Driving high school students get squeezed out of neighborhood
Parking just got tougher for Santa Monica High School students.
Residents living near the high school won a decisive victory this week when the city council instituted preferential parking in their neighborhood to combat students parking on side streets.
The areas where only residents can park will be on Ninth Street between Michigan Avenue and Pico Boulevard, the 1700 and 1800 block of Ninth Street, and Bay Street between Sixth Street and Lincoln Boulevard.
However, the council carved out 52 parking spots on the east side of Ninth Street that will remain open for public use, increasing the already competitive parking atmosphere in the neighborhood, according to residents.
“I think in this instance it’s a combination of high school students and commercial business on Lincoln and to a lesser extent on Pico don’t have a lot of parking,” said Councilman Richard Bloom.
The high school has long had a shortage of student parking but recently the situation has been made worse by school construction that has blocked much of the existing parking lot.
The Santa Monica-Malibu School District has been working with the city for the past year on where a new parking lot could be built.
“There’s very few spots,” said school district superintendent John Deasy. “It’s been an issue for years. That’s why we’ve been trying to find room for parking.” He added that more parking could be part of the proposed $120 Civic Center Plan near City Hall.
Students who drive to school have been forced onto the side streets, where residents complain that the students are disruptive to the neighborhood.
“There are a lot of side issues that could have been solved if total preferential parking had been initiated,” said Christian Boyce, a Ninth Street resident. “Visitors treat it like a parking lot, they are nosier and leave a lot of trash lying around.”
He said there isn’t enough parking for residents even without outsiders coming in.
“Where people come from and why they park here isn’t as much as a concern as if they live on the streets here or not,” he said.
City officials said they did not act because of resident complaints about high school students’ action, but rather they looked only at local parking needs.
“We weren’t trying to regulate behavior,” Mayor Pro Tem Kevin McKeown. “We were just trying to give people a place to park when they come home.”
“We weren’t trying to regulate behavior. We were just trying to give people a place to park when they come home.” — — KEVIN MCKEOWN Mayor pro tem
Mayor Mike Feinstein went further to say citing behavioral issues alone for creating preferential parking would have been illegal.
“It would be legally wrong for us to say the public doesn’t have access to a public resource because a small portion are misbehaving,” he said. “We have to go with the parking issues solely, but that is not to understate the behavior of some students.”
But students said there was no other place to go. Now that Ninth Street is basically off-limits, they said the same problem will happen with 12th Street and then 14th Street.
For Santa Monica High School junior Laura Kunstler, the issue is worse because she lives with her family in Mar Vista and has to drive to school every day.
“We are basically stuck on this side,” she said. “Parking is hard as it is so I’m psyched I even got this spot, and I had to get here at 7:45 this morning.”
Some residents criticized the city for creating an “island” of public parking on one side of Ninth Street.
They say the move will make parking near their homes even more difficult than before.
“We already have a problem but it seems what we’re doing is telling everyone who used to spread themselves out to park right here,” said Boyce. “We’re basically sacrificing one block to be the city’s parking lot, and that’s just not right.”
Feinstein said creating one area for high school students to park during the day would make enforcing noise ordinances and littering laws much easier.
Boyce said residents of the area would likely park in the spaces open to the public when they are available to give their neighbors more access to the preferential spots across the street.
“Residents are going to stick up for each other,” he said. “So I’m not sure how this is going to play out.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on March 8, 2002. Read the original PDF.