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# Ocean Park Association: New kid on the old block
- URL: https://www.smdp.com/ocean-park-association-new-kid-on-the-old-block/
- Published: 2006-03-29T16:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-23T17:24:10.000Z
- Author: Guest Author
- Tags: Opinion, Ocean Park, #archive-import

*By TED WINTERER Special to the Daily Press*

(Editor’s note: “In the Hood” is a regular column written by residents who represent organized neighborhood groups throughout Santa Monica. Published each Wednesday in the Daily Press, residents will cover the pressing issues facing their neighborhoods and call upon their neighbors to get involved. They’ll sometimes scrutinize policies and actions of local government, or bring to light a subject that needs attention in their respective environs.) Compared to our more venerable compatriots from other neighborhoods in Santa Monica, the Ocean Park Association is the new kid on the block.

And that’s perhaps appropriate, for our neighborhood is also the newcomer to Santa Monica. While the rest of the city was founded in 1886, Ocean Park was separately incorporated in 1904 and only subsequently annexed into the rest of Santa Monica.

Ocean Park, Abbot Kinney’s first real estate project in our area, is the neighborhood between Pico Boulevard and the Venice border, bounded by Lincoln Boulevard and the Pacific Ocean. Kinney then went on to found Venice, and Ocean Park has always had more in common with the rough-and-tumble traits of its sibling to the south than with the more manicured and tony sectors of northern Santa Monica. These days the diverse, funky flavor of Ocean Park is threatened by rapid gentrification, as home prices per square foot now rival those north of Montana Avenue.

That history brought the birth of OPA. Locals were concerned City Hall had long treated its latest addition as an afterthought and thus not provided Ocean Park with its fair share of services. And they worried that growth and the city’s land use policies threatened the character of our neighborhood, in particular its socioeconomic multiplicity and its relationship to light, air and water made famous by the late Richard Diebenkorn in his masterful “Ocean Park” paintings.

In addition, the Ocean Park Community Organization (OPCO), the first of the city’s neighborhood organizations, had fallen inactive and disappeared from the local political scene. So in the summer of 2004, 20 or so neighbors began to brainstorm about forming a new group to serve as the voice of Ocean Park, and in October of that year OPA held its first public meeting.

Thanks to the hard work of many, particularly OPA’s first president, Joel Brand, the drudgery of writing bylaws, forming a corporation, setting up a Web site and obtaining tax-exempt status are behind us, and we now have a healthy bank account and a substantial and growing membership. Thus, we can devote our efforts to our primary mission: preserving the essence of the unique community we cherish and further improving its quality of life.

How has OPA pursued these goals? We’ve hosted meetings with the police and the city’s planning and transportation departments to provide a forum for residents’ concerns, and we’ll soon welcome new City Manager Lamont Ewell for a similar dialogue. We’ve met with city officials to mitigate the impact of Santa Monica College’s shuttle parking at our beach lots. We’ve had graffiti removed from the murals on Ocean Park Boulevard and elsewhere, and arranged for traffic officers to curtail hazardous driving on our meaner streets. And we aspire to persuade City Hall to lessen the traffic and parking impacts of our Sunday farmers’ market.

OPA also has been an active participant in the citywide dialogue over the future revisions to what’s known as the “General Plan,” which will shape land use and transportation in Santa Monica for the next 20 years. We’re lobbying to protect our older, affordable rental units from being redeveloped into market rate housing. We’d like our neighborhood to become even more friendly to walking, biking and other alternate modes of transportation, and to reduce auto congestion and speeding, especially on our residential streets. We’re concerned about the large, new developments on the north and south ends of Main Street, and seek to preserve the historic scale and ambiance of our village center. And we hope that Lincoln Boulevard can evolve into a genuine neighborhood center, providing a diversity of modestly sized retail and service establishments in a walkable environment. Finally, we’re urging City Hall to narrow the traffic lanes on Ocean Park Boulevard from Lincoln to the beach and to add dedicated bike paths, larger sidewalks and green space, rendering it into the recreational pathway called for by the city’s own open space element.

If you live in Ocean Park, share our vision for our neighborhood and wish to add your voice to ours, please join our ranks at www.opa-sm.org. Or attend one of our monthly meetings. The next one is Sunday, April 9, at the community center in Joslyn Park at 4 p.m.

*Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on March 29, 2006.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/032906.pdf?ref=smdp.com)