By Shawn Landres
After twelve years on Santa Monica commissions and eight on the Planning Commission, my term ends this June. I frequently have returned to the question of how the households that fall between the subsidized pipeline and the unassisted market might afford to live here: a firefighter married to a teacher, a police officer with a working spouse, a nurse raising children in a city that needs her and prices her out. Ninety percent of the workforce commutes in to work here, and a starting teacher would spend more than half her salary on a one-bedroom apartment.
Santa Monica already permits duplexes, triplexes, townhouses, and courtyard housing in its multifamily zones. Recent state zoning updates, SB 9 and SB 1123, between them have catalyzed four applications. The zoning permits the housing in the same sense that a restaurant menu permits a meal no one can afford: the listing exists, but the price is prohibitive. This is performative zoning. The state has legalized housing that nobody builds because the rules were never what stood in the way.
The Pico neighborhood, where approximately 80 percent of the city’s minority residents live and where the Belmar neighborhood was razed by eminent domain in the 1950s, has absorbed the consequences of every previous era of displacement. A housing program with new incentives for development in Pico without protecting current tenants merely would repeat the displacement it claims to remedy.
My policy memo before the Planning Commission on April 15 proposes the Missing Middle Housing Realignment Plan (MMHRP), a local program designed to produce more affordable housing and a more competitive developer return than any state pathway. The building form is a cottage court that looks like a large home from the street and contains six or seven independent residences behind the facade. Even the market-rate cottages would sell and rent well below new-construction condos and apartments.
The program offers development concessions (room to build, lower fees, pre-approved plans) exclusively in exchange for deed-restricting at least one home for a workforce household; a developer who builds under state law receives none of them. The local pathway is more profitable than the state pathway, and the affordability covenant is the price of access. If the city extended those concessions to state-law projects, every developer would take them and build without a covenant—we would give away our only leverage and current and future working Santa Monicans would gain nothing.
That principle has implications for both sides of the housing debate. Residents concerned about neighborhood character should look at what the program actually builds: two-story cottages behind a unified street facade, at a height and lot coverage below current R-1 standards, indistinguishable from a large single-family home when viewed from the sidewalk. The building envelope is the mechanism that makes the density acceptable and the affordability possible; the form constraints are integral to the program, not a concession to opposition.
Residents skeptical of new density must accept that the state already has legalized it; the city’s only choice is whether to capture public benefit for the people our community needs or to let density arrive on Sacramento’s terms and wait for the market to find a pathway to profit. Residents who want more housing, faster, must accept that the concessions exist because they produce affordable units, and extending them without covenants gives away public value for nothing in return.
The city has no obligation to facilitate developer profits that yield zero public benefit. The program is designed for people who hold both of those truths at once.
My proposal requires that no occupied rental property can access these incentives, with a three-year lookback on single-family homes and a seven-year lookback on multiunit properties to prevent preemptive evictions. The target is 150 new homes in three years, at least 30 of them deed-restricted for workforce households. They would be covenanted affordable, neighborhood-scale, built without a dollar of public subsidy. Every one of those homes lets a family that serves Santa Monica live in Santa Monica, keeps a commute off the freeway, and anchors a neighborhood against the steady erosion of who can afford to stay.
The MMHRP sets the initial affordability covenant at a level where the local pathway is the better deal for developers. Set it too deep and the math flips: the state pathway becomes more profitable, and the program produces nothing. A covenant level that produces zero projects is performative; the city can tighten the restriction when market conditions justify it.
The plan is on the Planning Commission’s April 15 agenda, and I invite conversation and public comment about every assumption. My time on this commission is nearly over. Our obligation to ensure that the people who keep this city running can afford to live here has no term limit.
Shawn Landres has chaired the Social Services and Planning Commissions. He is completing his second and final term on the Planning Commission and his twelfth year of commission service. The views expressed are his own.