Despite dire predictions of annual city budget deficits approaching $8.9 million this fiscal year and $17 million in the 2002/2003 fiscal year, our city council is apparently on a spending spree.
One of the items on this week’s council agenda was a request to begin negotiations to purchase a 22,000-square-foot former University of California book bindery and warehouse at 1751-1753 Cloverfield Blvd. No purchase price for the property was mentioned in the staff report.
The city has been looking for a place to relocate the Ocean Park Community Center’s Daybreak operation now that it’s being forced out of Seventh Street and Colorado Avenue by the expanding Big Blue Bus operation. Word has it that 1751-1753 Cloverfield will be the new home of Daybreak and other OPCC “homeless” services.
A Pico neighborhood council-watcher e-mailed Mayor Michael Feinstein pointing out that the area is already impacted by large numbers of homeless who congregate at a nearby recycling facility and who live at a nearby Caltrans freeway right-of-way.
The e-mail states that residents and neighborhood groups in Pico and Sunset Park are not aware of proposals for 1751- 1753 Cloverfield, and have not been consulted about the plan to give the facility to OPCC for use as a drop-in center. There are concerns about the increased numbers of transients this facility would attract to the surrounding neighborhoods if OPCC moves in. Stay tuned.
In other development news, an interim ordinance reducing the public development review thresholds in the downtown area to 7,500 square feet from 30,000 square feet was approved by city council Tuesday night. You’re thinking this is good. Well, maybe not. There is a poison pill or two.
The ordinance also exempts all 100 percent affordable housing projects with up to 50 units from public development review and conditional use permits in certain specified zoning districts citywide.
In other words, developers of affordable housing, such as the city-sponsored Community Corporation of Santa Monica, will be able to build up to 50 units without any public input.
Such a development could easily be four or five floors high and placed in a neighborhood of one-and two-story residences with no public say-so — only administrative approval from behind closed doors. Detractors say the result could be very large, dense developments and even multiple oversized buildings, side by side in residential neighborhoods.
The exemptions also allow any mixed-use building with just a single floor of affordable housing to exceed maximum height limits. Mixed-use buildings with as few as 10 percent affordable units would also be exempt from public review.
Clearly the “bigger, higher and denser” direction is not the way most people in Santa Monica want to go. But this is nothing new for this city council and the planning department.
A similar recommendation inserted into a 200-plus page staff report a couple of years ago would have allowed developers of projects in R2, R3 and R4 multi-family zones to exceed height and density codes as well as provide less parking if they included affordable units in their market rate projects. This “bonus density plan” was vociferously opposed by neighborhood leaders, and the staff recommendation was dropped like a hot potato.
But many members of city council are so enamored with the concept of more and more affordable housing, they will compromise the very character of the city and community livability to promote their renter voter based housing agenda.
And to what ends do residents benefit by this? More traffic? More parking problems? More congestion and more pollution? And an uglier, more crowded city?
According to Chuck Allord, Chairman of Neighbors for a Safer Santa Monica, the city is spending $3.5 million to purchase a commercial property in the 1400 block of Broadway for Community Corporation of Santa Monica. Information in the Oct. 4 CCSM board of directors packet confirms that CCSM is negotiating (in escrow) to buy the former Gallegos Bros. tortillera property.
The packet said the city would pony up $2.7 million for the land, plus another $700,000 to compensate the present owner for pre-development of the parcel which already has approval for a mixed-use development with apartments and offices. With CCSM in the picture, the property will most likely become yet another affordable housing project.
Will it ever end? It won’t, Virginia. There’s no end in sight.
Bill Bauer is 25-year resident of Santa Monica and regular columnist.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on November 15, 2002. Read the original PDF.