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# What's the point?
- URL: https://www.smdp.com/whats-the-point-20061205/
- Published: 2006-12-05T16:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-25T01:20:44.000Z
- Author: David Pisarra
- Tags: Opinion, Downtown, #archive-import

*Growth can be good, but streets need love*

The continued growth in this city is amazing. There are new condominium complexes going up at what seems to be an ever-increasing rate. The downtown area is being built up ever more densely, and more and more mixed-use buildings are being erected.

Historically, growth is good for an economy. The more buildings that are built, the more tradesmen who have jobs to pay for their children’s food and education, and that keeps money flowing throughout the economy so that everyone can prosper. I am generally in favor of allowing owners to develop their property up to the maximum use of the land so that they have incentive to purchase the land and build more appropriate structures on it.

As times change, the needs of the society will change. There was a time in our history when we needed to have hitching posts for the horses, those gave way to parking slots for cars, which have given way to larger purpose-built structures.

Sixty years ago, this particular burg had lots of light industrial manufacturing facilities, large structures that were used by workers to build the tools and machines that helped fend off the fascism of the time. Those workers earned a wage that allowed them to live relatively close to the factories they worked in. It was not uncommon for people to walk to work, or take public transportation, or even “the company shuttle.” This was also the day when people could work in a factory and still afford to live in Santa Monica. Can you imagine such a thing today?

When the war ended, the economy shifted. Not drastically at first, the factories just retooled for the new toys, gizmos and gadgets that a postwar America needed. But it shifted nonetheless, away from manufacturing and towards more peacetime activities. Over the decades, the factories of the past have been replaced by office buildings used by knowledge workers. These workers are people who don’t manufacture tangible products like teapots, but ideas and knowledge.

As a class, they are more likely to be higher educated and higher paid. Not enough, mind you, that most of them could afford a home in this city, so they must commute. This is progress on a social scale, but it comes at a cost; one that has been obscured for too long.

The knowledge worker is generally someone who has earned their way up in the world by education, and therefore, wants the trappings that come with social standing. In particular, they want cars and homes — homes that they cannot afford here, so they must have cars to get from their homes to work. The cars, they park in a structure all day, then drive home to park in a garage all night.

The problem with it is this: As the city has become more dense with offices versus factories, with workers who can afford cars versus those who cannot, we have not built our infrastructure to accommodate this increase in traffic.

As anyone who has been on the freeway coming from downtown can attest, in the mornings the backup at Cloverfield Boulevard is horrendous, and then at night, trying to get out of this city is the definition of a nightmare. The 10 freeway is a crawl from the McClure tunnel to the 405\. There needs to be another off-ramp on the 10 East, between Cloverfield and Lincoln boulevards, and another on-ramp in the same general area.

The streets are packed with cars and people, thanks to stoplights that are not synchronized, streets that are not wide enough to handle the capacity and, frankly, too dense a city center. This is just going to get worse as the residency of downtown increases due to the completion of the mixed-use facilities that are scheduled to be completed next year. There is some good news in all this, at least these facilities have lots of underground parking which will help alleviate parking at least.

There is a new parking monitoring system in place, and this one is actually designed to help the public, as opposed to increasing the fines. There is now a Web site that allows you to check on the parking structures status downtown to determine how full the lots are. The Web site (http://parkingspacenow.smgov.net/) is a satellite photo with parking lot space availability overlaid on it in real time. This is a definite help, though there is much to be done to improve the overall flow of traffic and congestion in our city.

Hopefully, the new city council will continue to update the systems. Perhaps someone can get the state to add another set of ramps for the freeway to reduce pressure on the Cloverfield and Lincoln interchanges and surrounding streets.

David Pisarra is a partner in the Santa Monica law firm of Pisarra & Grist. He (310) 664-9969 or

*Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on December 5, 2006.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/120506.pdf?ref=smdp.com)