City purchases bundle of properties
DOWNTOWN While the real estate market may have cooled in recent months, City Hall has been heating up, shelling out more than $70 million on large parcels that may one day become parking structures, mixed-use developments, or light-rail terminals to enhance public transit.
In the last year and a half, the City Council has approved or authorized the purchase of 181,300 square feet in the downtown area. Properties include, but are not limited to, the Sears auto shop on Colorado Avenue and Carlson’s Appliances in the 1338 block of 5th Street.
Most recently, the council authorized the purchase of the temporary Main Library site at 1324 Fifth street, along with three other parcels nearby, for roughly $30 million. The seven lots consist of 52,500 square feet, according to Miriam Mack, economic development director for City Hall.
“We are not in the business of scanning the market, looking to buy properties,” Mack said. “There must be some kind of public need, which would cause us to look.”
The council has become an active participant in the real estate market because of a growing need for more parking and other amenities downtown, which has seen a dramatic increase in the number of condominiums and apartments within the last five to 10 years.
More housing means more people, who demand more services. Parking seems to be the biggest one of them all. The council convened a downtown parking task force which recommended purchasing large parcels for future parking structures. While future uses for the parcels have not yet been identified, there are those who are leaning towards more parking, particularly downtown business interests and residents who have a difficult time finding parking on the weekends.
“Downtown is not just the [Third Street] promenade,”said Mayor Pro Tem Herb Katz, a member of the downtown parking task force, which recommended thousands of new parking spaces be added in the coming years to accommodate increased commercial and residential activity.
“Basically we’re talking about Ocean Avenue to Lincoln [Boulevard],” Katz said. “If that’s what we want downtown to be, we need to spread out parking and go for one-stop parking where you drop off your car and use trams and other modes of transportation. That’s the main goal and we need as much of those big parcels as we can get now because the prices are not going to get any cheaper.
“You really have only one shot,” Katz said of some of the larger, contiguous lots.
While parking is a concern, Councilman Kevin McKeown believes that the land should not be solely dedicated to new structures, but rather, should be for a mix of uses determined by residents.
McKeown voted against the downtown parking task force’s recommendation to add more than 1,700 parking spaces because “it was predicated on needing an additional thousand parking spaces for half a million square feet of future commercial development Santa Monicans haven’t had a chance to evaluate.
“We have real and immediate parking needs for existing businesses and their employees and customers, which I support solving,” McKeown added. “How the land we just purchased should be used is up to Santa Monicans, though, and we need to listen hard to hear whether our community wants to house people instead of cars or chooses to dedicate part of the newly public land to open space and recreational facilities.”
More parks sounds good to Dr. Barbara Shore, but so does another structure. The therapist, who has spent the last nine years working in downtown, said she likes the new mixed-use developments that have sprung up around her because they bring life to what was once a fairly dead neighborhood.
But with that activity comes added traffic and parking has become difficult. Some of her clients have had trouble finding parking close to her office, she said.
“I think one more structure would help, but I would not want to see a lot of structures cluttering up the skyline,”Shore said.“I would really like to see a mix of uses, like more places for people to gather with more housing and rapid transit. All of those things together would really help make this a vibrant community, where the old could mingle with the young and we can really make this like a village.”
Katz said he is open to new ideas and has proposed building any new structures so that they can be converted into other uses, such as office space or housing, if the parking spaces are no longer needed in the future.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on March 9, 2007. Read the original PDF.