Kevin McKeown used to be one of the good guys. Yet he now seems aligned with the pro-development camp. He should room with Jesse Zwick.
From the outset, the State has overstepped its authority. It claimed the right to overrule local zoning because of a lack of affordable housing, and then passed laws with more developer-friendly variances than any lobbyist could hope for. The result is a glut of market-rate housing and a paltry 10-15% of new units designated (in the initial bill, SB 330) as affordable to “very low, low, and moderate income” households.
When the City submitted its first zoning modification, the State rejected it as insufficient. BUT it extended, without penalty, the filing deadline, the City met that deadline, and the revision was approved. That’s when developers rose up.
They claimed that, by missing the first deadline, the City was in default and was now susceptible to “builders remedy,” giving developers free rein to do whatever they wanted. It was a bullying tactic that the City succumbed to, claiming that it would be too costly to defend against any suit filed by deep-pocketed builders. The City blinked and we’ve all been blinded by their timidity and lack of good legal counsel.
With structures that defy everything about Santa Monica’s reputation that has made it desirable, the City is now the West Coast equivalent of Miami or Manhattan-by-the-Sea. The State provided no funding for infrastructure, leaving it up to municipalities to provide sanitation, police and fire protection, emergency services, education, etc. Santa Monica has made it clear that its finances are already stretched, and the additional costs to support, potentially, more than 10,000 new residents will stretch already wafer thin resources.
The State also failed to acknowledge that, while it was asking existing residents to cut back on their consumption of water and power, its housing mandates would intensify the battle for both. The electricity grid isn’t expanding fast enough, the California Public Utility Commission has reduced incentives for rooftop solar, and water can’t be manufactured, mined, or summoned from Nature to meet the needs of hundreds of thousands of additional residents.
When the City Council takes its current stand, it is not meeting the needs of the people who already live here. It is taking sides with builders, taking paying positions with builders, as Mr. Zwick has done, and ignoring that the pandemic did more than infect the nation: it gave people the option to work from home in areas that offer more space for less money than apartments in Santa Monica.
Kevin has gone to the dark side.
Peter Altschuler
Santa Monica