By LESLIE ANNE JONES Special to the Daily Press
There’s been a lot of attention paid to the Pico neighborhood recently: The gang violence workshops, a double homicide and, most recently, fights breaking out at Santa Monica High School — fingers seem to point to Pico.
But Clyde Smith, a resident of the Pico neighborhood for most of his life, a board member of the Pico Neighborhood Association (PNA) and an active member of the Santa Monica community, believes there’s more hype than substance to the alleged state of Pico.
“I think it’s the nicest neighborhood in the city,” Smith said.
The Pico neighborhood runs north of the Santa Monica Freeway to Santa Monica Boulevard, south to Pico Boulevard and east from Lincoln Boulevard to Centinela Boulevard.
Pico is home to 16 percent of Santa Monica’s population. The percentages of African Americans and Asians are similar to the rest of the city — 12 percent and 7 percent, respectively. Pico has a larger Latino population, 38 percent, compared to the citywide 13 percent. The median age in Pico is 35, four years younger than the Santa Monica average. And the average Pico household makes $15,000 less than the citywide household median of $50,714, according to U.S. census information.
In all of his years living and working in the Pico neighborhood, Smith said the biggest change for Pico has been population growth.
Smith’s service to the Pico community dates back to 1979, when PNA began in Rev. Ellis Casson’s church office at the First A.M.E. Church by the Sea. Casson saw the need for a community organization in the Pico area. PNA has been striving to improve the quality of life for Pico residents ever since.
PNA isn’t the only organization that received a helping hand from Smith: The Santa Monica Salvation Army, Santa Monica Boys and Girls Club, YMCA, the Santa Monica-Venice NWACP, the Santa Monica Chamber of Commerce board of directors, the American Heart Association’s Santa Monica chapter, Rotary Club and the Martin Luther King Jr. Westside Coalition are some of the other organizations in which Smith has been involved.
Smith views his volunteering as simply part of being a responsible community member.
“All of us don’t go through life alone; we go through life on the shoulders of the people who went ahead of us,” he said. “So like others, I benefited from their hard work.”
Smith, 58, was born and raised in the Pico neighborhood. His parents moved to Santa Monica during World War II because Smith’s father had a job with Douglas Aircraft. Smith received his primary education at Will Rogers Elementary School and Santa Monica High School.
In 1969, when Smith was 17, he graduated from Santa Monica High. He enlisted in the Marines in 1964 and spent three years in Vietnam. He returned to Santa Monica in 1968. Smith started his secondary education at Santa Monica College and then in 1975 transferred to the University of Southern California, where he received a degree in business and marketing.
Smith has held a number of different jobs, but one of the things he has been involved in since he left school is affordable housing development. After leaving USC, Smith worked for the nonprofit Neighborhood Resource and Development Corp., a group sponsored by PNA that rehabilitated Pico housing and organized community projects. Smith worked there for 11 years. He is still working in affordable housing development, now in other California communities.
Smith caught up with the Daily Press on his cell phone, en route to the desert for the weekend to work on an affordable housing project.
How did you get started with the PNA? “Well, I volunteered. I volunteered my time at various places, including the church. I was involved with my own church, Cavalry Baptist, at the time, and volunteering is just part of what we in Santa Monica did with our time, got involved with the community.”
What kind of things has the PNA done? “PNA was instrumental in beginning the programs that we now know in Virginia Park. They started the Virginia Park advisory board, started the Pico Saturday Farmers’ Market; they’ve been instrumental overall in developing the Pico Neighborhood Community Plan, which is an authentic planning document that the Pico neighborhood uses to forge its decisions about Pico life; the Pico streetscapes improvements. I chaired the committee for the Santa Monica Chamber of Commerce, the Pico Boulevard committee, and from doing that kind of work, it evolved into Pico Streetscapes improvement.”
How has the Pico neighborhood changed?
“I think that some members of the neighborhood have become more involved... Residents have become more involved in their community, in making decisions about things that affect their everyday life.”
What is PNA doing now? “Pretty much the same agenda: affordable housing, youth concerns... concern for every aspect of government, quality-of-life issues, public safety issues.”
What do you think about the separation between Pico and the rest of Santa Monica?
“You’re talking about media treatment labels? I just think it’s methods that our media uses to sell newspapers. They often, at journalism school, are trained to use monikers, nom de guerres — various reportedly descriptive language to try and describe a community, (which is) very dangerous.”
Do you think the Pico neighborhood has a gang problem?
“Does it have a gang problem? You mean more than the rest of the United States, more than the rest of Santa Monica? I don’t know, I don’t think so. I think that the problem that it has is with people labeling its youth. The same youth do the same kinds of things in other parts of the community, nobody calls them a gang. So I don’t know, I have to leave that up to the experts. It hasn’t touched my life other than random acts of senseless violence, but did I see the person’s union card to see if they belong to a group or association? I don’t know.”
How have acts of violence affected you personally?
“I’m affected emotionally, but in terms of whether or not it affects me on a day-to-day basis, no.”
How has the Pico neighborhood changed in your lifetime?
“There’s a lot more people. A lot more people. It’s more complex because of more people. Most of us grew up in a time where we could leave our front door open and our back door open and just go about our daily business and not worry about it. Those days are gone, but I don’t think that my community sees itself as infected or overrun with any particular negative aspects of living in Santa Monica. I don’t think that if people get in their cars and drive to Ralph’s or drive around shopping on Pico or going about their daily lives, they consider violent acts any more than they do random acts of kindness.”
How has Santa Monica High School changed?
“Well, the administrators have changed, because some have come and some have retired, but the problems are about the same as when I went there. Santa Monica is largely an Anglo-oriented or Eurocentric city. It hasn’t made standing room for many people unlike itself. So the people that are not like that and don’t fit that model spend an inordinate amount of their time on a daily basis explaining themselves and how they live, and what they think and how they’re ‘different’ than other people, which in point of fact they’re not particularly different than other people. We have far more in common than we have that separates us.”
What are the ongoing problems at Santa Monica High School?
“Well everything that was printed in last week’s Corsair (the Samohi newspaper). The students are not referred to enough, they’re certainly not included in the administrators’ decision. Even at the district level students are taken as cargo on a ship that may be taking on water, they don’t necessarily get listened to or responded to, and certainly the African American and Latino students don’t get responded to or treated as the same as the other students.”
How are African American and Latino students treated differently?
“Access to opportunity, the perception that they are not as capable of doing work, being an A student versus being a C-student. If I expect you, as a reporter, to know basic grammar and English when I hire you, the likelihood is you’ll try and achieve that. If I think that you don’t know anything and I’m out to teach you everything, it changes my perception of you.”
What do you think about the fighting incident at Santa Monica High School?
“There wasn’t any property damage, there wasn’t any substantial damage to students, no one was hospitalized, weapons weren’t used, it was just a few shoving matches between selected groups of students. The larger audience was the audience watching the shoving matches.”
What should be done about violence in the Pico neighborhood?
“It’s not high on my priority list. I think the most violent act in the Pico neighborhood is the traffic — traffic intrusion.”
Are the issues in Pico blown out of proportion?
“Absolutely. When someone is hurt, it’s important to all of us. But it doesn’t merely happen in my community, that’s not the substance of what my community is about. If we were going to talk about 89 things, violence wouldn’t be one of them.”
What are your priorities in the Pico neighborhood?
“Equilibrium with the rest of the city’s quality of life.”
How can that be achieved? “The same way you would do it achieving anything else: You have to bring the resources to the table. The reason the neighborhood organization was formed was to bring greater opportunity to people in the community and to get them involved in the decisions that affect their lives.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on May 2, 2005. Read the original PDF.