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# Small-town Santa Monica is history
- URL: https://www.smdp.com/small-town-santa-monica-is-history/
- Published: 2005-05-14T15:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-23T07:09:44.000Z
- Author: Guest Author
- Tags: Opinion, Promenade, #archive-import, Homelessness

This past week, Q-line asked: “Should Santa Monica strive to maintain a small-town atmosphere and, if so, how can this be accomplished?”

Here are your responses: ✆ “It’s really too late to preserve the small-town atmosphere that we once enjoyed and treasured so much here in Santa Monica, thanks to the mayors, City Council and city planners of recent memory, but let’s please try to preserve what we have left. Stop the overbuilding and the psuedo-sophistication that is being encouraged. Clean up the blight of homelessness, vagrancy and skid-row atmosphere. That at least would be a start. I’m trying to preserve what’s left.” ✆ “In my estimation, the only way that Santa Monica could strive to preserve a small-town atmosphere is to get rid of all — and I mean all — of the big chain stores on the Promenade, and put back the smaller ones. Let’s have a Target. Let’s have a Penny’s. Let’s have a Woolworth’s. We had some good bookstores — there all gone. Let’s get rid of all the chain stores on the Promenade — every single one of them. This town will never become a small town because we have all those stores there. What can we do about them? And I say, ‘Get rid of them.’ Bring in small-town restaurants, chains and stores.” ✆ “It would be very hard to make Santa Monica into a small town again. One thing they could do is to stop building all these high-rise building and buildings that bring in too many cars. If they tear down something, just replace it with something the same size. And we have too many chain stores. We should get rid of most ‘em — and have the so-called mom ‘n’ pop stores, which just have the one business. If there’s a chain store that has so many stores all over the country, what’s the point of having it here? They could have it somewhere else. Another thing we should get rid of is all the bums. Small towns don’t have a lot of bums. They all come to Santa Monica. We need to send them back where they came from.” ✆ “I think the way to make Santa Monica maintain a small-town atmosphere is to have more bus services to preserve the uniqueness of this lovely little town by sea. And no sky-rises please. And more family-friendly housing. On this, Frank Lloyd Wright — more Spanish-style architecture as well — this is California, and I think California deserves to have more Spanish-style buildings and less of these scary buildings. I know he’s an award-winning architect, but I personally cannot stand his architecture. Make it more urban friendly, more family oriented. I like the Cape Cod style, or mission style. No Tudor style, because that doesn’t particularly work here. He should even think about a more Japanese style because it integrates the elements. The city should be more pedestrian friendly and plantings of beautiful jacaranda trees, magnolia trees, California poppies, lavender, whatever. Santa Monica is a beautiful town, so let’s preserve it.” ✆ “I think Santa Monica lost its small-town beach identity long ago. Through poor planning, Santa Monica is a little of this and a little of that, which adds up to no identity at all. Big business and the almighty dollar is hard to overcome, so I hold out little hope for a small-town atmosphere in Santa Monica.” ✆ “The city of Santa Monica should stop allowing the demolition of small buildings to put up huge ones. An example is at 26th Street and Santa Monica Boulevard, a very busy intersection where a small one-story community center is turning into a large housing complex. There was talk of changing the Shakey’s Pizza on the corner of Berkeley and Santa Monica Boulevard into a housing complex as well. It wasn’t long ago that there was talk of changing the small one-story businesses at Stewart and Colorado into a three-to five-story complex with greater than 100 housing units and businesses. Thank God that project was stopped, at least for now. And when you look at the proposed plans for the Santa Monica Place property, it was stunning to hear them speak of the density they want to allow. I think they should leave the density of that property as it is. This is not rocket science, by the way.” ✆ “Santa Monica is now big on small-town atmosphere, thanks to the socialistic governments, past and present. Look at the cities of Santa Barbara, the carpentry of Manhattan Beach and even Pacific Palisades. No tall buildings, simple but convenient store layouts. Look at what Santa Monica has become since rent control — bums, traffic, parking, irrational devotion to low-income housing, problems that have been created and maintained by City Hall. Instead of a simplistic lifestyle where people are content with their lives, which is what a beach community is, our leaders have fostered divisiveness and anger with citizens not having it all. Rent control transfers money from landlords to tenants, and then they are taxed by City Hall to fund ever-increasing monstrosities of architectural blight. The city becomes larger but not better. City philosophy is diametrically opposed to a small-town beach community. Look at the ever-increasing tax-exempt carrions of do-gooders: heal the bums, heal the minority students of Samohi, heal the tenants, heal the bay, heal the sick, raise the dead — this socialistic philosophy has helped destroy this town. For penance and education to the true value of Santa Monica, the City Hall members should spend every sunset on the beach pondering their failure at leadership.” ✆ “Santa Monica’s image for decades was a quiet beach town with lots of mom ‘n’ pop businesses, and a low-key lifestyle. The shift away from this long-time reality took place on April 10, 1979, with the renter’s rights slate taking over City Hall in the form of winning the majority of City Council seats. As board seats, commission positions and school board functions came up, the SMRR-people plugged in their clowns. Now 25 plus years later, our city has become a coastal Hollywood location for the entertainment business... Hopefully we can reverse this trend by voting out the SMRR council people next time around. Thus reversing the trend, and putting more moderate people in all the positions they took over 25 years ago.” ✆ “My suggestions would be as follows: One: To disallow any further building of large office buildings. Two: Keeping the light industrial in town. Three: Disallowing any further building in condos that puts too many people here with space and traffic, and allow the existing signage of small buildings to remain where they are — it gives a little hometown atmosphere. Four: Fixing up what is already here. Five: Get the city out of the landlord business. They have condemned places around here and then picked them up under the promise of low-cost housing, but they keep the rents just like everyone else and don’t fix them up. Six: Don’t chase out the small trailer parks. I think that they are a part of a small-town atmosphere.”✆

*Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on May 14, 2005.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/051405.pdf?ref=smdp.com)