This week, Q-Line asked: “Are the top concerns revealed in the city’s survey also your concerns? How can our elected officials rectify the problem?”
Here are your responses: ■ “I have a suggestion. Mr. Springer, who actually writes as a guest for your paper, (From the Streets) suggests that China has solved the problem of the homeless. So perhaps we can take all the homeless from Santa Monica and send them to China so they can be taken care of.” ■ “Many years ago, Santa Monica had the Ocean Park Amusement Pier done in by Disneyland. The Arragon and Conseno Ballrooms done in when folks stopped dancing and Jack’s at the beach done in when the amusement pier was torn down. It was a great place have to fun. I remember 66 years ago when I went to Pirate Days at Venice amusement pier. I was five years old. The Venice amusement pier was also demolished. How dare we try to have a good time. In the late 1970s, real estate price gouging and profiteering reared its head and was soon severed by a well-written and well-justified rent control law that opened the door of fairness against greed. It created two political issues in Santa Monica: rent control and homeless. Rent control is here to stay. I trust the government will help the homeless. As for myself, the only fun I have now is riding my bike along the excellent Santa Monica bike path, reminiscing about how good it was to be alive in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s. It is then that I realize that I had the best of it.” ■ “Our elected officials are not capable of rectifying the problems because it’s their own incompetence that has caused them. The only solution is for all of us to wake up and vote more wisely in the future. We need to elect people who live in the real world and have real jobs and who will base decisions on common sense and a healthy respect for taxpayers money.” ■ “The concerns regarding homelessness, over-development and congestion mirror my own. Our policies, or perhaps lack of them, have turned Santa Monica into a Mecca for the homeless. Their sheer numbers and the problems they create has put a financial and emotional strain on this city. Area-wise this is a small, eight-square-mile community. It has been weighed down over the last two decades by a tremendous growth in buildings. Why? Because our leadership is sold out to developers in exchange for more money to plow into their social programs. Lastly, there is the issue of congestion. This is simple math. When you increase density, you also increase the mass. In the case of Santa Monica, this means more people squeezed into traffic slowing lanes. Basically, I think social planning and civic planning are totally out of sync in Santa Monica.” ■ “The worst problem in Santa Monica is smog due in replacement of established trees with twigs. The bus lane made more traffic. We have more empty buses chasing each other around.” ■ “I think the homeless problem is just going to get worse and worse. All of the money the city throws at it is just going to make the problem worse for the citizens who pay for these programs to exist. I’d like to see all the money for the homeless put towards our schools and senior citizens. Let those adults who have messed up their lives find their own way out of it.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on January 17, 2003. Read the original PDF.