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# School district playing up SMRR’s agenda
- URL: https://www.smdp.com/school-district-playing-up-smrrs-agenda-editor/
- Published: 2006-02-23T16:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-23T17:17:54.000Z
- Author: Guest Author
- Tags: Opinion, Main St, #archive-import

*By Mathew L. Millen Santa Monica*

No one reading your article (SMDP, Feb. 20, page 1) regarding the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District (SMMUSD) losing students should fret. Any empty desks will not have time to get cold. Santa Monicans For Renters Rights (SMRR) has conspired with Community Corp. of Santa Monica to build hundreds of new high-density, low-income housing projects for SMRR campaign workers allied with local unions in town that provide money and workers for SMRR campaigns. These projects at 20th and Santa Monica Boulevard; Santa Monica Boulevard and Berkeley; Main Street in Ocean Park; and 15th Street and Broadway are primarily two-, three-and four-bedroom units. The new CCSM projects, about 160 units with an average of four children per unit, works out to about 640 new children in the school district within the next 12 months. The project at 15th Street and Broadway is four stories high and towers over the single-family homes across the street. Take a ride by and look for yourself, it is coming to your neighborhood soon.

SMRR and other housing “advocates” are manipulating the general plan update to zone all the commercial zones for multi-story, low-income rental housing projects and rezone all the industrial land. We will see numerous projects high-density, low-income projects like the one at 15th Street and Broadway lining Main Street, Ocean Park, Wilshire and Santa Monica boulevards, and Montana Avenue business districts. Because SMRR has saturated the Pico neighborhood with low-income housing, HUD regulations compel the city to now provide low-income housing in the other parts of Santa Monica. The schools are already at capacity. More low-income housing projects means the SMRR-controlled school board will be proposing a $400 million bond issue to build more classrooms at Franklin, Roosevelt and Lincoln Junior High for the children moving into the city who will reside in the projects and additional classrooms throughout the district for the permit children and to accommodate the “cheaters,” those students who do not reside in the district, but use another person's residence, change a utility to their name, obtain a utility bill, and then lie and say they reside in the district.

Labeling the problem a “lack of students” is only a ploy for more development. The issue is who is going to have their taxes raised to pay for SMRR’s development plans?

*Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on February 23, 2006.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/022306.pdf?ref=smdp.com)