Tag Archives: Santa Monica housing

When in Rome, do as Santa Monicans do: get inspired about building a park at Santa Monica Airport

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I was traveling in Italy earlier this month so thankfully I wasn’t around when the Santa Monica City Council had the mother of all nightmarish meetings. The meeting began the evening of Oct. 10, but the council was in closed session for hours and the public meeting didn’t start until late. Then the council stayed up until 4:00 a.m. to vote on what kind of public process to have for developing plans for when Santa Monica Airport closes at the end of 2028.

It was ugly. The “Make Santa Monica Great Again” crowd went way over-the-top crazy over a plan to expand public process by empowering a “grand jury” type group of randomly selected, but demographically representative residents to advise the City Council on what to do.

Staff had proposed the new plan after the council had directed it to do so, a fact ignored by some forgetful council members. The plan got caught up in anti-development paranoia, as MSMGA residents saw it as a plot to develop airport land. (This from the same residents who usually direct their paranoia at staff and City Council; one might think they would have more trust in 40 randomly-selected residents than the decision-makers they usually despise.) While the local outrage machine manufactured most of the hysteria, some was unfortunately stimulated by a staff report that seemed to forget that the default for the airport land is to turn it into a park in accordance with Measure LC. If you want to know more of the gory details, here are links to two articles in Santa Monica Next that unpack the false statements made against the plan: one from before the meeting and one from after.

There are lessons for everyone to learn.

For those worried about development at the airport, please – relax a little. However staff writes its reports, needing to sound evenhanded when it comes to alternatives, Measure LC still governs. No, a 40-person committee of randomly selected residents would not have had final decision-making authority over the airport land. Not even the City Council would have final authority if it wanted to propose something inconsistent with LC. Anything inconsistent with LC needs a vote of the people.

For those who want housing at the airport, take this over-reaction seriously even if it was not based on reality. This goes for staff, too, which may need to be agnostic about what happens at the airport, but which needs to be careful about the language it uses. The biggest danger to the future of the airport land is for the aviation industry to mount another initiative, like their Measure D in 2014, to stop the City from closing the airport. The biggest danger of such an initiative passing is if the aviation industry can whip up fear to persuade the anti-development element of Santa Monica politics that if the airport closes it will be replaced with development. Most anti-development residents live far enough from the airport that they don’t care if it closes.

Speaking for myself, as someone who for 30 years has pushed for Santa Monica to build more housing, the airport is simply not a good place for housing. Housers should look elsewhere. The airport land is never going to be convenient for transit or walking to shopping. Meanwhile, residents need parks, and every square foot of open land at the airport is a special and precious resource, purchased a century ago with a parks bond. While it would be possible, under LC, to convert existing structures into housing, those structures are better suited for what they are being used for now: offices that the City leases to businesses. The City will be able to use the revenues from the leases to build and operate the park. (See my prior blog on how to do this.) Affordable housing is needed in Santa Monica but it will not generate revenues to build a park – affordable housing needs its own subsidies.

My advice to housers who insist on locating housing at the airport: talk to the Santa Monica College (SMC) Board. SMC not only owns the Bundy Campus, but also owns land along Airport Avenue that is not subject to LC. Over the years, heedless of the impact on the local housing market, SMC has expanded by enrolling many international and other out-of-district students who need housing because they can’t or don’t live at home. SMC can build dormitories without parking for students, who can be connected to the SMC campus and to transit by SMC shuttles. They would thus neither add to traffic nor need a direct connection to transit.

My advice for the City Council, aside from not making decisions in the wee hours – please, help dial down the rhetoric, don’t amplify it. You are supposed to know better. The City is embarking on the biggest infrastructure project in its history. It is a great opportunity. It will not succeed if elected officials play into the fear game.

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Meanwhile I want to report on something inspiring. When in Rome a couple of weeks ago I did what the Romans do – I took a long stroll in the Villa Borghese Gardens. The Villa Borghese is one of the great parks of Rome – of the world, in fact. Originally an aristocratic estate, built out over centuries, the government purchased the property in 1902 and turned it into a park.

A map of the Villa Borghese

How big is the Villa Borghese? About 198 acres, not too much bigger than the 160 or so acres of open land at Santa Monica Airport.

The Villa Borghese, in the middle of Rome

The Villa Borghese demonstrates that a great park need not be over-designed. Most of the park consists of winding paths through a landscape that is beautiful but, so far as I could tell, not irrigated. (The Roman climate is similar to ours.)

Playing fields at the Villa Borghese

Within the park are several museums, including the world famous Borghese Gallery and the Villa Giulia, Italy’s great Etruscan Museum. There is also a reconstruction of the Shakespeare’s Globe Theater, and a cinema, and Rome’s zoo. There are playing fields and playgrounds. But in no way does the park feel cramped or over-programmed – 198 acres is a lot of land (as is 160).

Families in pedal-powered carts roam the park.

There are a number of lessons to learn from the Villa Borghese. As I already said, but I’ll repeat it, a great park need not be over-designed. When it comes to the Airport Great Park, let’s keep it simple, and get it built. As I wrote in my previously-mentioned earlier blog, establish a budget first and stick to it.

And, yes it’s Rome, and you can get a snack.

Another lesson is that great parks can evolve over time. The Villa Borghese has evolved over centuries. Let’s get a basic version of the Airport Great Park built, and let future generations make decisions about whether they want to add features.

Thanks for reading.

Housing elemental

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Last year I wrote several posts about Santa Monica’s efforts to write a new Housing Element that would comply with new state laws that put teeth in longstanding requirements that local governments plan for sufficient growth in housing. Overall, I was doubtful that the City was drafting and would submit a document that would be compliant. Based on those views, I might have been pleased when earlier this month the state’s Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) rejected the Housing Element that Santa Monica submitted in October.

But I am not.

Let’s put things in context. Santa Monica was not alone. HCD is rejecting most housing elements that cities have submitted. As reported Thursday, HCD even rejected the housing element of the City of Los Angeles, one that had been much admired by the pro-housing community. The problem is that the housing elements can only go so far before they run up against reality.

While HCD must hold cities to a high standard in how they plan to allow more housing development, the process can reach a point of diminishing returns. The housing element process demands an idealization of what should be possible in a just world, but we don’t live in that world. The risk now is that continued efforts to create a perfect document will forestall reform of laws so that real housing, not paper plans for housing, can be constructed. Housing elements are only means to an end; the end is more housing.

I worry that we have reached that point.

When HCD’s rejection letter arrived, the City’s Planning Department immediately suspended a process that was underway to revise Santa Monica’s zoning to satisfy the goals of the housing element that the City had submitted. The process would necessarily lead to better, more inclusive zoning, even if ultimately new zoning, under a more perfect housing element, might be better. Now the process is stopped. Under state law, this creates a paradoxical result.

Because HCD determined that the housing element is not compliant, Santa Monica must now complete zoning changes to accommodate its regional housing needs allocation (RHNA) on an accelerated schedule — by October 15 of this year instead of in two years. However, since Planning has stopped the rezoning process while the department tries to figure out how to revise the housing element to comply, it is hard to imagine how the department can go jump throught all the hoops to get a new revision of the housing element approved by City Council, and then draft and get approval for a zoning update, all by October. (Not to mention that we have a City Council that recently violated the very first program, Program 1A, of the housing element it submitted to HCD by reinstating development review for projects on more than one acre.)

The very first program of Santa Monica’s submitted housing element calling for
administrative review of nearly all housing projects.

It’s going to be a mess; as everyone in the housing world knows, messes lead to delays, and delays mean housing doesn’t get built.

In fact, particularly in the context of HCD’s rejection of L.A.’s housing element, I wonder if it is possible to create a real-world housing element that would satisfy HCD’s requirements. Consider two requirements: (i) that housing elements show how cities will “affirmatively further fair housing,” and (ii) that RHNA numbers, including Santa Monica’s, emphasize the need for affordable housing. (In Santa Monica 6,168 of the 8,895 RHNA units are supposed to be affordable.) It is not possible, however, (i) to remedy, using only land use laws, more than a century of laws and policies that have excluded non-white people from the housing market, suppressed their wages, and otherwise limited their accumulation of wealth, nor (ii) does housing element law provide funding to build the affordable units a housing element would require. For these reasons, housing elements are always going to be aspirational. The power of housing elements comes if the state uses them to force local governments to make zoning changes. If, however, HCD keeps rejecting housing elements, the zoning changes get pushed back.

A better tactic would have been for HCD to accept the housing elements from cities, regardless how aspirational they were, but then come back and review the zoning to make sure that new zoning would allow for achievement of the RHNA numbers if financing were available. If the zoning was inadequate, then a better remedy would be for state law to allow HCD to override zoning and allow by-right development of housing. As it is, if cities continue to be non-compliant in their housing elements, the law’s counter-intuitive remedy is that they can’t receive funding for affordable housing. Does that make sense? Anti-housers are not going to complain if their cities can’t get money to build affordable housing. Better to give the money to affordable housing providers and let them build wherever they can find land. (Cities can also lose other funding, but would anti-housers care?)

The current law ultimately has provisions that give housing developers rights to build anywhere within non-compliant cites (subject to certain conditions), but those aspects of the law are untested and would probably require litigation to enforce, something developers try to avoid. One option that could work now would be for HCD (or the legislature if necessary) to extend deadlines for the rewriting of rejected housing elements while requiring cities to continue updating their zoning to allow more housing.

The amendments that strengthened the housing element law are new this year and it is not surprising that there has been a steep learning curve. Cities say that they want local control and that the state can trust them not to block housing. An extension of the deadlines for a year would give them time to prove that, and we could get better zoning sooner.

Thanks for reading.

Santa Monica’s housing element: a new episode!

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The next episode in the continuing series of meetings regarding the new housing element of Santa Monica’s general plan will take place Tuesday evening. Then the City Council will review and vote on amendments and additions to the version of the document that the council approved in June. The state’s Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) rejected the City’s draft in a letter dated August 30 detailing where HCD saw failures to satisfy the state’s requirements for the housing element. The changes the council will consider are those that planning staff recommends to satisfy HCD’s requirements. (Note that various drafts of the housing element, HCD’s letter, staff reports, public comment, Planning Commission actions, etc., many of which are referred to in this post, are downloadable at this link.)

On the surface of things, at this point the process seems underwhelming. This is because HCD’s comments, contained in a 12-page appendix to its letter, certainly “sweat the small stuff.” I read the document hoping for an eloquent critique of how Santa Monica, playing a small but important role in an larger story involving all of affluent California, had so botched housing policy over 40 years: (i) that our city and region are overwhelmed by and shamed by tens of thousands of people living on the streets, (ii) that low-income and even middle-class households of working people cannot find housing without paying 50% or more of their combined incomes in rents, (iii) that historically affordable neighborhoods are seeing unprecedented increases in housing costs because historically affluent areas have not allowed for growth, and (iv) that even young people with high incomes cannot find housing suitable for raising families.

Instead, and I suppose they were doing their job, HCD’s staff wrote a dry 12-page report showing where the City’s draft failed to satisfy its statutorily mandated requirements to assess the reality of the housing situation, the reality of the constraints to building housing, and the reality of what the City planned to do to fix the problem. Fine; every comment HCD made was justified, but then I don’t know how answering those comments will lead to more housing being built.

For example, in section 5 of the letter, HCD identifies numerous places where the City’s draft failed to identify constraints on the building of housing, or the costs of those constraints. But even if all those constraints, and there are many, were identified and their costs enumerated, how will that lead to more housing if there is not political will to do so? The housing element, even the draft council approved in June, has a list of actions the City is promising to take to make it easier to build housing, but with the current anti-housing council majority in power, do we believe they will follow through? Do we believe that even if they liberalize the zoning, they will not find some way to subvert the liberalization?

To get something done, you can’t ignore the politics, but of course any staff-written document must ignore the politics, even to the point of dissembling. I’ll give one example. Back in 2010, after six years of very public process, the City Council approved new land use and circulation elements of the general plan (the LUCE). To encourage housing in commercial and industrial zones (i.e., to build housing without densifying existing residential areas), the LUCE contemplated, among other things, larger projects that would be subject to a higher level of review and negotiation of community benefits (namely, development agreements). These were “Tier 3” projects and “activity centers,” the latter to be located near transit centers with the possibility of more development than even Tier 3 projects.

Santa Monica’s zoning map. Very few of these zones allow for significant new housing.

But when it came time to enact a zoning ordinance to implement the LUCE, the council had changed. It had become more conservative, more anti-change; more beholden to those who were comfortable with things the way they are. As a result, in the zoning law, the council very nearly obliterated the possibility of building Tier 3 projects and deleted four out of the five possible activity centers.

This history is recounted on page 9 of Appendix E to the housing element, the appendix that describes, as the law requires, constraints on housing. If you look at the redlined version staff is asking the council to approve, you will see language staff has added in response to HCD’s demands for more analysis of constraints, but the staff’s anodyne language ignores the real history. Instead, staff makes it sounds like the down-zoning occurred because the City wanted to avoid the discretionary processes developers would have had to go through to build the bigger projects, but that’s not what happened. The down-zoning occurred because of the politics. The council did not want the bigger projects and killed the possibility they would be built. Council did not kill Tier 3 and activity centers to make it easier to build housing; just the opposite. Later, the council passed new zoning for downtown that stopped new housing from being built; the apartments that are nearing completion now on Lincoln and elsewhere were built under the previous downtown zoning.

The whole housing element is a feel-good, “let’s pat ourselves on the back” document that belies the current reality.

If the council now passes the revised housing element it will be committing itself to, in the words of staff’s proposed revised Appendix E, a reevaluation of “development standards and regulations, both independently and cumulatively, to not only ensure housing projects are feasible, but that they also incentivize housing production citywide,” but I’ll believe it when I see it. What it all means is that the housing element is just the first step. The proof of the pudding will come when we find out if the council will enact new zoning and remove other constraints on housing to encourage housing to be built.

Otherwise, what will happen? If history provides precedent, there will be litigation. The Santa Monica Housing Council, the organization that successfully sued the City 30 years ago over the housing element the council passed then, has had its lawyers send long letters to the City detailing where they see deficiencies. Most of their comments are not reflected in the revised housing element and I doubt City Council would approve them if they were. Out of the litigation in the 1990s came the zoning that allowed the creation of a new residential neighborhood downtown east of Fourth Street; maybe more litigation is what will be needed again.

Whatever happens Tuesday evening, there will be more episodes in this continuing series.

Thanks for reading.

Stop the presses: nice words about landlords uttered at the Santa Monica City Council

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Before I can quit with writing about the housing element that the City of Santa Monica has sent to the California Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD), I have to visit an extraordinary conversation that took place during the June 15 City Council meeting. That was when council gave planning staff final directions for the housing element before sending it to HCD.

The discussion I’m referring to was extraordinary because in it two councilmembers praised landlords for their role in providing affordable housing. Certainly, I have not observed every City Council hearing during the nearly 30 years I have been following and participating in Santa Monica politics, but I cannot remember anyone praising landlords, as a group or class, from the dais during that time. It seems that after the rent control battles of the ’80s subsided, all political discourse in Santa Monica, even from the pro-business side, devolved into a default mode in which anyone who owned or developed residential property (other than a homeowner) was at best the equivalent of a “kulak” (wealthy peasant) or at worst a predatory capitalist.

The discussion occurred when the councilmembers were discussing Program 3.A in the draft housing element. In the draft presented to the council June 15 Program 3.A said that the City would amend its ordinances to make permanent anti-displacement provisions in the California Housing Crisis Act of 2019 (known as SB 330). SB 330 requires that if a housing developer would in building a new housing development destroy existing rent-controlled or affordable deed-restricted units, the developer would need to replace those units in the new development and rent them to low-income tenants. Under SB 330, these provisions sunset in 2025; Program 3.A would make those requirements permanent in Santa Monica.

The discussion began with Mayor Sue Himmelrich expressing her opinion that not only did she want to make SB 330 permanent, but she wanted to provide that the rents in the newly built, but rent-controlled, apartments would be the old rents, not reset to current market-rate levels. Even better, she wanted the new units to be deed-restricted and made available to low-income tenants. She said this would add “predictability.”

Councilmember Oscar de la Torre, however, had a problem with Program 3.A. He was concerned with its impact on “mom and pop” landlords. He said these apartment owners had been providing affordable housing for many years in the form of rent-controlled apartments. De la Torre said that he would “have a hard time punishing them,” because they had been “doing the right thing for so many years.” He asked if this law wouldn’t “lock them into the same situation where they can’t make any progress for their family.” He said that “government should compensate these people;” he asked, “shouldn’t we have a way where we share that burden?”

De la Torre made it plain that he was only talking about “mom and pop” apartment owners, not corporations that might own “25 buildings,” but still my jaw dropped. As I said before, I cannot remember a member of the Santa Monica City Council expressing sympathy for landlords, big or small, let alone their heirs. Nor one of them making arguments that would make it more economically advantageous to tear down existing apartments—and this from a local figure known for his opposition to the use of the Ellis Act to do precisely that.

Councilmember Phil Brock agreed with de la Torre. He said that the law requiring replacement of rent-controlled units would disincentivize replacement of old housing, and that we would end up with “more rundown apartments.” He used a hypothetical of a 75-year-old building that might ultimately need to be replaced. He said that given the cost of doing so, the replacement could not happen if the new units were rent-controlled or deed-restricted affordable. (Both Brock and de la Torre come from families that own apartments. They did not make announcements at the meeting about this (although Brock referred to his mother as an apartment owner), but I expect that everyone on the (virtual) dais was aware of it.)

At this point Mayor Himmelrich jumped in. She responded to de la Torre and Brock by saying that property owners could make enough money to justify rebuilding from additional, market-rate units they could build. She took a hypothetical four-unit building de la Torre had used and said that such a building could be rebuilt with eight units, and the owners could make plenty of money from the four new units.

I doubt Himmelrich is correct. Since the ’80s Santa Monica has downzoned its multi-unit residential districts, so that it is not generally possible to build as much on a residential lot as could be built previously, when these old apartments were built, let alone double the size of existing apartment buildings. Here is a detail from the zoning map:

Detail of Santa Monica zoning map.

As shown, most multi-unit residential districts are zoned “Low Density Residential” (R2 or the analog in Ocean Park, OP2), including nearly all of the Pico Neighborhood, mid-Wilshire/WilMont, and Ocean Park. The theoretical maximum number of units per lot in R2 is four, but for most lots the real maximum is three because the minimum size of a unit in R2 is 2,000 square feet. (This large unit size is evidence, incidentally, that the downzoning discouraged affordable housing.) Even if retaining the units would qualify the development for a 50% state density bonus (the best available), at most the development would have five, or maybe six, units. Possibly the owner/developer could add a unit by asking for “concessions” under density bonus law, but even if Himmelrich’s hypothetical eight units could be built, privately-financed housing cannot be financed with a 50% inclusionary requirement. Finally, is it realistic that on single lots in residential districts, the size of apartment buildings will be doubled?

In fact, planning staffer Jing Yeo had already explained the real impact of SB 330 on Santa Monica: she told the council early in the discussion that the effect of SB 330 here was to prevent a property owner from tearing down four units and replacing them with three.

Brock replied to Himmelrich by saying that the replacement provisions made reinvestment infeasible. Himmelrich responded by asking him, “are we doing this housing element for landlords or for tenants?” Brock seemed taken back by the question. “I think we’re doing it for everyone,” he replied, “[i]t should be ideally a symbiotic relationship.”  

I am a New Deal-type Democrat with socialist leanings, and as such I believe in regulation of economic activity. That includes rent control, which is, or can be, a reasonable exercise of governmental authority with multiple social benefits. Rent control, however, like any economic regulation, needs to be reasonable. Regulations are not reasonable if they are so strict that they defeat their own purposes. The purpose of rent control is to deliver safe and well-maintained housing that people can afford. All regulations require recalculation and review from time to time, just as all housing needs maintenance, whether the building is a wood-framed apartment structure in termite-country or a steel and concrete condo tower in Florida. Sometimes old buildings need to be replaced.

Councilmember Brock was right when he described the relationship between property owners and tenants as symbiotic. Our economy is largely capitalist, and we rely on private capital to build and maintain housing. This is even the case, to a great extent, when it comes to affordable housing. (Personally, I would like to see government get back into the business of building public housing, but that is not likely to happen any time soon.) Whether the capital comes from “moms and pops” investing their life savings into an apartment building, from private placement financing for specific developments, or from publicly-traded REITs, etc., investors have to believe that they have a good chance of having a better risk/return ratio than they would have if, for instance, they invest their money in a stock market index fund.

If you would like to watch these City Council deliberations about making SB 330 permanent, click here to go to the video, and then go to the 5:02 mark and start watching. Lasts about 20 minutes, and you’ll also see what they decided to do. Hint: nothing.

Thanks for reading.

Housing production in Santa Monica, by the numbers

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Tonight, the Santa Monica City Council will hold its first hearing to discuss specific and substantive proposals from planning staff for what to include in the next iteration of the state-mandated Housing Element of the City’s General Plan. This is the document you may have heard of in which the City must tell the state how during the period from 2021 to 2029 it will be possible, really and truly, to build 8,895 housing units, of which 6,168 must be affordable. (The numbers are Santa Monica’s “RHNA numbers,” from “Regional Housing Needs Allocation.”)

Cities need to file housing elements every eight years, and the deadline for filing this one is October. Between now and final approval of the Housing Element I will likely write more than a few posts about it. The purpose of this initial post is to give some context for the numbers involved.

The number to begin with is 52,983. That is the total number of housing units in the city as of June 30, 2019, as set forth in the City’s 2020 Affordable Housing Progress Report, the latest calculation I could find. As of that date, the City also had about 1,000 units, give or take, either under construction or approved, and these units presumably won’t be countable against the new RHNA number. That means that going into the 2021-29 period Santa Monica has about 54,000 units either extant or in the works.

The RHNA number, 8,895, is 16.5% of 54,000. Over eight years, that means that Santa Monica must plan for increasing its housing stock by two percent per year. While a two percent annual increase should not be anything to panic over, it would be a marked increase over the rate of housing production in Santa Monica for the past 40 years.

In 1994 I was appointed to the Housing Commission. A year later I was appointed to the Planning Commission. On both commissions I worked on a housing element. With regard to housing policy, I recall many similarities to the situation today.

The context then was that the City had just lost a lawsuit brought by housing developers who contended that the City had adopted a housing element that did not take into account measures the City had enacted that discouraged the building of housing. The developers won the case, and the City had to change its policies to allow more housing to be built. As now, there was a lot of gnashing of teeth.

You may ask, what did the City do in the 80s that was so anti-housing that it lost this case?

It’s complicated. For most of the 80s Santa Monicans for Renters Rights (SMRR) controlled City Council. SMRR leadership was committed to what it called a “human scaled community,” in opposition, say, to the towers previous city leadership had enabled to be built on the beachfront in Ocean Park or along Ocean Avenue. This led SMRR to oppose higher densities, even for affordable housing. While today people don’t see a disconnect between density and “human scale,” in fairness to Santa Monica’s leadership 40 years ago, the renter neighborhoods in Santa Monica, such as those along Wilshire, Ocean Park, and the Pico Neighborhood, were already among the denser neighborhoods in California and they probably didn’t think they needed to make them denser.  

From what I understand, the primary motivations for SMRR’s anti-housing policies in the 80s were not meant to be anti-housing, but rather to preserve rental housing in residential districts from being destroyed to build condominiums. This was a big problem; conversions were a reaction to rent control, which had been enacted in 1979. While some warned that limitations on new development in residential areas would ultimately mean fewer low-income households in the city, City Council enacted limitations to make conversions less profitable.

Another at least putatively well-meant motivation was to get more affordable housing built. In 1990 City voters approved Measure R, which required that 30% of housing built in Santa Monica be deed-restricted affordable. That goal was not by itself unattainable, and Measure R by itself need not have stopped development of housing. (Since 1990 about 38% of the housing built in Santa Monica has been deed-restricted affordable.) The City Council followed up Measure R, however, with an enforcement ordinance that included draconian on-site requirements for projects with as few as five units.

The results of these policies were that virtually no housing was built, as shown in the following charts, which I scanned from City documents.  

Based on the data in this chart, in 1990 the City had 47,753 housing units. Of them, you’ll see that roughly 9,000 were built before 1940, 7,500 in the 40s, 9,000 in the 50s, more than 10,000 in the 60s and nearly 8,000 in the 70s. (Note that these numbers represent only the units that survived to 1990; considering how many units were destroyed by the freeway and other public works, and normal attrition and replacement, many more units were built in those decades.)

Then note that only 3,617 units were built in the 80s, and there is reason to believe that nearly all of them were constructed early in the decade.

The second chart picks up the story in 1990. You’ll see that the 90s were a catastrophe for housing development. The net number of units in the city increased only 110, from 47,753 to 47,863 in 2000, the lowest rate of increase of the cities listed (none of which did very well, by the way). During the 90s the region was bursting with new immigrants as the population of Los Angeles County increased from 8.86 to 9.5 million (more than seven percent). Working-class poverty and homelessness were becoming crises, but Santa Monica only added, on a net basis, 110 units of housing. Santa Monica’s population, by the way, decreased during the 90s from 86,911 to 84,073, a decline of 3.3%. (This chart shows clearly how the housing crisis we have today in Southern California has its roots in the 90s when housing production failed miserably to keep up with population growth.)

After losing the court case in the early 90s, what did City Council do?

Actually, some good stuff. Before I joined the Housing and Planning Commissions, so I get no credit for this, the City passed landmark new zoning for downtown. The council, which for the most part was still controlled by SMRR, still wanted to discourage building in existing neighborhoods, to preserve rental units. In the meantime, however, the City had opened the Third Street Promenade, and the focus was on downtown. There was little housing there, and so new housing would not cause much displacement. The City decided to focus housing development downtown. 

Downtown was zoned for commercial development, but the council did something simple to encourage residential development: it not only allowed residential development in commercial zones but also allowed twice as much development on downtown properties if the development were residential instead of commercial. The City also passed a new, much more flexible, ordinance implementing Measure R.

Not much happened immediately as we know from the housing production numbers for the 90s. It took a while for developers to figure out what they could do.

By 2000 the reforms began to take effect. In the first decade of the new century, as shown in the second chart, Santa Monica had a net increase of 3,049 units, to a total of 50,912, an increase of 6.4% over the decade. This was in fact a better rate of increase than the County as a whole. While I don’t have data for the next decade all the way through 2020, as of June 30, 2019, as I wrote above, the total number of units was 52,983, an increase of a little over 2,000 in the nine years after 2010.

While slower than the previous decade, growth was steady. An average of about 200 units per year was close to the rate of 250 units per year forecast in the 2010 Land Use and Circulation Element, a growth rate of half of one percent. I’ve previously written that a good, sustainable rate of increase for Santa Monica would be one percent per year, or about 500 units. As discussed above, the RHNA requirement over eight years is about double this number, a return to the housing production number of the decades before the 80s.

In future posts I’ll discuss why this number should not frighten anyone. The lesson of the 90s is that the City can respond creatively to the need to build more housing. And the lesson of the 2000s is that dense housing can create a vibrant neighborhood, as has happened downtown.

One last point: I hope someone tonight asks staff why the land the City owns at the Civic Auditorium isn’t included in the inventory of City-owned properties available for housing.

Thanks for reading.

Memo to City Council: It’s a start

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After years of creating procedural and other obstacles to the building of much-needed new housing, the City of Santa Monica is poised to do something significant to encourage housing development. Tuesday evening, if the City Council follows the recommendations of staff and a vote by the Planning Commission, the council will vote to streamline the approval process for all 100% affordable housing and most market-rate multi-unit housing developments.

If passed, the new rules will require only administrative approval for (i) 100% affordable projects of all sizes (under current rules, 100% affordable projects of more than 50 units outside of the downtown require Planning Commission review), and (ii) market-rate projects for which for all practical purposes the City’s review was already limited by state law (the “Housing Accountability Act”), but for which the City nevertheless required a Planning Commission hearing. Administrative review will not only shorten the duration of review by the City, but also add to the certainty of approval. This will facilitate financing, particularly for affordable projects that rely on tax-credits.

The hope is that by eliminating discretionary review, the City will rekindle interest from developers in what are called, under the City’s general plan, “Tier 2” projects. These are the mid-density, often mixed-use, projects that have been the mainstay of housing development in the city, to the extent there has been housing development, for about 30 years, for both affordable and market-rate developments. The City said it expected Tier 2 projects would be built under the supposedly “pro-housing” planning documents the City developed, after painfully slow processes, over the past 16 years, but few have been built under the new rules.

Perversely, the City’s housing laws make it more difficult to build Tier 2 projects, with more housing, than Tier 1 projects, which generate little housing and few benefits. Tier 1 projects already get administrative review. (As for Tier 3 projects, with even more housing and benefits, these are impossible. They are in the general plan only as window-dressing.) The City loaded Tier 2 projects with additional costs, including the state’s highest requirements for including affordable units, and required discretionary approvals. As a result, the few developers willing to work under the City’s new rules have primarily built smaller, Tier 1, projects that deliver much less housing, including drastically fewer affordable units.

If the council does the right thing Tuesday night, the discretionary review will be gone for most Tier 2 projects, but the restrictive development standards and added-on costs will remain. Nonetheless, the recommendation from staff to remove discretionary review comes in the context that the City expects its annual allocation under the “Regional Housing Needs Assessment” (RHNA) to be greatly increased to about 1,100 units for 2021 to 2029 period. Satisfying RHNA will require the City to demonstrate land availability and zoning capacity to achieve the RHNA numbers. Eliminating discretionary review does nothing for RHNA.

Satisfying RHNA will require a rethinking of the City’s zoning. The City will need to extend to commercial districts throughout the city the kind of zoning first adopted downtown in the 1990s that encouraged the building of housing instead of commercial development. The most important factor was allowing twice the amount of residential development as commercial. Of course, as those who followed the fiasco of the Downtown Community Plan (DCP), know, the DCP ruined the zoning that had over 20 years turned much of downtown into a vibrant neighborhood. One hopes that in the context of responding to RHNA, the City will fix the DCP, too. By concentrating housing development in commercial zones, the City can limit displacement of current tenants.

Tuesday night expect to hear pseudo-housers argue that the City should do nothing to encourage market-rate development, and only provide incentives for 100% affordable projects. In their view, it’s evil to make money from building housing, and only “greedy developers” do so (notwithstanding that everyone in Santa Monica lives in a development that was built by, or land that was subdivided by, a developer). To pseudo-housers, market-rate (or what they like to call “luxury”) development only raises rents for everyone else. As if they want to bring back redlining, they don’t like investment in cities. (I discussed pseudo-housers in more detail back in November.)

I won’t again discuss the silliness of these arguments, but it is worth taking a moment to examine the economics of housing development to try to understand why it is so hard in California to build housing for working-class and even middle-class households.

We talk about a “housing affordability” crisis but when we look at the numbers, we realize that it’s not that rents are too high, but that incomes are too low to pay for the real cost of building housing. It now costs, in southern California, on the order of $500 per square foot to build apartments. (For this analysis I’ll ignore whether this includes the cost of land.) That means that assuming a developer can find land and get zoning approval, an 800-square foot, two-bedroom apartment, our era’s equivalent to a 1950s or ’60s tract house, costs $400,000 to build. To cover amortization of costs, financing, operating costs, and to make some profit, the developer has to recoup at least 10% annually — $40,000 per year, meaning a monthly rent of about $3300, or about $4 per square foot. To afford $40,000 a year in rent, a household needs an income of at least $100,000, far beyond the average household income in L.A. of about $60,000.

These costs show why it is useless to criticize developers for building apartments that only “rich people” can afford. If there weren’t at least some households making $100,000 per year, there wouldn’t be a market for even 800-square foot new apartments, let alone the larger units (including condos) that young families aspire to. To the extent new housing isn’t built for people with above-average incomes, those people will move into the housing of lower-income workers—displacement. Keep on doing that, and what do you know, but 50,000 people in L.A. County don’t have homes at all.  

Fifty years ago, workers made “middle-class” wages working union manufacturing jobs. Fifty years of Republican attacks on unions and the resulting shift of wealth from workers to capital, have created the fiction that it’s housing that has become too expensive, while it’s wages that have fallen too low to justify the development of market-rate housing for workers. Government is called upon to provide or subsidize affordable housing for workers who should be able to afford market-rate housing, and would be able to do so, if they received a reasonable share of the benefits of an expanded economy. And then liberals are criticized for giving away “free stuff.”

Rather than make it more difficult to invest money in housing, the way to solve the housing affordability crisis is to raise incomes starting at the lowest levels of wages.

Thanks for reading.

Where to build housing and where not

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I ended my blog last week about Santa Monica’s housing policies with some good news, namely that a lot of housing was either under construction in the city or had approvals to proceed to construction. As of the end of March, 759 units were under construction and another 1,384 had received planning approvals. Most of this housing received approval under laws that are no longer in force, but it was at least good to see that the one good thing about the high rents that result from the region’s housing crisis is that they do attract investment to build apartments that will house people for 50 or 60 years.

But then depressing news came to light when the City released its annual report on housing production. The numbers showed why the state is trying to take control of land use policy. The City reported that in fiscal year 2017-18 only 46 multi-family housing units (apartments or condos) were built in Santa Monica, of which only two were affordable.

This low level of construction continued and exacerbated a trend from fiscal year 2014-15, when housing production fell drastically. While in the 2013 and 2014 fiscal years total multi-family production was 941 units in Santa Monica (of which 503 were affordable!), in the four years since then, only 478 housing units, an average of 119 per year, have been built. This number is fewer than half of the 250 units expected to be built annually under the LUCE, and less even than the average of 217 units built in Santa Monica annually over the past 24 years. (In fact, housing production wasn’t even that good: the report’s construction numbers don’t take into account demolitions. According to the City’s housing reports, from June 2014 to June 2018, the net increase in housing units, after deducting demolitions (and including data for single-family houses), was 422, an average annual increase of only 105.)

Again, the good news is that a fair amount of housing is now in the works, either under construction or approved, in Santa Monica. However, the anemic production of the past four years, and, as I discussed in last week’s blog, the apparent debacle of the Downtown Community Plan, illustrate why Sacramento is not likely to leave housing policy to local governments. Not when Governor Newson wants his legacy to include 3.5 million new homes.

I write this even as the most ambitious proposal to limit local control, Scott Wiener’s SB50, is dead for the year. Sen. Anthony Portantino, of La Cañada/Flintridge, responding to pleas from residents of single-family, suburban areas (such as La Cañada/Flintridge), used his power as Chair of the Appropriations Committee to prevent Wiener’s bill from reaching the Senate floor. The bill drew the ire of single-family zone residents because somewhere along the way a bill that encouraged in-fill urban development had become a bill that would have drastically up-zoned nearly all single-family zones in the state.

This up-zoning of suburbia not only added a poison pill to SB50, but also it was bad urban policy. Why densify sprawl? It doesn’t make sense: if you build more housing off the urban grid, isolated from decent transit, jobs, shopping and entertainment, you magnify the disaster that sprawl is. Wiener needs to bring back a bill that privileges investment in urban housing, and there is plenty of urban land that is zoned for commercial and industrial purposes where this can be done without driving residents crazy. Santa Monica showed how to do this in the ’90s by allowing double the amount of residential development over commercial development in formerly commercial zones in its downtown. A boom in housing resulted.

Downtown Santa Monica development

But cities don’t like to turn commercial and industrial real estate into housing. While no-growth politics coming from affluent homeowners has had a lot to do with California’s failure to build enough housing, a factor that has drawn national attention, another factor has been that cities prefer commercial development that generates taxes over residential development that requires the delivery of services. Cities are loath to convert commercial real estate to housing.

In the interest of promoting economic development cities don’t take into account how many more jobs per square foot of development are now created in office and retail buildings over what existed on old industrial properties, and how many more square feet can now be built in multi-story office buildings than existed in the old one-story factories. Every 1,000 square feet of office development now generates at least three or four jobs, and for those jobs, at least two housing units need to be built. But cities rarely consider that math when rezoning commercial or industrial properties.

Unfortunately, Santa Monica has been a leader in this regard as well, given how it has converted originally industrial areas to offices without sufficient housing for the many more people who work there. In a future version of his bill, Wiener would do well to require more housing to be built whenever cities entitle more commercial development.

As for the suburbs, instead of attacking single-family zoning where we don’t want denser development anyway, what the legislature needs to do is to require local governments to allow (and encourage) the repurposing of malls with added housing and offices (local jobs for suburbanites), and as nodes for transit. Leave the housing subdivisions alone.

Wiener will bring the bill back next year, and I suspect that next time a version of it will get further along in the process. Wiener learned from his mistakes with the first version of his housing bill last year, and I suspect he’ll learn from his mistakes this year. And presumably by then the governor will want to see more progress. This story isn’t over.

Thanks for reading.

Whack-a-mole housing policy

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When in the summer of 2017 the Santa Monica City Council, after six years of work, adopted the Downtown Community Plan (DCP), the then architecture critic for the L.A. Times, Christopher Hawthorne, wrote an article about it. Hawthorne, after a conversation with City Manager Rick Cole, expressed guarded optimism that the plan, which Cole and the council had touted as a “housing” plan, would indeed lead to the building of more housing, for all income levels, in downtown Santa Monica.

According to Hawthorne, Cole characterized the DCP as being the result of a “grand bargain” between anti-growth and pro-housing factions in Santa Monica. Because the DCP included streamlined approvals for housing and height and density bonuses for housing development, and eliminated parking minimums, Cole was confident, based on the City’s financial analysis, that developers would build housing despite increased requirements for including affordable housing.

Hawthorne was respectful of Cole’s optimism, but the critic injected a note of skepticism in his article by including a comment from Santa Monica housing activist Jason Islas to the effect that the DCP’s high percentage requirements for affordable housing (maxing out at 30% for the largest projects “on-site,” or 35% “off-site”) would mean that no housing would be built. Islas’ comment on the affordability question was that “30% of zero is zero.”

Now nearly two years on, and according to a “Downtown Community Plan Monitoring Report” the City issued March 22, Islas’ predictions have proven more accurate that City Manager Cole’s. Since adoption of the DCP, six projects have been proposed under the DCP standards, totaling 335 units, but only 19—only 6%!—are affordable. How can that be, you say? Isn’t 20% the minimum under the DCP?

No. Twenty percent is the minimum for projects over 39 feet tall (“Tier 2 projects.”) Five of the six DCP projects are Tier 1. Under the City’s rosy financial analysis, this wasn’t supposed to happen. The City’s financial consultants, and a majority of City Council members, predicted developers would build market rate units in Santa Monica even if they had to provide higher percentages of affordable housing than were required anywhere else in the state.

Developers are proposing to build market-rate housing (but not much) under DCP standards, but not with nearly the affordable housing City Council wanted to come with it.

As I said, five of the six DCP projects are Tier 1, which means they only have a five percent affordable requirement. One project is Tier 2, but as the March 22 report points out, the developer of that project opted to build to 50 feet even though the zoning would have allowed a height of 60 feet (meaning an additional floor of apartments). By adding that floor, the developer would have increased the affordable obligation from 20% to 25%, presumably wiping out any profit for the additional density.

It’s not only that developers are not building the denser and more affordable housing that the DCP was supposed to encourage, but the housing being proposed contravenes other goals of the DCP. The five Tier 1 DCP projects are entirely comprised of small (less than 375 square feet) studio units. (These units are referred to in developer applications and staff reports as “single room occupancy” (SRO) units, but don’t confuse them with what “SRO” usually refers to, namely “congregant” housing, with shared bathrooms, kitchens and other facilities often built for residents who need supportive services. The proposed units are small versions of what are variously referred to in real estate listings as “studios,” “singles” or “bachelor” units, with their own bathrooms and cooking facilities.)

The DCP is bizarre, but I suppose typical for the product of political “grand bargains,” in that the its standards penalize the building of what the City professes to want—a mix of unit types and affordability to create a diverse neighborhood downtown—while making it easier to build what the City says it doesn’t want, namely smaller projects with 95% market rate units and only one type of unit.

These Tier 1 projects, some of which have replaced previously-proposed Tier 2 projects, have caused the typical hysteria that is the City’s response to events that are simultaneously unexpected and predictable. Tomorrow night City Council will consider an ordinance to ban the building of projects with only small studio units after having adopted an emergency ordinance to do this in March. (Which, no surprise, caused the developer of the Tier 1 all-studio projects to sue the City, since the developer understandably felt that he had played by the rules.)

The ordinance won’t solve the problem, however, since it won’t stop the building of studios that are larger than 375 square feet. Meaning that developers could still build Tier 1, all studio projects, but with fewer, somewhat larger units. These would still be profitable: according to statistics I read in a recent Lookout article, 435-square-foot studios currently rent for about $2,500 (or more) in Santa Monica. That’s more than $5 per square foot. (Meaning that whatever residents who live comfortably in big houses or securely in rent-controlled apartments say, there’s a market for small apartments. Not only young tech workers, but think of the many international students at SMC.)

What developer needs to build above 39 feet if there is that kind of money to be made, especially if approvals are not discretionary and the affordable housing requirement is minimal? Figure it this way: if you remove all the unprofitable affordable housing from a Tier 2 project, you’re probably left with the same amount of profitable square footage in a Tier 1 project. As Islas said, 30% of zero is zero.

The ordinance being proposed is a typical example of a whack-a-mole planning. You don’t like all-studio projects? Ban them: whack! But the problem is not that developers have found a work-around to the City’s Byzantine and onerous requirements under the DCP, but the DCP itself, which the City based on wishful thinking and a financial analysis that developers warned the City was flawed.

The fact that the DCP turns out not to be the housing plan the City touted is borne out by a lot of good news about housing in Santa Monica. Anyone who gets around town these days can see that a lot of apartments are under construction.

New apartments under construction on Lincoln Boulevard

According to a March 26 staff report on the City’s Affordable Housing Production Program, in the four years ending 2018 1001 units were constructed, of which 40% (402) are affordable. The 1001 is consistent with the LUCE’s modest goal that 250 units would be built per year, a one-half percentage point annual increase over the city’s approximately 50,000 housing units. Even more encouraging, 759 units were under construction, and 1,384 units had received planning approval. (Keep in mind that these figures are for the entire city, while the DCP only affects downtown.)

These are the kind of numbers that the City could try to use to justify an exemption to the “dreaded” SB50 making its way through the legislature. However, none of this housing is a product of the DCP.

It’s time to revisit the DCP. But who wants to spend six years doing that?

Thanks for reading.

The character of Vicente Terrace

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As it turns out, not all politics are local, and what with one thing or another going on in the world, I’m one local news obsessive who has had a difficult time lately obsessing on local news. Thus, no posts here since October, meaning I’ve left uncommented upon elections in Santa Monica and a lawsuit that would upend Santa Monica politics completely. Matters about which previously I would have written much.

But this weekend I’ve put the Mueller report aside to write about a hyper local Santa Monica issue, namely the future of two apartment projects near the beach. I wrote about them in my last column, back in October, and I feel compelled to follow the story.

The owners of the Shutters and Casa del Mar hotels are developing two apartment buildings (with retail on the ground floors) on vacant lots near the hotels. The Planning Commission approved both projects last year, but those approvals have been appealed to the City Council. The council will consider the appeals at its meeting Tuesday evening.

The developer submitted plans for the apartments in September 2015. Even assuming the council denies the appeals and approves the projects, that means it will have taken almost four years to make a decision over two small buildings with a combined 105 apartments, including 16 affordable units. No wonder the legislature in Sacramento is frustrated by how difficult it is to get housing built in California. (Incidentally, based on the development potential of one of the sites, the hotel owners paid $13 million for one of the properties, money that went into the City’s affordable housing fund.)

Of the two projects, the larger one would replace the parking lot between Ocean Avenue and Shutters. The northern edge of the property is Vicente Terrace, a street that runs from Ocean Avenue down to the beach. Residents who live on the north side of the street have appealed the approval of the project, primarily on the grounds that having an apartment building across from their houses would be contrary to “neighborhood character.”

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Vicente Terrace

Before I explain why I disagree with the neighbors’ appeal, it’s only fair to mention that they are not taking the stance of so many opponents of change in Santa Monica, meaning that they are not opposing the whole project. They seem to recognize that buildings across the street housing new neighbors would be an improvement over the parking lot that they face now. What these neighbors say they want is for the developers to make the building look like it’s a row of townhouses rather than an apartment building.

They also acknowledge that the Planning Commission approved a plan that the developer modified to respond to their concerns. The buildings on Vicente Terrace will now be stepped back considerably from the curb (from 15 to 22 feet, even though the zoning ordinance only requires a five-foot setback) and the floors above 36 feet (the height limit the neighbors say they would accept) are stepped back at least another 20 feet, meaning these upper floors will likely not be perceptible from the street below.

There is now only small difference in terms of size and massing between the approved plans and what the neighbors say they want, except that the neighbors want the façades to mimic townhouses rather than apartments. (Related to this, they also contend that apartments across the street will lower their property values.)

I say, “small difference,” but let’s not forget Freud’s concept of the “narcissism of small differences”: small disagreements can fuel passionate arguments. In this case, the neighbors in their houses fervently desire to face façades that are or at least appear to be single-family homes, not apartments.  Instead of the narcissism of small differences, what we seem to have here is plain narcissism. They want the other side of the street to mirror themselves.

As I said, these neighbors don’t seem to be hard-line NIMBYs, and judging by an opinion piece one of them wrote in the Daily Press, some at least assume a liberal political mantle (“Wall Street vs. Main Street”). (I often wonder if Santa Monicans who decry the profit motives of real estate developers don’t go to movies because they’re made by movie producers and studios obsessed with the box office.)

The neighbors, however, seem unaware of how arguments based on “neighborhood character” have historically been used to exclude apartments from neighborhoods because of fears of allowing into neighborhoods the lower economic classes.

Nor do they seem to be aware that in places where the population is generally left-wing, left-wingers have been adept at finding new rhetoric to justify the same old suburban sanctification and glorification of single-family homes vs. the vilification of apartments. (This is of course creates cognitive dissonance here in Santa Monica, where left-wing arguments against building market rate apartments are also based on phony (when coming from generally affluent people) quasi-Marxist arguments based on the expected high incomes of  future tenants who surely will be class-enemies if they can afford to rent new apartments in Santa Monica.)

In the context of the housing crisis created by NIMBYism and the environmental crisis created by sprawl, left-wing arguments against infill development, however, are now being challenged as anti-city and pro-sprawl. As Benjamin Ross puts it in his 2014 book, Dead End: Suburban Sprawl and the Rebirth of American Urbanism, a history of how restrictive land use policies aimed against apartments and the people who would live in them destroyed cities and gave us sprawl, “the rise of the antisprawl movement has put resistance to change in conflict with left-of-center social and environmental goals…. [Although] [o]pponents of urban infill are fewer in number . . . they have not abandoned the fight. The rhetoric of the environmentalist Left remains on their lips, but the substance of their agenda has begun to converge with the familiar exclusion of old-line suburbs.” (Emphasis added.) Ross calls this “left nimbyism.”

I live in Ocean Park, a once single-family neighborhood that thankfully became a mixed neighborhood of houses and apartments before the City adopted mono-culture zoning. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t like the “character” of Ocean Park. On a per square foot basis, Ocean Park has some of the highest priced real estate in California. The Vicente Terrace neighbors’ argument that apartments will lower their property values is laughable.

I want to distinguish these phony leftist arguments from the genuine left-wing concerns of UNITE HERE Local 11, the union that represents hotel workers in Santa Monica, which has appealed the approvals of both buildings. The grounds for the union’s appeal are that the union doesn’t believe that the approvals include enough protections against the renting of the apartments as short-term rentals (either as Airbnb-type lodgings or as corporate housing).

UNITE HERE is right to be concerned about short-term rentals of unoccupied apartments, as they have become a scourge of the housing market. It appears to me, however, based on the staff report, that the City has included sufficient enforcement mechanisms in the conditions of approval and in existing law. (And the City has had some success recently with enforcement.) However, if it’s possible to approve the projects with more effective enforcement mechanisms, there wouldn’t be anything wrong with that.

Thanks for reading.

Tale of Two Projects

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It’s been a while since I’ve written about a specific development project in Santa Monica. About a year ago I was busy writing articles about the Downtown Community Plan (DCP), and after that I had my fill of F.A.R.’s and levels of review, etc. I’ve mostly been writing travelogues since then. In the past week, however, two projects, of quite different scale, and located in different parts of the city, caught my eye.

One is a small, apartment complex, only 47 units, with ground-floor retail, on a typically skinny Lincoln Boulevard parcel at Ashland Avenue. The project survived development review last week when City Council members, claiming (accurately) that state law limited their power to block the project, rejected an appeal by neighbors of a Planning Commission approval of the project back in January. (Neighbors Lose Bid to Stop Apartment Complex on Santa Monica’s Lincoln Boulevard).

I live not far from the site and I either drive or walk past it often. It’s a location of classic crudscape, an ugly lot with several decrepit garages that look like they were built with stucco and tin foil.

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The current site at Ashland and Lincoln

It’s incredible to me that neighbors would fight a new apartment building, with attractive ground-floor retail, on that stretch of Lincoln, but then I know it shouldn’t be incredible to me that a few neighbors will do anything to prevent people from moving into their neighborhood.

I remember when City Council, during the hearings on the LUCE, was debating standards for the boulevards. Council members were succumbing to anti-development arguments about “character” (that vague quality that has historically been used to keep apartments and apartment-dwellers out of insular communities). I remember, though, Bobby Shriver, who was sympathetic to the anti’s on other boulevards, admitting that Lincoln Boulevard was pretty ugly and needed new development. Almost ten years later, after another whole planning process for Lincoln Boulevard, a developer is finally building something—an improvement.

For the appeal staff had to prepare a 29-page staff report, which on top of myriad other documents, including a 50-page staff report for the Planning Commission, means that hundreds of pages of reports were created for . . . a 47-unit project that fits within Tier 2 of the applicable zoning. Months and years go by even with a state-law required “project streamlining” and an exemption from environmental review: the application for this little project was filed in March 2016 and “deemed complete” in May 2016. Already two years ago.

I’m shocked that the developers proposed a Tier 2 building. If they had made it a little smaller (a 1.5 F.A.R. instead of the 1.81 it has), it would have qualified under Tier 1, and they could have avoided this review. I’m glad they were brave—if they can make it to the finish line, the site will have another 10 or 15 apartments. (By the way, the development standards still require an insane about of parking—the project will have 151 expensive underground parking spaces for 47 apartments and about 17,000 square feet of retail. On a transit corridor. Crazy.)

Need I mention that the project replaces commercial zoning with residential development? Isn’t that what we want in jobs rich, housing poor, Santa Monica?

Naturally, the process is not over. The developers still need to take the project back to the Architectural Review Board for a formal review and no doubt another appeal to the Planning Commission. After informal ARB review, and comments from the Planning Commission, the developers and their architects must now deal with the usual litany of vague nostrums about “variation” and “visual breaks” and “modulation” and “granularity.” It’s like the ARB members and Planning Commissioners are wine connoisseurs. Here’s a rendering of the current design.

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As seen in this elevation, the building presents a bold statement on an ugly street. While the ARB and Planning Commissioners (and the anti’s) often complain about bland architecture in Santa Monica, their practice is to screw around with any architects who try to use formal structure and rhythm. They make the same amorphous demands on every project, and then complain that buildings are indistinguishable.

The second project that caught my eye—this one was hard to miss—was the return to the planning process of the Frank Gehry designed hotel project at the corner of Ocean Avenue and Santa Monica Boulevard.

I’m not going to write much about this now—surely there are still years to go on this one and I’ll have more opportunities to write about it later. But as the political class settles down to patting itself on the back about how this project now “fits” the new standards in the DCP, and since the developers have made their peace with the DCP, I’ll be perhaps the one person to talk about what we’ve lost.

Which are 60 condominiums. The new plans are pretty close, in terms of programming, to the old plans, except that 60 condos were sacrificed to make the project fit the new zoning and political standards.

Okay, no one is going to shed a tear for the condos, but let me ask—what was bad about them? In a city of 50,000 housing units, they weren’t going to add to traffic in any measurable way, and they weren’t going to destroy the “character” of anyone’s neighborhood. Yes, rich people were going to buy them, but then we already live in a city where many of the critics of the condos live in houses that are now worth $1,000 per square foot as teardowns.

What the condos would have done is turn thin air into millions of dollars each year of taxes for schools, healthcare, public safety, housing and services for the homeless, etc. Yes, the proverbial bogeymen of Russian oligarchs and Arab sheiks or—Heaven forbid—young Silicon Beach entrepreneurs, might buy some of the condos and only use them a few weeks a year, but others might be bought by elderly Santa Monica homeowners wishing to downsize but stay put.

What was bad about the condos is that they disturbed the false halo of radicalism that the political class in Santa Monica believes crowns their heads. Santa Monicans are mostly on the Left, and so the rhetoric that comes from the most conservative voices in town must use the language of revolution. Oh, those greedy developers! The neighborhood activists and their politicians use words like “community character” and act as if they’re about to storm the barricades of their own privilege, but it’s all about pleasing people who, in the opposite of a progressive agenda, fear change.

Thanks for reading.