To the Santa Monica City Council
On September 8, 2026, the majority of the City Council voted to move forward with Option 1: the immediate, unmodified implementation of SB 79's development standards across 89 R1 parcels in the Expo/Bundy Transit-Oriented Development Zone. Rebuking the recommended option of your own Planning Commission, you voted to destroy/upzone the only R1 neighborhood in the Pico Neighborhood. You did this over the explicit, well-documented, and thoroughly reasoned objection of the Pico Neighborhood Association (PNA) and the residents who live in the Gandara Park Neighborhood. You did it without reliable data on who actually lives in the affected homes, not taking into account that dozens of families who live in R1 homes as renters will likely be evicted as developers zero in on the cheapest R1 lots in Santa Monica. You proceeded under a CEQA exemption that let you avoid asking hard questions about air quality, displacement, and cumulative environmental harm. In the weeks since, you have not lifted a finger to begin the community outreach that a decision of this magnitude demands. You did all of this to a neighborhood that has spent the better part of a century absorbing the costs of decisions made by people in power who are not directly impacted by the decisions made. Many of you recently moved to Santa Monica with a developer-funded YIMBY agenda to fill Santa Monica with market-rate and moderate-rate high-rise housing. You will no doubt begin by destroying the Pico Neighborhood’s character and, moving forward, displace long-term renters and families one neighborhood at a time. You campaigned on a pro-renter platform yet advocated and voted to support SB 79, which will result in mass displacement targeting low-income neighborhoods. It is clear you don’t care about Santa Monica residents, you care about delivering construction projects for your developer donors.
Your Racial Justice Language Is Cosmetic Justice
This City Council loves to talk about racial equity. It is in your resolutions, your press releases, your General Plan language about "retaining and protecting the City's multi-ethnic and multi-income character." You will stand at a podium and speak fluently about restorative justice, about environmental justice, about righting historical wrongs. And then, when an actual decision arrives that tests whether you mean any of it, you vote to upzone 37 parcels beyond the legal minimum in the one neighborhood in this city that has endured redlining, racial covenants, unfair elections and bifurcation by the I-10 freeway that your predecessors planned on purpose. You cannot claim the moral credit of racial justice rhetoric while producing the material outcomes of racial displacement. Restorative justice is not a phrase for the resolution binder. It means recognizing that a neighborhood which has already been cut in half by a freeway, has already absorbed the region's transit infrastructure, and has already been treated as this city's dumping ground for uses no one else wanted, has earned the right to a deliberate, data-informed, community-driven planning process, not a rushed vote followed by silence.
If this Council's commitment to equity were real, Option 1 of how to implement the demands of SB79 would have been dead on arrival. Instead, you took a policy that even your own staff acknowledged could have been scoped to affect 52 parcels and expanded it to 89, in the one TOD zone out of seven that didn't already have the capacity to qualify for exclusion.
This Is Not New. This Is Déjà Vu, the Same Pattern, All Over Again
The Pico Neighborhood has been here before, and you know it. The history of the Pico Neighborhood is written into the historical record of this city. In 1958, the I-10 Freeway was routed directly through the heart of this neighborhood not because there was no other path, but because it needed to connect to the McClure Tunnel and Santa Monica's business interests wanted the conduit. Between 600 and 1,500 mostly Black and Mexican American residents, many of whom had lived in their homes for an average of 17 years, were displaced. Their compensation was not enough to let most of them stay in Santa Monica. Families scattered to Baldwin Hills, Crenshaw, and the San Fernando Valley. Churches lost half their congregations. A thriving Black and Latino business corridor on Olympic Boulevard was gutted. The freeway didn't just take homes it physically severed the neighborhood in two, and it took nearly a decade before Stewart Avenue was even extended to reconnect the two halves you had split.
That was not an accident of engineering. Industrial zoning, manufacturing plants, and later the transit maintenance yard were all sited disproportionately close to the Black, Mexican American, and Japanese American families who had the least power to protect their neighborhoods. This Council's predecessors built environmental racism into the map of this neighborhood, brick by brick and freeway lane by freeway lane, and Pico has been paying interest on that debt for sixty years in noise, in air quality, public health impacts, in truncated property values, in generations of families who never fully recovered what the freeway took from them.
Choosing Option 1 of the SB79 options presented by city staff continues that pattern under new letterhead, dressed up in the vocabulary of housing production instead of infrastructure. You have opted for immediate SB 79 implementation, without a locally developed alternative plan, without anti-displacement protections, and without an environmental justice analysis. You treat Pico as a transit opportunity zone, a line item to be optimized, not a place where people, many of them the descendants of the very families your freeway displaced, still live.
"More Housing" Is Not a Blank Check, and You Know It
This Council likes to talk about the housing crisis in the language of scarcity: build more, anywhere, as fast as possible, and the market will sort out who benefits. That is not planning. That is an abdication of it. You are selling out our neighborhoods to developers under the guise of creating high-rise housing that most residents can’t afford. Displaced tenants don't vanish; they compete for whatever affordable housing is left in the next neighborhood over, driving rents up there too. This is not a hypothetical. It is the documented trajectory of neighborhood after neighborhood. During the City Council meeting on September 8th, Councilmember Dan Hall showed us a PowerPoint presentation on your plans to build high-rise housing in other neighborhoods in the city, creating urban canyons that will hide the sun from Santa Monica residents. It was clear from Hall’s presentation that you will upzone and densify all neighborhoods, destroying the character of our City and displacing long-term renters throughout Santa Monica.
Why The Pico Neighborhood Needs District Elections in Santa Monica
Santa Monica's defenders of unfair at-large elections love pointing to Latino or Pico-based councilmembers as proof the election system works. The city touts that councilmembers Natalia Zernitskaya, Ellis Raskin, and Barry Snell live in Pico district, as if that settles representation. It doesn't. Those three, along with Mayor Caroline Torosis and council member Dan Hall, just voted to destroy the only R1 zone through the one neighborhood already cut in half by a freeway and gutted by industrial zoning decades ago. In fact, Ellis led the vote by making the motion to propose Option 1. Clearly, living in Pico isn't the same as representing Pico residents. When your campaign is funded by developers and pro-density special interests, you answer to those donors, and not to Pico's renters and homeowners. That's the case for district elections: representatives who must earn Pico's support and lose their seat if they betray it, not council members who trade on their address while serving the interests that bankrolled them.
Pico has too often been asked to go first, sacrifice first, and be protected later, if at all. This Council had the chance to break that pattern. Instead, it voted to extend it, and then it went quiet. That vote can still be revisited, and that silence can still be broken. The people of the Pico Neighborhood, the renters in R1 homes that your data doesn't count, the homeowners whose families rebuilt after the freeway, the tenants who don't yet know their block was just rezoned out from under them are watching to see whether this Council's commitment to racial and environmental justice is a governing principle or just a talking point.
____
Maria Loya, PNA Chair