ’80s and early ’90s developers were using the Ellis Act to tear down rent-controlled apartments and replace them with condos. The City made it more difficult to do that, and compensated (because state law said the City couldn’t block the building of housing) by encouraging residential development in commercial zones. The LUCE and the zoning ordinance continue these policies.

Do these developments drive gentrification? Do they increase rents in low-income neighborhoods, driving residents out? The answer is no, for several reasons.

For one, adding to the housing supply does not increase rents on old housing stock, even if high rents in new buildings raise the average rent citywide. This doesn’t mean that increasing the housing supply will necessarily lower rents, since rents are determined by many factors, including regional supply-and-demand and the attractiveness of a particular location, but if high-income people moving to Santa Monica have more choices for apartments, particularly new apartments, it’s less likely that these potential “gentrifiers” will seek to rent old apartments in historically low-income neighborhoods.

Conversely, not building new apartments, the purpose of LV, would increase the pressure on historically low-rent neighborhoods. If our theoretical gentrifiers can’t find housing in high-end neighborhoods, or in a “happening” area like downtown, they are more likely to look for something in Pico.

This is what has happened in Sunset Park over the past 30 years with single-family homes. Bungalows that once housed Douglas factory workers were purchased and upgraded and now go for millions of dollars. I.e., the neighborhood gentrified (to the financial benefit of anyone who held onto the old bungalow).

While there isn’t room in Santa Monica’s R1 zones to build more single-family homes, there remains room in commercial zones to build apartments and condos to take pressure off neighborhoods like Pico. (With the added benefit that replacing potential commercial development with residential reduces the growth in traffic congestion.)

There’s also a danger with LV that as single-family home prices continue to increase in Santa Monica, reflecting demand for home-ownership, and without the building of condominiums to absorb the demand, owners of rent-controlled apartment buildings will use the Ellis Act to tear them down and replace them with large, single-family homes, which can be built “by right” with no planning review. This is already happening in a few instances.

So, no, LV will not stop gentrification. Just the opposite.

Thanks for reading.

 

 

 

LUVE: What we don’t need now

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When voters submit an initiative to enact a law, Section 9212 of the California Elections Code authorizes the relevant legislative body to commission a report analyzing the impacts the initiative would have, including, specifically, its impact “on the use of land, the impact on the availability and location of housing, and the ability of the city to meet its regional housing needs.”

The State of California considers those issues to be important, and so does the Santa Monica City Council. When presented last month with Residocracy’s “Land Use Voter Empowerment” initiative (LUVE), the council requested a Section 9212 report, which it received from city staff last week. The council will consider the report at its meeting tomorrow night.

The 65-page report is negative about LUVE, which would, in general but with some exceptions, require voter approval of new construction taller than 32 feet. The report finds not only that LUVE would have many negative unintended consequences, such as making post-earthquake reconstruction problematic, but also that LUVE would have a negative impact on its ostensible intended consequences, such as preventing worsening traffic congestion and gentrification.

The report also explains why LUVE, or most of it, would be unenforceable under state law, because state law does not allow voter approval of administrative decisions, and how legislation Gov. Jerry Brown is about to get passed streamlining approvals of certain urban residential developments will likely override much of LUVE.

For all that, the scope of the Section 9212 report does not extend to the two most damning arguments against LUVE: one, that there is no overdevelopment crisis in Santa Monica that requires the drastic solution of voter approval over development, and two, that it would be a nightmare to have to vote on development decisions.

As for point one, for more than 40 years, with little resort to ballot box government, Santa Monica has closely regulated development. Ever since the public rose up in the ’70s and elected new city councilmembers to stop the destruction of the Pier and the building of an island in Santa Monica Bay, there has been a consensus that the City needs to control development. While land use politics in Santa Monica can be remarkably bitter, the differences Santa Monicans argue over are small when looked at objectively, or regionally, i.e., compared to growth in the surrounding City of L.A., L.A. County or southern California as a whole.

Contrary to Residocracy’s rhetoric, Santa Monica has intensified its regulation of growth over the past 20 years. A recent analysis showed that since 2003 only about an average of 48,000 square feet of net new commercial space has been built in Santa Monica annually; compare this to the 9,000,000 square feet of office development that was approved in the ’80s and built by the mid-’90s.

Residential development has also been modest. Since 2003, Santa Monica has seen an average net increase of about 230 new housing units a year. Given that Santa Monica has nearly 50,000 units in total, this increase is only about half of one percent per year. This is not massive overdevelopment. It’s fear mongering to claim, as Residocracy does, that LUVE is needed to prevent future overdevelopment.

This doesn’t mean that there won’t be controversies about development in the future. The City is in the process of making decisions for the next 20 or 30 years of development in downtown. Vigorous debate is healthy and to be expected. But based on the history, there’s no reason to suspect that planning staff and our Planning Commission and City Council can’t make intelligent decisions that balance the pros and cons of new plans and proposals.

As for the second crucial argument against LUVE, do we really want to vote on development proposals and planning documents? Is ballot box government a good idea?

Before you answer that question, consider that in November there will be 17 statewide measures on the ballot. Things aren’t yet settled, but it looks like there will be at least a dozen county, city, or school measures also on the ballot, including several crucial tax measures. It’s been a century since the “Progressive Era” reforms brought the initiative and referendum to California. Was it ever intended that voters would have a ballot with 30 measures to vote on?

For every great initiative like the Coastal Act, there are dozens of nightmares. It’s not that initiatives don’t sometimes respond to real problems, but the nature of an initiative is to remove the flexibility to respond to change that is one of the virtues of representative democracy. Initiatives also have a multiplier effect, since they typically require more and more votes on matters that used to be routinely left to elected representatives. California government, for instance, at all levels has been hobbled by the restrictions of Prop. 13 and 218 on the power to tax. Weakening government has not made government better or improved the lives of Californians.

LUVE wants to do the same thing with the power to plan. According the City’s Section 9212 report, currently there are 12 proposals to build apartments in Santa Monica and 10 of them would require voter approval under LUVE. Assume that even half the developers decided to brave the process instead of taking the easy way out and building low-slung retail or offices, which are quite profitable (but which, by the way, generate more traffic than housing). Would you want to vote on five apartment buildings in 2018? How many campaign mailers can your mailbox hold?

Let’s say you do want to vote on them all—are you ready, willing and able to review the hundreds of pages of documentation and plans necessary to conscientiously evaluate each project?

Thanks for reading.

A map from the Section 9212 report (fig. 4, page 26) showing all the buildings (residential in green, commercial in pink) in Santa Monica that would have required voter approval if LUVE had been in effect when they were built.

A map from the Section 9212 report (fig. 4, page 26) showing all the buildings (residential in green, non-residential in pink) in Santa Monica that would have required voter approval if LUVE had been in effect when they were built.

Moving goal posts and new players: the plight of anti-development politicians

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After last night’s City Council meeting Councilmember Sue Himmelrich might understandably have a “no good deed goes unpunished” feeling. You see, Himmelrich proposed that council direct staff to prepare a ballot measure for November that would be an alternative to Residocracy’s LUVE initiative. Himmelrich, whom Residocracy endorsed when she ran for council in 2014, proposed a measure that would give voters the right to approve large projects, but one that would not be as draconian as LUVE and therefore (presumably) have a better chance of passing. Residocracy, however, slammed her and her proposal even before the meeting began.

On Monday, on Residocracy’s Facebook page, Residocracy’s Tricia Crane derided Himmelrich’s proposal, calling it “an attempt to confuse voters,” and one that showed the “desperation” of councilmembers (presumably Himmelrich) “to retain power and defeat the LUVE initiative.” Ouch. (Later Crane, I suppose to make sure her sentiments were not limited to Facebook users, forwarded the Facebook exchange to her neighborhood group, Northeast Neighbors—that email must have gone viral, because even I received it.)

Crane was right about the potential confusion. (If not about Himmelrich’s motivations, which seem sincere.) As pointed out last night by, of all people, Residocracy-nemesis Councilmember Terry O’Day, having two similar measures on the ballot would create confusion. If the anti-development vote were split, probably both would lose. The cynical thing would have been if the councilmembers opposed by Residocracy had supported Himmelrich’s motion. (Neither they nor any other councilmembers did, and the motion died without a second.)

As for Crane’s attack on Himmelrich, the first-term councilmember is not the first anti-development politician to engage the wrath of anti-development constituents feeling scorned. Even Councilmember Kevin McKeown, over many years the most consistent anti-development voice in Santa Monica politics, is now enduring nasty attacks because of his opposition to LUVE.

There’s a pattern. History repeats. (Not sure just when the attacks might have been tragic, but certainly, with the attacks on McKeown and Himmelrich, we’ve now reached farce.) For reasons that I’ll get into below, at some point anti-development politicians and their anti-development constituents tend to part ways. Consider what happened the first time Santa Monica elected a City Council majority consisting of members who had all been elected with anti-development support.

That was in 1999, when after a special election Richard Bloom joined councilmembers McKeown, Michael Feinstein, and the late Ken Genser, all of whom had been elected with anti-development support. In short order the four proceeded to replace the entire Planning Commission with anti-development activists drawn from neighborhood associations. Long-term planning in the City came to a stop, as the new commissioners, led by former councilmember Kelly Olsen, browbeat planning staff, whom they accused of being in the pocket of developers.

But the anti-development majority began to fall apart in 2001 when Genser, Santa Monica’s original anti-development councilmember, voted in favor of Target; the other three were opposed. Then in 2003 Feinstein infuriated the anti-development side by voting against reappointing Olsen to the Planning Commission. Not entirely coincidentally, Feinstein lost his bid for reelection in 2004.

As for Bloom (today, of course, Assembly Member Bloom), his views evolved as he became more involved with social and environmental issues. Although Bloom’s original political base was among anti-development homeowners in Sunset Park, by 2005 or so he had become a strong supporter of housing and economic development. By 2008, both Bloom and Genser opposed the RIFT initiative, and were on the outs with their original anti-development supporters.

So why do anti-development councilmembers and their constituents become estranged? The anti-development side will tell you it’s because all politicians are corrupt and ultimately get bought off by developers, but empirically that’s not true. The real reasons are more complex.

Briefly put, when it comes to the goals of the anti-development side, as soon as one goal is achieved, a new, more extreme goal is created. In Santa Monica, where everyone involved in politics wants to regulate development to some extent (we’re all Democrats, right?), this means that a politician elected on a platform advocating one level of regulation soon finds, after voting for regulating development at that level, that some aggrieved constituents want him or her now to adopt higher levels of regulation, levels that the politician might not be comfortable with, whether because he or she is aware of legal restrictions or simply because he or she doesn’t want to go that far in preventing change.

Consider what’s going on now. In 2004 City Council began the LUCE process, and responded to anti-development sentiment (i) by pushing nearly all new development into commercial and industrial districts comprising a small fraction of the City’s land area (a good idea) and (ii) by making nearly all significant development discretionary (not such a good idea). In 2010 the LUCE was finally adopted—with the support of the anti-development community.

But when, a few years later, City staff was drafting the new zoning ordinance, suddenly there was a new target: the largest projects allowed under LUCE, discretionary projects called “Tier 3.” Last year when the zoning ordinance finally came to a vote, the new anti-development majority (McKeown, Himmelrich, Tony Vazquez and Ted Winterer) voted to eliminate nearly all Tier 3 projects.

McKeown, Himmelrich, Vazquez and Winterer retained, however, LUCE’s Tier 2, the zoning standard that allows the continued building of the kind of housing (apartments over ground floor retail) that has been the standard in Santa Monica since the ’90s. Moreover, the four have voted several times to approve more of these apartments. These votes have infuriated the extreme anti-development element represented by Residocracy, i.e., those Santa Monicans who insist that new apartments are incompatible with the character of a city that is 70% renter. Which is why Residocracy has now brought forward LUVE, which would for all practical purposes eliminate Tier 2.

So there you have it, anti-development mission creep: limit development to commercial areas and make nearly all of it discretionary; eliminate Tier 3; eliminate Tier 2. If you don’t follow us every step, you’re a paid stooge for developers.

There’s another factor, too: the constant entry of new people into the political process from the anti-development side, people who don’t necessarily have knowledge of the anti-development battles that preceded their involvement. Ten years ago, after more than 25 years of anti-development politics (and policies, many good, to control growth), the new group in town was the Santa Monica Coalition for a Livable City. SMCLC, acting as if no one had ever noticed traffic before, came up with the RIFT initiative in 2008, but SMCLC now takes a backseat as Residocracy drives the agenda. It’s telling that the three key leaders of Residocracy—spec mansion developer Armen Melkonians, North of Montana realtor Kate Bransfeld, and Tricia Crane, who formerly directed her activism to the School District’s special education programs—did not participate in any significant way in local development politics until three or four years ago.

It’s this combination of shifting goal posts and new players, not developer money, that causes the inevitable disconnect between anti-development politicians and their original anti-development base.

Thanks for reading.

Housers, united by LUVE

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So far I’ve avoided writing about Residocracy’s “Land Use Voter Empowerment Initiative” (LUVE), but now that the Santa Monica City Council will be discussing its merits in a few weeks (at the council’s July 12 meeting) I’ll stop avoiding the unavoidable.

What’s most interesting to me as a political observer is how Residocracy has, with LUVE, fractured the anti-development coalition that has been so successful over the years in setting the Santa Monica political agenda. This is most clearly evidenced by the fact that Council Members Kevin McKeown and Ted Winterer, two of the most articulate voices skeptical of development in Santa Monica (and two of the city’s most popular politicians), are both strongly opposed to LUVE.

Both McKeown and Winterer were strong supporters of the “Residents Initiative to Fight Traffic” (RIFT), the measure that the Santa Monica Coalition for a Livable City put on the ballot in 2008. But LUVE is quite different from RIFT.

RIFT only limited commercial development, which put RIFT squarely in the mainstream of anti-development politics in Santa Monica going back to 1981 when Santa Monicans for Renters Rights (SMRR) first took power in Santa Monica and the City became, to borrow from historian William Fulton (The Reluctant Metropolis), the first city to challenge the Los Angeles growth machine. In fact, there were many of us who opposed RIFT only because of its bringing ballot box government into the planning process, not because of its goal of reducing commercial (particularly office) development.

While it is true that during the ’80s SMRR-dominated city councils enacted laws making it harder to build housing (and that during that time little housing was built), paradoxically the purpose of the laws was to save housing. The idea was to preserve existing apartments by making it more difficult and less profitable to tear them down to build condominiums. When the City was sued on the basis that these impediments to building housing violated state law, and lost, the City’s response was brilliant: it maintained, even strengthened, the obstacles to building in residential districts, but satisfied state law by making it easier to build housing in commercial districts (particularly downtown).

I well remember in the mid-’90s, when the City Council was considering the new downtown zoning, listening, at a meeting of the Ocean Park Community Organization, to SMRR leader Dennis Zane try to persuade the late anti-development leader Laurel Roennau why it was good to build housing downtown. (The strategy of protecting neighborhoods by focusing development in commercial zones later became the organizing principle for the LUCE updates to Santa Monica’s general plan.)

Indeed, housing, particularly affordable housing, has always been central to SMRR’s agenda, and has always been popular with Santa Monica voters. When SMRR first challenged the growth machine in the ’80s, one of its goals was to require office developers to pay for affordable housing. In 1990 voters passed Measure R, which requires that 30% of the housing in the city be affordable to low and moderate income households. In 1999 Santa Monica became one of the few cities where a majority of voters approved the building of affordable housing.

The big battles over development since the ’80s have been about commercial development, not housing. There was the Civic Center Plan, which went to the ballot in 1994, and where most of the controversy concerned the expansion of RAND’s offices and RAND’s entitlement to build 250,000 square feet of spec offices. Then there was Target in 2001, a 100% commercial project. Now we have fights over hotels that are essentially commercial developments even though they include housing in the form of condos. Until Residocracy came along, there was little controversy (and that primarily about design issues) over the housing built in Santa Monica since the new zoning in the ’90s, nearly all of which was built downtown.

The recent Paper Mate battle is another case in point: the problem with the project was its adding hundreds of thousands of square feet of offices. At the council meeting where the project was approved, Ted Winterer made a motion to approve it if the developer turned another (the fourth) of the project’s five buildings into housing; Tony Vazquez seconded the motion. If the developer had jumped up and said Yes!, the outcome could have been different. The project might have passed on a 6-1 vote; if so, SMRR would have been less likely to have supported Residocracy’s referendum to overturn the approval. (The vote might even have been 7-0; although McKeown had not said that he would have accepted the total size of the project, he, along with other many other opponents of the project, such as Zane, had said emphatically that what he wanted at the site was housing, not more offices.)

The proponents of LUVE know that they have a problem politically with the housing issue. In their statements and writings in support, they deny that LUVE would prevent housing from being built, and claim that LUVE would protect existing housing. The measure itself is drafted to present the illusion that it supports housing development: it exempts from the 32-foot height limit 100% affordable housing projects (but only up to 50 units, and with the demise of redevelopment it’s almost impossible to build 100% affordable projects anyway), and 77 properties identified as suitable sites for housing in the City’s general plan (but only up to a floor-to-area ratio (FAR) of 2.5, which would likely mean that a landowner or developer would instead opt for a by-right commercial development flying under the 32-foot limit).

Given this history, it shouldn’t be surprising to see this break between Residocracy, whose leaders have made clear their belief that Santa Monica does not need more housing, and others who are skeptical about growth, but who nonetheless know that we need to house the next generation. They read the papers, and nearly everyday there’s an article about California’s housing crisis.

Although I often quote the Freud phrase, “the narcissism of small differences,” to explain how people largely in agreement can nonetheless have bitter disputes over the iota’s of their disagreements, it’s dismayed me that in Santa Monica people who largely share the same communal values nonetheless continually find themselves in noisy and acrimonious disputes when it comes to development. (And I’ll include myself.)

But as I said, it shouldn’t be surprising that “housers” in Santa Monica have largely united against LUVE. It’s like the Hillary/Bernie fight. At times bitter, but as Paul Begala said, “nothing unites the people of Earth like a threat from Mars.”

Thanks for reading.