By TED WINTERER
When I graduated from college just after the end of the last Ice Age, I lived in Jackson Hole, Wyo. for a year. There I taught skiing, worked as a DJ at a bar and wooed the Finnish maids at the Alpenhof. Money was scarce, but I lived cheaply in a luxury condo, with a sauna and a shower larger than many studio apartments.
You see, the condo was adjacent to the Jackson Hole airport, which lies within spitting distance of the ski resort. The only problem was the Snake River, which runs between the airport and the slopes, an impassable obstacle due to the absence of a bridge. So to get from my condo to the ski area, one had to drive 20 minutes into the town of Jackson, where a bridge crossed the river, and then double back for another 20 minutes on the opposite side of the river to reach the lifts.
Some brilliant developer had gotten wind of a scheme to build a bridge from the airport to the resort, snatched up some cheap scrubland and built luxury condos, expecting a significant windfall when his new town homes were a five-minute drive away from the Tetons. The only catch? The bridge has yet to be built and he had to rent his condos to ski bums like me.
I was reminded of this when reading the latest city staff report on the ongoing revisions to plans for land use and traffic circulation in our town. Several options for future growth are presented and two of them focus on redeveloping the area around Bergamot Station, the site of a planned stop for the Expo light rail.
Now I’m all for this light rail, which will eventually connect us to downtown LA. My concern is that the portion of the route which extends into Santa Monica won’t be completed until 2015. At this point it’s like that bridge across the Snake River, lacking any funding or approvals.
So I hope our new zoning ordinance, the end result of these planning revisions, won’t allow for any redevelopment incentives around Bergamot Station until the Expo rail extension is completely financed. If we built around Bergamot in anticipation of light rail, we might get stuck with a white elephant of development lacking any public transit.
And then there’s the matter of the arts complex at Bergamot. One would hope the mixed-use development proposed in these alternative plans would be an architecturally inspired medley of galleries, affordable artist studios, low-and middle-income housing, walkable retail and pocket parks, rather than the alienating and insipid market rate dreck we’ve seen pop up downtown in recent years.
In the city staff’s report on these alternatives for land use in Santa Monica, it’s noted that residents expressed a desire for “an appropriate town scale” and that “existing height limits should be maintained.” I have argued over and over, as have countless others, that popular sentiment does not favor the existing height limits allowed in our zoning ordinance, which are often greater than the heights of the buildings currently in place. Rather, folks like the existing heights.
Is anyone at City Hall listening? If staff acknowledges that “the height and scale of new buildings should complement the existing fabric of neighborhoods and commercial areas,” why do their three preferred alternatives for our future all include areas with increased heights and densities, and why does their report give short shrift to the choices of either preserving the status quo or adopting a no-growth policy? (Ted Winterer)
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on December 9, 2005. Read the original PDF.