LAST MONDAY, IN AN ARTICLE ON traffic, the Los Angeles Times took the 1988 Santa Monica City Council to task for approving the Water Garden project, knowing that its traffic mitigation measures were highly inadequate.
When council debated the development in January and February of 1988, they knew the project would worsen traffic along city streets and the 10 freeway. They made developer, J.H. Snyder, Co., pay for some upgrades to adjacent streets and approved the project anyway, noting that its economic benefits outweighed any traffic impacts.
Economics yield to pubic benefit in the “strategy framework” Land Use and Circulation Element (LUCE) update to the city’s general plan undergoing another council review tomorrow night. This “blueprint for the future” sets general guidelines for land use and transportation in Santa Monica for the next 20-plus years. It’s available online at www.shapethefuture2025.net and scarier than any horror story you’re likely to come across.
It begins ominously, “New development results in tangible benefits to the community such as new affordable and workforce housing opportunities.” The lengthy plan then outlines dozens and dozens of mixed-use development possibilities, all with “new workforce and affordable housing” — after stating that the city should “not be over taken by growth and congestion.”
LUCE advocates “linking land use to transportation, reducing ecological footprints and moving the city towards sustain-ability.” The plan promises that LUCE principles will achieve more affordable and workforce housing (again), shared parking, access to transit, enhanced pedestrian shopping, better transportation alternatives (to the car) and encourage future growth at transit corridors (major thoroughfares).
This flossy rhetoric might sound good at first, but LUCE contradicts itself repeatedly and provides virtually no substantiation for any of it’s lofty assertions and idealistic conclusions.
In outlining mobility, LUCE outlines improved walking and pedestrian experiences by “giving bicyclists and pedestrians the ability to move quickly and comfortably throughout the city” and eliminating dependency on cars. LUCE promises wider sidewalks and medians, extensive bike lane networks, crosswalk curb bumpouts, light rail at-grade crossings, etc., throughout the city without creating additional congestion. If LUCE can accomplish this, I can make an elephant disappear. Overall, LUCE’s “smart growth” principles based on the haziest of assumptions and wishful thinking are a blueprint for disaster.
In future columns, I’ll study LUCE’s good points (there are some) and bad points including why it will produce substantially more development, traffic congestion and further deteriorate our quality of life while falling far short of its noble “sustainable” goals. wider sidewalks and streets that are “active 17 hours a day/7 days a week” aren’t high priorities for most of us. I’m not to sure how much of this benefits current residents but it surely serves the agenda’s of the progressives and socialists in City Hall — and that’s just the tip of this LUCE-berg.
For example, LUCE would keep Santa Monicans healthy by encouraging walking and bicycling. What’s next? Free gym memberships? Since when was personal exercise a more important urban planning criteria then being able to drive to work, school and shopping safely and conveniently? Here, where “nanny”government reigns over common sense, the stress of being stuck in constant traffic jams and the health impacts from breathing tons of car and bus exhaust spewing into the air from gridlocked vehicles are ignored.
LUCE envisions large, combination commercial and residential developments along major streets with — here it comes again — workforce and affordable housing elements that trigger even greater height and density. Get ready for multistory developments like the proposed “The Village” in the Civic Center in “neighborhood centers” at major intersections such as at Wilshire Boulevard and 14th Street, Pico and Lincoln boulevards, Wilshire and Centinela Avenue and many more. LUCE even encourages multistory “workforce and affordable housing” above car dealer showrooms. Key thoroughfares will become home to high rent boutiques and residential addresses for thousands of new tenants.
A former planning commissioner told me that the LUCE “outcome” was in place before the consultants who helped develop the plan were hired. Its conclusions were already “embedded in the assumptions and approach outlined in the Request for Proposals.”
All those ballyhooed “Motion by the Ocean” public meetings were specifically designed to sell us on a predetermined course of action. They were loaded with city bureaucrats; politicos; developers; smart growth, sustainable, public housing and bicycle advocates who pressed their agendas time and again.
By ignoring most real community needs, LUCE is another poorly crafted monument to City Hall’s ongoing social engineering experimentation. Despite its claims, LUCE provides little in public benefit — unless you’re a bicyclist or a pro-development smart growther. LUCE promises we can have our cake and eat it, too. Nonsense.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on June 16, 2008. Read the original PDF.