“DEFI N ITELY, AT LEAST U NTI L A solid new City General Plan is completed, a moratorium should be put on all new commercial-and residential-building. Refurbishing and improving, most certainly, but no more sun-blocking, ambiance-destroying, dismal, traffic-inviting building. The present development course will only take away yet more of why many came here in the first place and make this tiny community an even more crowded, uninteresting, visitor less-appealing, and sometimes even unhappy, keyed-up, harried a place to be. We should be asking ourselves that tough question now: ‘Do I want my city to be just a place where I sleep and work, and at most other times really need to go somewhere else to be able to find quiet, and to relax and inexpensively enjoy myself with my interests and my friends when out and about?’ Please, this coastal gem is already sadly tarnished.”
“CITY HALL’S REALLY NOT OVERHAULING this city. They’re overwhelming it. One Council meeting and one contract at a time, Santa Monica has become a less desirable place to live. Sadly, to me, it looks and feels more like a business and retail center. Hello to catering to money-driven interests, the ravaging of downtown trees and the forced mass-medication of our water supply. Good-bye to tree-cherishing aesthetics, safe streets and bicycling, and to safe drinking water. Something, obviously, should be done to limit this Council majority’s powers. If more residents don’t soon wake up and huddle to bring about progressive change, to our own detriment I think more of us will soon be goners.”
“OVERHAU LI NG TH E CITY IS NOT the key word, ‘overloading’ is. The brakes should have been put on long ago — too much building, way too many people and nightmare traffic have turned this city upside down. The infrastructure in all this mess is lagging way behind. But some people are getting rich in the midst of all this disaster... and that is the other operative word, just like the homeless industry here — lots of people getting rich. So that will be going on and on, and the mess will continue.”
“THE CITY NEEDS TO CUT DOWN ON development — commercial and residential — besides pollution and smog ad congestion. We are in the midst of water shortage. Just this afternoon, the news said California might have to impose strict rationing. How can we add more buildings and more people? We don’t have the water for it.”
“WE’VE GOT TOO MUCH BUILDING going on. Every time we build something we get more people and more traffic, which makes even more of a mess. We should have less development, even tear down some things and have more open space. Less people equals less traffic.”
“ALL OF MY LIFE, AFTER ENTERING puberty, I was told it is not the size that counts. It is how well you use it that counts, thank God. That has a lot to do with cities as well. The city of Santa Monica is very much like Reno, Nevada — a city that advertises itself as the biggest little city in the world. Santa Monica is big in everything except geographical size, certainly large in the area of commercial development such as high-rise office buildings and retail hopping centers. These commercial cash flows are great for the city treasury, but still there is the well known side of transformational commercial development. Transformation often means out with the old and in with the new, and the city loses its character. Where would Paris be without the Eiffel Tower or London without Big Ben?”
“I THINK SANTA MONICA SHOULD LIMIT commercial development. I’ll never forget the time my family went to Clearwater, Florida, and it was just high-rises with very little offset, with a beach that was small and black water. The irony was it was called Clearwater and the water was black. There was so much overdevelopment so close to the beach. Of course, that’s where the garbage drained to.”
“WHEN FRIENDS COME TO VISIT US IN Santa Monica, they often comment how filthy and dirty our town is, especially on the streets surrounding our beach and the promenade — broken bottles and Starbucks cups, traffic jams and tourists driving the wrong way. Santa Monica for Renters Rights have sold us out. Wake up, Santa Monica, and smell the roses... oops, I mean smell the homeless pee.”
“CITY HALL NEEDS TO CUT DOWN ON development, and the bustling environment. I miss the days when Santa Monica was a quiet, mellow town for people to come to and relax and enjoy.”
“CITY HALL’S IDEAS FOR OVERHAULING the city are so against what we residents want and need, like, for example, the ridiculous removal of ficus trees from where they are needed most, that I hope we wait until we get another Council until we do anything.”
“SANTA MONICA IS A SPECIAL PLACE with a special environment, and rapid overdevelopment is slowly ruining a quiet beach town. We feel that careful long-range planning is overdue.”
“I THINK WE SHOULD SIMPLY STOP. We’ve already built way too much. There’s too much traffic, not enough space, and we should just stop. Yes, I think there should be a stop in commercial development.”
“I THINK THE CITY SHOULD LIMIT ITS development. They’ve way overdone themselves. The air is now dirty, filled with dirt from construction and that’s a very bad thing for all of us.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on January 12, 2008. Read the original PDF.