Tag Archives: Santa Monica politics

The time for speculation is now

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Signature gathering for the referendum against the Hines Paper Mate project wraps up soon, which means that I have little time remaining to speculate on the meaning of the referendum process before the result of the process complicates my analysis.

I suspect the referendum proponents at Residocracy will get the signatures they need, as I can’t recall a signature-gathering effort in Santa Monica that failed. Based on their having to hire paid signature gatherers, the process seems not to have gone as well as they predicted, but I assume all hands will be on deck to get the boat to the finish line.

The voters are there if they can reach them. The number of signatures needed, 6,100, is about the number of voters in Santa Monica (7,000 or so) who, at least by my computations, typically base their votes primarily on the issue of development, and of course there are even more voters who are willing to sign any petition against traffic.

But then, there are two things you can say about gathering signatures – it’s easy, and it’s hard.

It’s easy because signature-gatherers can always come up with a sound bite (“7,000 car trips!”) that simplifies the issue and sells it, and the fact that the gatherer is looking the potential signer in the eye in a real-life, not virtual, situation helps to close the deal. (Unless the target passerby is in don’t-bother-me mode.)

But gathering signatures is also hard. While 10% of voters, the threshold that needs to be reached, is only a small percentage of the electorate, it’s typically many more people than those who are active in the group promoting the ballot measure. It takes a lot of work to reach outside the core.

Consider Residocracy. As I recall, when the signature campaign started, Residocracy was saying it had about 400 members. To get 6,100 signatures one needs a cushion to cover invalid signatures, and so one needs something like 8,000 signatures. Meaning that each of the 400 needed to be responsible for an average of 20 signatures.

Sounds easy, right?

But think about it – think about your four closest friends; do the five of you know 100 different people you can get to sign something? I’m suspecting not – you probably know a lot of the same people. And the Residocracy 400 likely have overlapping Venn diagrams of friendships. So let’s say on average each of the 400 can get 10 signatures from their social circle. Now you’re up to 4,000 – which is a good base, but those are also the easy ones, the low-hanging fruit. The other 4,000 are harder.

As I mentioned above, the only definitive sign that the signature gathering has not gone as fast as expected is that Residocracy resorted to hiring paid signature gatherers, something Residocracy’s founder, Armen Melkonians, had said he didn’t want to do. Nothing wrong with that, but it does throw some reality onto the claims that those who signed up for Residocracy speak for residents collectively.

As for the meaning of the petition drive, it would be refreshing if what came out of the process is a recognition that no one in Santa Monica politics speaks for everyone, and that to win an argument one must make more of an argument than simply “this is what the residents want.”

I’m not going to hold my breath for that, but it appears that Santa Monica is in for some soul-searching. The City’s new survey on attitudes toward development is going to be chewed on quite a bit. I haven’t yet studied the survey in depth, but even looking at the numbers on the surface it’s apparent that people have much more complex attitudes toward local issues than are reflected in our political discourse.

Yes, people can want to make traffic flow better and also want more housing and good jobs.

Thanks for reading.

A Tale of Three Motions

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I was busy (i.e., sleeping) in the wee hours Wednesday morning, and it wasn’t until the weekend that I got around to watching the City Council’s deliberations over the Bergamot Area Plan (BAP). It surprised many residents who spoke at the meeting, but the main issue for the council members was not traffic, density, or parks, but rather how to increase the affordability of housing.

This gulf between what some residents believe are the issues and what in fact were the issues arises because the council members, even those elected with the support of, for instance, residents who rank traffic congestion as Santa Monica’s worst problem, are aware that they have to deal with the inevitable more than they have to deal with the wishful.

It is inevitable that the old industrial areas of Santa Monica will be redeveloped, and it is inevitable that the number of Santa Monicans who live in apartments and condos, already a massive majority, will continue to increase. Santa Monica is both a post-sprawl and a post-industrial city, and people charged with managing that transition, that evolution, cannot wish away the inevitable.

And so the council members did not discuss traffic much, because they know that the BAP deals with traffic as best as any realistic plan for the area could, and they didn’t discuss density much, because they know that the densities to be allowed under the plan, even if you don’t count new streets in the FAR calculation, are moderate and realistic for a place that a metropolis surrounds and which in turn surrounds a train station on a billion-dollar light rail line. It was telling that there was no controversy among the council members about increasing the density for the two privately own parcels on Michigan Avenue adjacent to the Bergamot galleries.

Nor did the council members argue much about parks, since they know that given the legal and fiscal constraints, they couldn’t do any more Wednesday morning to create parks than the plan did, and that the real work of creating usable public open space will come in the negotiation of development agreements.

So what did the council members argue about, or given that they didn’t really argue, what did they spend a couple of hours discussing? Well, it was housing, specifically how to get more housing that would be available to people who work in the area. The discussion revolved around three motions.

Council Member Gleam Davis made the first motion, and it reflected the consensus of a lot of progressives in the city, including the leadership of Santa Monicans for Renters Rights, that the plan needed more affordability. Davis’ motion was to expand density bonuses for building affordable housing, and to target the bonuses reward developers who build units for households earning less than what staff had recommended.

This motion passed unanimously.

The next motion came from Council Member Ted Winterer, and it had to do with the ratio between commercial and residential development in the area under the plan. If you were reading my Lookout columns three years ago about the updates to the land use and circulation elements of the general plan (the LUCE) (and you’re obsessed enough with local politics to remember them), you will know my heart went all fluttery when Winterer made the motion, because he wanted to clarify that the ratios called for in the plan would include in the calculation of the ratio existing square footage (which is all commercial), and existing square footage that is removed in the building of new development, thereby increasing the percentage of residential development because the percentage would be based upon the whole amount of development, not only the new development.

Winterer’s motion passed on a 4-3 vote; voting for it were Winterer, Davis and Council Members Tony Vazquez and Kevin McKeown. Council Member Terry O’Day said that he was voting against it because he believed that it would put the BAP in conflict with the LUCE, and presumably Mayor Pam O’Connor and Council Member Robert Holbrook agreed with him because they didn’t say anything and also voted no.

Council Member McKeown made the third motion, and it was to increase by 50% the amount of affordable housing that would be required under the plan in large projects. This motion lost on a 4-3 vote; Davis, who was the key vote all night, voted no because she was concerned that an across-the-board increase in the requirement might reduce the overall amount of housing that would be built, defeating the purpose of, as McKeown had emphasized, getting housing built near the jobs in the area to house working families and reduce commuter traffic.

Instead, Davis and the rest of the council directed staff to analyze the economics of increasing the affordable housing requirement; this data can then be used in negotiations over development agreements, which is where the data, on a project-by-project basis, would be most relevant.

In the end, the council members voted 6-1 to pass the BAP. The no vote came from McKeown; he made a protest vote on the affordability issue, but otherwise did not express significant disagreements with the plan. It was significant that O’Day, Holbrook and O’Connor voted for the plan even though they had lost the vote on the commercial/residential ratio, and that Vazquez and Winterer voted in favor of the plan even though they had lost the vote on McKeown’s motion to increase affordability.

It’s worth remembering that the Planning Commission approved the plan on a 5-1 vote, and the one no vote then was also a kind of protest vote, that time on the parks issue.

Some Santa Monicans are mystified about how the commissioners and the council members could so overwhelmingly endorse a plan that plan opponents say the public overwhelmingly rejects. Leaving aside the question whether the general public is in fact upset about the plan, the fact remains that the job of the commissioners and the council members is to plan for the future not sanctify the past.

Thanks for reading.

Santa Monica and Santa Barbara: Not the Same

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The policy of mixing market-rate housing with affordable housing has been not only accepted wisdom nationwide since the debacles that standalone public housing created in the ’50s and ’60s, but also a policy goal in Santa Monica for a long time. Santa Monica voters enacted Prop. R in 1990 to require that 30% of all housing in the city be affordable and from the first ordinance that implemented the law Santa Monica has pushed the goal of building affordable housing with, or in close proximity to, market rate housing.

Surprisingly this “inclusionary” policy was challenged last week in a column, “Community benefits do nothing for the community,” from the “Our Town” collective at the Daily Press. In the column, Our Town writer Ellen Brennan argued that mixing low-income and luxury housing is “not a recipe for healthy neighborhoods.”

But maybe Brennan’s opposition to inclusionary housing is not surprising because in the column she also blasts three council members backed by Santa Monicans for Renters Rights (SMRR) for pushing for more development downtown because they believe in a SMRR “dogma” in favor of building affordable housing.

Note to Brennan: affordable housing is not dogma in Santa Monica, it’s the law, and it’s the law because the people passed Prop. R. And then in 1998 they passed another measure authorizing Santa Monica to spend money building affordable housing, and in the latest opinion survey Santa Monicans said that affordable housing was the top community benefit they wanted to see from development.

Before I criticize Brennan’s column more, however, let me say that I have a lot of respect for her. We’ve even agreed occasionally, and in any case she’s been an articulate and gracious participant in Santa Monica politics, which prompts a relevant digression.

Which is that readers may detect a trend. In the blog I posted last week I also took pains before disagreeing with Denny Zane and Mike Feinstein to say admiring things about them. You might be thinking, “Oh, Gruber, he’s just trying to make nice to people he’s going to bump into on the street.” Or worse, “Gruber – typical politician.” In fact there’s a substantive point I want to make, which is that despite the hyperbole to the point of vitriol and the wild accusations that can fly around (welcome to local politics anywhere), the level of discourse in Santa Monica is high. There are always intelligent and articulate people on all sides of any issue, and over the decades Santa Monica has been a well-governed and progressive city because people listen to each other and make compromises. It helps that anyone who gets involved in more than one issue knows that the person you’re violently disagreeing with today about X is your ally tomorrow about Y.

I say that this is a relevant digression because what’s happening in Santa Monica lately (although not by any means for the first time) is that the rhetoric has become the lead story, not the underlying decisions that have to be made. People are focusing on the box, not what’s in the box (let alone what’s outside the box).

Okay, end of digression, and having said that, I’ll say right away that I disagree with nearly every word of Brennan’s column.

Why? Because Brennan bases her reasoning on a false understanding of what Santa Monica is.

I first became acquainted with Brennan in the ’90s when I was on the Planning Commission. One night the issue before the commission was the hours of operation for Pacific Park on the rebuilt Pier: the amusement park wanted to extend its hours to later at night. Brennan appeared before the commission in opposition; she told us that she had moved two years previously to an apartment across from the Pier, and that she had expected that living on the beach there would be like Mendocino.

Mendocino? I remember wondering to myself, “When she looked at the apartment, did she notice the Pier? Or did she turn around to see a whole region that for a century or so had considered the sand in front of her apartment its favorite beach?

Mendocino?

A few weeks ago Brennan appeared before City Council – the issue was the Downtown Specific Plan – to complain that on a recent Saturday afternoon she had encountered terrible traffic and difficulty parking when she tried to use her car to accomplish a few errands downtown.

Hmmm. For getting onto a century Santa Monica has been a place where on a beautiful Saturday afternoon 500,000 people are going to be here. That’s what Santa Monica has been, is, and will always be. If you live near the beach summer Saturdays are not good days to drive to the bank and the grocery store.

Not only is Santa Monica the favorite beach for 10 million people, but its history also includes being a would-be great port with mile-long wharf, an industrial center with one of the world’s largest factories, a medical center with two big hospitals, a corporate office center (including a 300-foot high tower built for a phone company’s headquarters), etc. These are all histories not shared with any real or hypothetical sleepy beach town that Santa Monica isn’t.

In fact, the main thing that Santa Monica shares with Santa Barbara is traffic congestion (and complaints about it). Try visiting Santa Barbara on a nice weekend.

Thanks for reading.

For Poorer and for Richer

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Two of my favorite Santa Monicans to argue or agree with are former mayors Denny Zane and Michael Feinstein. (But it’s better when they agree with you.) The two of them will always let you know exactly what they are thinking and back up their arguments with facts and/or honest perspectives, as well as deep historical and practical knowledge.

But I disagree with their opposition to including luxury condominiums in any towers that the City might allow to be built along Ocean Avenue, opposition they expressed in articles Jason Islas wrote recently for The Lookout.

There are good reasons to question the desirability of allowing new towers along Ocean Avenue (there are also good reasons to favor them), but I don’t include opposing high-end residences as one of them.

Both Zane and Feinstein argue that allowing tall buildings for the purpose of housing rich people would compromise Santa Monica’s character — in Feinstein’s words, “change our entire community standards,” or, in Zane’s, to do so would “transgress some pretty fundamental values.” But what values and standards? Rich people are part of Santa Monica and always have been. From the earliest days there were mansions along Ocean Avenue, and let’s not forget Marion Davies’ little place on the beach. Luxury homes and the people who live in them are part of the mix that makes up our special character.

Would Zane and Feinstein say that Santa Monica’s community standards are challenged because 31% of all the land in Santa Monica, comprising nearly 47% percent of all residentially zoned land, is zoned for single-family homes? While it’s true that back in the days when Santa Monica was a factory town workers and shopkeepers lived in and owned many of those houses, it’s been a long time since a truly middle-income family could buy a house here.

I suspect that many of the people who oppose building towers on Ocean enjoy the fact that so much of our city is lightly populated (as do I – cities shouldn’t be uniformly dense), but the fact is that a lot of Santa Monica, including some of the most beautiful parts leading up to Santa Monica Canyon and the Santa Monica Mountains, is already privatized (to use Feinstein’s word). Has this ruined the character of Santa Monica? I don’t think so.

Opposing high-end condos also begs the question of what might go in a tower that would be less objectionable. Land downtown is zoned commercial; personally, I would find it worse to allow more office towers (like the former GTE and “Café Casino” buildings), and offices would also generate more traffic than condos. Does anyone want to build high-rises with only affordable housing? That’s a strategy that progressives rejected a long time ago. And what’s wrong with mixing residences with hotels? That’s a tradition in cities all around the world.

All in all, it seems that if towers are going to be built, the best mix that could be proposed would be a combination of hotels, market rate condos and apartments (meaning luxury, yes, but there’s nothing stopping the City from trying to negotiate housing for a broader mix of incomes), affordable housing (which in a development agreement can be required to be built on-site or nearby), and public access to the views from the tops of the buildings.

Thanks for reading.

Popularity Contest; and the Winner is . . .

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For more than 30 years Santa Monicans for Renters Rights (SMRR) has been the dominant political organization in Santa Monica. I’d argue that now it’s more popular than ever.

Why do I say this at a time when residents are supposed to be so angry? Start with the last election, when SMRR candidates ran the table and for the first time won every race for City Council, the School Board, the College Board and the Rent Board. SMRR has by far the most powerful brand in Santa Monica politics. The power of that brand is based on performance: residents know that Santa Monica, notwithstanding the issues we have, is among the best-governed cities in the region, one that provides excellent services.

When it comes to the development issue, which these days generates the most headlines, Santa Monica, among the cities in the region that have historically been employment centers, is the one that has best managed development. Notably, when nearly every other Southern California city subsidizes development, Santa Monica requires that developers subsidize city services and capital investments. This has been the case ever since SMRR took charge in 1981 — when, in the words of William Fulton, Santa Monica was the first Southern California city to “confront the growth machine.” Since the ’60s population has boomed in Southern California, but for 50 years Santa Monica’s population has hardly budged.

As population has turned over in Santa Monica, and as the battles of 30 years ago over rent control faded into history, many have predicted that SMRR’s popularity would wane, but that hasn’t happened. Newcomers have high opinions of SMRR precisely because they have come from elsewhere and know in comparison just how well Santa Monica is governed (and they know that traffic is just as bad outside of Santa Monica as in it).

What I’m saying is contrary to the narrative that we read about in the local papers and online, but I don’t know any place where politics is about happy people expressing gratitude for their happiness — nor should it be. Everyone and every government makes mistakes, and that goes for Santa Monica, too. But according to a decade of consistent scientific polling, the real people who live here — not necessarily the people who purport to speak for them — are happy with their city and with local government. Even the critics appearing before the City Council or the Planning Commission typically preference their criticisms with “I love it here, but . . .”

In this context it was a shocker to read a column last week in the Daily Press written by longtime local activist Tricia Crane for a column-writing collective called “Our Town” that consists of Crane and fellow anti-development activists Ellen Brennan, Zina Josephs and Armen Melkonians. In the column, entitled “Taking from the poor, giving to the rich,” the Our Towners lit into “the people who run Santa Monica” who did “not care what residents want.”

According to Our Town, Santa Monica’s vaunted public development review process, one of SMRR’s achievements, was “a method used to keep people distracted from the hidden agenda of a group of politicos and developers who are working together to overbuild Santa Monica in a way that profits them while destroying the quality of life for residents.”

The immediate instigation for the column was the Rent Board’s decision to grant developer Marc Luzzatto a removal permit to allow him to proceed with his development on the site of the Village Trailer Park (VTP). According to the Our Town column, the failure of SMRR leadership to get the board members to ignore the advice of their attorneys (who advised that it was unlikely the board would prevail against Luzzatto in a lawsuit) and deny the permit was evidence for “just how far from its original values SMRR has wandered as it uses its political clout to forward the interests of the wealthy while leaving the neediest of Santa Monica further and further behind.”

Ouch.

And it’s not just the Our Town writers; the mantra of the Santa Monica Coalition for a Livable City (SMCLC) is, “Take back our city!” Take it back from whom?

A couple of things. For one, do you believe that the anti-development opposition to the VTP project (which will consist nearly entirely of workforce and affordable housing) is based on the plight of the trailer park tenants? (Who, by the way, could have been evicted seven years ago under state law if the City and Luzzatto had not reached a deal to keep them there.) I’m not doubting that Santa Monica’s anti-development activists feel bad, as we all do, for people losing their homes, but I suspect that if there had been a tannery there instead, and Luzzatto wanted to replace that with 400 apartments, the Our Town writers and SMCLC would have protested and argued that Santa Monica needs to preserve its tanneries.

While declaring that they are not against “all development,” the anti-development side conveniently finds “special” arguments to use against any specific development (for example, while condos are too big and luxurious and serve the rich, workforce apartments are too small and austere and the tenants can’t afford them), but the real problem is that they never tell us what development they would support. Development needs to be regulated, but anyone who argues that there shouldn’t be, or won’t be, any development can’t be taken seriously.

For two, what about the bite-the-hand-that-feeds-you angle? The anti-development faction in Santa Monica has never elected anyone to City Council without an endorsement from SMRR, and even those they have elected have at least been in favor of building housing. The anti-development forces who use SMRR every two years to pursue their agenda reject the members of SMRR, and the SMRR council members, who support regulated economic development and investment in Santa Monica. SMRR’s strength, however, and the ability to achieve its goals, depends on respecting a range of views within.

SMRR prides itself on being a “big tent” organization, and that strategy has worked well. You have to wonder what are the limits to that strategy. “Big tent” can easily become “battered political organization syndrome,” where disproportionate efforts are spent trying to accommodate a faction that plainly doesn’t like SMRR and won’t be happy until it has the whole tent.

Thanks for reading.

Money Isn’t Everything

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On Saturday I co-hosted with former Santa Monica Mayor Mike Feinstein a forum to discuss whether Santa Monica should relax the limitations on building height that it enacted in the ’80s. Because of limited seating at the venue (the restaurant Bizou Grill on Colorado Avenue, which deserves great praise) we couldn’t publicize the event widely, but about 70 interested community members turned out.

The discussion was good – serious talk about the pros and cons of building up. Frankly, it was hard to separate the issue of height from other issues relating to development and the future of downtown Santa Monica (at the moment, of course, there are three controversial tall hotel/condo developments pending), but as one participant told me later, there are benefits to isolating and focusing on one aspect of a complex problem.

I had many thoughts during the forum on what the issue of height is about, but also many on what height is not about, and in this post I’m going to write about some of the latter.

For one thing, height is not about density. As architect and urbanist Stefanos Polyzoides (who journeyed from Pasadena to give an outside-of-Santa-Monica perspective) pointed out, two of the densest cities in the world, Paris and Barcelona, have few buildings higher than six stories. More allowable height enables the shifting of development into different shapes (for good or ill), but how much development to allow is a separate decision.

Height is also not about money, and this works both ways.

Misti Kerns, the head of Santa Monica’s Convention and Visitors Bureau, reminded the group that more hotel development indisputably will aid our local economy and help the city balance its budget. It’s not indisputable, however, that hotel development depends on allowing taller buildings. More than a few hotels have been built here since the height restrictions were enacted 30 years ago, and the City Council has already voted to give priority in the planning process to hotel developments.

It’s true that the City faces deficits over the next few years, but none of the hotels now in the development pipeline could be opened in time to help with the current situation. Even if they could, does anyone believe that fundamental long-term planning decisions should be made one way or the other to solve an immediate budget issue?

But “money” arguments that the opponents of height make are also irrelevant. These take various forms, including (i) “the only reason to build is so that greedy developers can make money,” or (ii) “the only reason to build is so that rich people can live in luxury condos.”

As for developers’ profits, we live in a capitalistic society characterized by the profit motive and the importance of investment in assets, including real estate. If you want to see a city where developers stopped investing, take a look at Detroit, and unless you live in a building built by a nonprofit affordable housing developer, you either live on property that a developer subdivided and developed or in a building that one built.

Sure developers are out to make a buck, but then so are film producers and doctors and artists, but I don’t see anyone calling them greedy when they make a successful movie or build a good practice or sell a painting. Nor have I heard homeowners calling themselves greedy for feeling good when home values increase, or future retirees complaining when the investments in their 401k or pension plan increase in value.

As for the luxury condo argument, 31% of the land in Santa Monica is zoned single-family residential, and this being the Westside, we can assume that nearly every one of those houses is affordable to only the 10% (and a lot of it to only the 1%). We may not need social policies to get housing for rich people built, but don’t kid yourself that it isn’t part of what Santa Monica is. Besides that, it’s a good thing when rich people want to live in your downtown. It shows you’ve done something right.

And look: do you believe the opponents of the pending tall hotel/condo projects would like them any better if they had a mix of work-force and affordable family-oriented housing that perfectly meshed with Santa Monica’s needs? Or, heaven help us, what if someone wanted to build 120 affordable units at the Miramar instead of 120 condos? Would the Huntley Hotel accept 22 stories of that?

When we’re talking about height, let’s talk about height. I’m sure the aesthetic, communitarian, urbanism, and other real issues about it will give us plenty to argue over all by themselves.

Thanks for reading.

When Hotels Collide

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I suppose I should be flattered that the owners of the Miramar Hotel felt that including a seven-year-old quote from me about the Annenberg Beach House might help them in their battle royale with the Huntley Hotel, but I’ll decline the honor.

It’s not that I don’t find it ironic that Latham & Watkins, known as the toughest real estate development law firm in Southern California, has been retained to scuttle a real estate development (I even joked about this in a blog post last month), but I wish the Miramar had left my name off what is one of the most unpleasant and misbegotten political mailers in Santa Monica history.

No thanks, but I’d rather not be associated with a piece that makes the owner of the Huntley look like the FBI’s most-wanted terrorist. And surely it’s counter-productive for one developer to accuse another of greed.

But I can understand if the Miramar people are feeling a bit frustrated, because the Huntley’s consultant, Sue Burnside, has been turning Miramar opponents out in droves to public meetings, the latest being the City Council meeting Tuesday night. That was on the motion by three councilmembers to table action on any project proposing a tall building until after the adoption of the Downtown Specific Plan (DSP).

Speaking of irony, this proposed measure, which was promoted as a means of calming the waters, caused another two or three hours of storm-tossed seas.

I was torn by the proposal. I agree with the three councilmembers proposing it (Kevin McKeown, Ted Winterer and Tony Vazquez) that in an ideal world it would be better to make intellectually pure decisions about issues like height before anybody proposed a project, but we don’t live in an ideal world, and in the real world, until and unless someone proposes a tall project, we probably wouldn’t even think about the issue.

Moreover, as someone who hasn’t made up his mind about whether we should relax our 30-year-old limitations on heights, I like the idea of seeing the proposed projects first, because they provide context for the decision-making. Ted Winterer had a good point that the process could create its own momentum towards approval, but I’d risk that for the chance to see what people have in mind.

In any case, no decisions will be made until council adopts the DSP.

Politically, the crux of the issue was summarized in Kevin McKeown’s comment, after agreeing to support Gleam Davis’ motion to poll residents on their views about height, that, “I will be supporting this motion, although I think it would have been better, faster, easier and cheaper to just listen to our constituents.”

What McKeown might have said, to be more accurate, was that the council should have listened to his constituents, because the proposal highlighted the fact that the councilmembers, even the six who owe their political success to their having been endorsed by Santa Monicans for Renters Rights (SMRR), do not share all the same constituencies.

Look at the election last November. The two leading candidates, Ted Winterer and Terry O’Day, each polled about the same number of votes (17,604 for Winterer and 17,042 for O’Day); although SMRR (and other organizations) endorsed them both and to a great extent their support overlapped, anyone who knows anything about politics here knows that Winterer probably received five or six thousand anti-development votes and O’Day probably received about the same number from voters opposed to anti-development policies.

If you look at the 2012 election at the margin between victory and defeat, which was all about who won the contested fourth seat, the issue of constituencies is even more complicated. Tony Vazquez won the seat and he ran outside of the development/anti-development issue. He wasn’t supported by the developers’ pop-up organization, Santa Monicans United for a Responsible Future, and the anti-development forces didn’t support him either – he wasn’t on the slate of Santa Monica Coalition for a Livable City and he didn’t receive financial support from the Huntley through their pop-up organization, Santa Monicans for Responsible Growth. Indeed, the anti-development faction so suspected him of being in favor of development that they prevented him from receiving an endorsement from the SMRR membership or the Santa Monica Democratic Club, two of his natural constituencies.

Instead, Vazquez won because he was known for having been a councilmember in the ’90s and he had endorsements from SMRR, the County Democratic Party, and, crucially, Unite-HERE, the hotel workers’ union, which walked precincts for him. While land-use politics garner most of the attention and generate most of the heat in Santa Monica, they’ve rarely been decisive with the voters.

I bring this up because it might lower the frustration and anger level if people acknowledge that just because they are willing to come late at night to a City Council meeting to protest, that doesn’t mean that the councilmembers, who know who elected them, will necessarily consider them as representing anyone other than themselves.

Call it once again the difference between the real world and someone’s ideal.

Thanks for reading.

Village Trailer Park: Politics and Planning and Planning Politics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for reading.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for reading.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for reading.