Distraught residents lined up to speak at City Hall last Tuesday about a threat to their homes, not from a natural disaster but from California Senate Bill 79 (SB 79). However, the Council meeting had been canceled. Instead, it was members of the city’s community development team listening to anguished pleas and offering the kind of thorough explanations and gracious empathy frequently missing from the Council chambers.
The city staff on the dais had distinct advantages over council members. If the Council let everyone speak without time limits and responded to each comment, it could double the 9-hour endurance tests that meetings already often become.
Yet it was still heartwarming to see the unflappable professionalism exhibited by Ross Fehrman, Jing Yeo, and Rachel Kwok. There was no speechifying or pandering, because they’re not elected leaders seeking votes or contributions. They just offered clarity, and the compassion was an extra bonus.
Clarity is in short supply when it comes to SB 79, which is intended to increase housing development by upzoning all properties within a half mile of major transit stops, but just what constitutes a “major” stop was still being deliberated practically until the law took effect on July 1.
The LA Metro stations were always included, and erecting eight-story buildings (the maximum height allowed) along Colorado Avenue could be an effective way to increase housing in Santa Monica without negatively impacting the community. But SB 79 casts a far wider net, encompassing most of the Mid-City, Pico and Downtown neighborhoods without providing any infrastructure to facilitate the transit use it purports to encourage, such as streetlights and level sidewalks.
Instead, it doles out density bonuses like bonbons, allowing as many as developers can gobble up, resulting already in a proposed tower on 15th Street that’s not eight stories but 12. On a block of mostly one- and two-story buildings, is that densifying a neighborhood or destroying it?
This is where the politics of housing development get complicated, because affordable housing is a major concern for many residents, and an obvious way to increase it is by replacing smaller residences with larger ones containing more units. However, it’s also convenient for elected leaders to support such upzoning when it earns them abundant financial rewards from real estate developers.
The first Santa Monica project announced under SB 79 is coincidentally owned by a donor of one of the legislation’s most vocal supporters on the Council and at a location that the Council more or less chose, which brings us back to the meeting at City Hall. Pico residents wanted to know why the Council chose to target their single-family homes for upzoning, against the advice of city staff and the Planning Commission.
Of course, it’s not quite that simple. There’s a complex mathematical formula embedded in SB 79 that allows cities to suspend the law’s impact from eligible areas until 2030, but that math left part of Pico unprotected, with the Council having the undesirable task of choosing which part. Councilmember Ellis Raskin expressed apprehension about the potential for “unprecedented displacement and gentrification.”
The Planning Commission recommended upzoning an area with multi-family housing to minimize that displacement, since developers are less likely to risk the higher costs of evicting and relocating numerous tenants and the lower profit margins, compared to redeveloping a lot with a single home.
It’s unclear if the Council didn’t accept this or if they just have a kneejerk bias against neighborhoods of single family homes, which some of them have stated are a vestige of 20th century racism. There’s some historic basis for that progressive perspective. The conundrum is that the people expressing it are often white, and many of the people living in single-family homes in Pico are not.
One of them is Christine Parra, a former council member, who criticized the Council majority for not doing a racial equity analysis prior to their decision. “They’re going to allow the displacement of a neighborhood, when they had a better option,” she said, bemoaning their decision to override the Planning Commission’s advice and pointing out that roughly 20% of her neighbors are renters.
“It's a really, really hard policy choice,” said Yeo, the director of community development, at last Tuesday's meeting, defending the Council’s action despite the staff report’s contrary recommendation. “The city has been forced into this.”
But that’s not entirely accurate. While it’s true that in July the Council voiced unanimous opposition to the risks SB 79 posed to Santa Monica, that was a year after the Council voted (6-1) to endorse the bill and send the legislature a letter documenting their enthusiastic support.
SB 79 isn’t something that was forced on the city so much as something the city eagerly pursued. Now that we’re facing the unintended consequences, the Council is vowing to safeguard working class residents from displacement. But what about the rest of the residents? Why is it okay for their neighborhoods to be displaced?
The Council should be commended for protecting those with the least resources. But why should middle-class residents or any others feel like second-class citizens? We have a President who believes in rewarding people who voted for him and punishing those who didn’t. Fortunately, our council members don’t espouse that approach, but there seems to be an element of it present.
For all the lip service to diversity, equity and inclusion, some people in Santa Monica are treated as less equal than others. Too often, council members stratify citizens according to a progressive pecking order to determine who is worthy of empathy and who isn’t. To the credit of the development team last week, they offered it equally to all.
Devan Sipher can be reached at Devan@smdp.com.