Santa Monica Dreaming: Trouble in Rent-Controlled Paradise

by Rev. Jim Conn on May 1, 2012

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If absence makes the heart grow fonder, distance makes reality look rosier. From a long way off Santa Monica appears like a liberal’s fantasy of justice in paradise. After all, we have a tough rent control law and we’ve had a mostly enlightened city council, government and school board for more than three decades. But from up close, the picture’s not that sweet.

A recent hotel approval exposed the reality. A developer wanted some special consideration for the 710 Wilshire hotel project that was oversized and out of conformance with zoning standards. Hotel workers in the city wanted to guarantee a decent wage for the people who would work in the new hotel as well as those who would build it. The city staff likes hotels because they provide an easy source of revenue. But the developer wouldn’t budge on the wage issues.

He wasn’t willing to require an operator to pay a decent income to hard-working, low-income families – or guarantee decent health-care coverage. The hotel got the green light from the city council, the workers’ under-paid labor and health benefits will make this project profitable to the developer, while residents will put up with the traffic and fallout from increased density.

Meanwhile down the street a Santa Monica College security officer pepper-sprayed students trying to get into a college board meeting. They were upset over a plan by the administration to hold summer classes with a two-tier cost system: One level offered classes as usual, but the second would be open only to people who could pay a steep tuition, similar to a private college’s. The goal was availability of classes for students who needed credits to graduate and transfer. The impact was felt by students going to school on a shoestring and who are worried about going deeper into debt.

Almost the same week an African American girl was stomped into unconsciousness by a couple of Latinas during lunch at Santa Monica High School. Racial tensions there have made “Samo High,” a rough ride for students for a long time. Administrators and the school board step up programs to deal with this turmoil when a crisis hits, then efforts lag, so it happens all over again.

In fact, it happened early last fall when a young African American man on the wrestling team was “hazed” by a couple of white kids on the team who used a hangman’s rope. Hazing is, apparently, a normal activity for the swim team, but the noose – which the white kids say meant nothing to them beyond a nebulous prank – brought up some bitter images for African American parents in Santa Monica.

Activists continue to push this issue, calling for the implementation of proven programs to combat inter-racial conflict, ethnic-sensitive curriculum and cross-racial dialogues. I am assured that something is in the works, but in the meantime people wait and the kids continue to act out.

Add to these matters the constant pressure in the state capitol from various landlord associations to end rent control statewide, and residents can see that the One Percent in Santa Monica hasn’t relented at all. In fact, the “vacancy decontrol” requirement written into state law and governing all rent control ordinances in the state already guarantees that, at best, rent control will be reduced to rent stabilization within a generation. Meanwhile the steep property values along the coast offer the incentive for developers to buy and tear down rentals and replace them with condos.

The people of Santa Monica – whether low-wage workers, poor students, people of color or renters – cannot depend on the elected officials to save us from ourselves. They help much of the time, but we must save ourselves. Only our involvement as advocates, along with our votes and our hard work on our own behalf, will make the future of Santa Monica as rosy as it looks from a distance.

(Note: An earlier version of this post incorrectly identified the athletic team involved in a hazing incident as a swim team; it was in fact a wrestling team.)

Tags: 710 Wilshire • Santa Monica • Santa Monica City College

Steve Goldman

Jim – wrestling time, not swim team. Steve G
Jsearle479

Dear Jim,

Thank you for making those of us who treasure living in Santa Monica aware of what’s really going on here and requires us to continually pay attention.

Best,
Judith
Jamesd

Jim,

I think hope for a better time and a better place often takes off from just a “justice reminder” like the one you have written about the impacts of destruction stalkin a community when one stops looking and acting on “the best of our human thinking and doing. My gods, what a fine journalist you have become. Men like you and Chris Hedges ring the doorbells of the future of our times and our places. Thanks two fer!
Tedhampton

James Madison once said: “History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments.” This is why they give so much to our political leaders – so that gain remains the sole agenda.
Shannon in Oregon

Just prior to our leaving Santa Monica to live in the Pacific Northwest there was a shift towards the wealthy and away from the everyday folks-as the rent control was being phased out when a renter moved out. The population shifted more and more to the wealthy and along with that-values. A lot of young election workers were devastated when for the first time, Santa Monicas did NOT vote for school funding about 2000 I think it was. The rest of us were disturbed by this as well. But at a thousand bucks a bedroom for a rental and a tiny 2 bedroom lot with no yard selling for over a million when it was under 300k the year before -the tide was inevitably turning. The new Santa Monica wealthy either didn’t have school children or didn’t put them in public schools. That AND extremely myopic focus on their own interests, while applying cosmetic touches to a population without housing. The research says that the more money you have over about 60K a year, the greater your feeling that you don’t have enough. I think this is what happens when the very rich do not flinch at earning that while their workers scrape by-addicted to greed and luxury.

Returning to a visit just a year later and the hostility in the air was palpable. People seemed paranoid about my preschool aged daughter and I saying hello. Strangers yelling at each other for not moving fast enough. And it was the first time you could look around and everyone was on a cell phone. I asked a local bus driver what had happened and he said it was indeed increasingly worse-that the emotional tone was so bad and hostile that he had to leave to go to WA to his family to decompress every so often. My 3 yr old burst into tears at a bus stop and said she never wanted to go to “LA” again (this was in Santa Monica). She said, “I want to go back to my country life.” We live in Portland-not country but not yet overrun by the 1% and the desperate world created by the ones that only look out for themselves at the expense of others.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1544964172 Trudy Goodwin

Respectfully Jim, if the students had only chained the Black wrestler to the locker we could call it hazing. But when you add chants of “slave for sale” and a noose around the neck of a brown-colored wrestling dummy — it becomes a racial assault.
Brenda Barnes

Hi Jim,
I was a Rent Board attorney shortly after it started in 1980, and then a department manager until 1986. When I left the Board’s employment, fortunately I had enough money to buy a trailer at Village Trailer Park. With five years’ work on the 40 pages of that law, I knew the value of being under SM rent control for space rent and guaranteed housing services, but also owning my own home.

Amazingly enough, both vacancy decontrol and allowing landlords to go out of the rental housing business passed at the state level–which have almost completely devastated rent control–specifically excluded mobilehome parks. Therefore, Village Trailer Park is still covered by rent control.

However, the Rent Control Board has turned against tenants of all kinds, and particularly mobilehome park tenants. I wonder first of all if you have any idea why that is, and secondly, if you have any ideas for how the residents here should go about fighting it. Since I am now a retired lawyer, I have prepared (with my urban planner husband who has a masters from Cambridge and 31 years’ experience) a knockout legal and planning case against closure of this Park for development. However, it has taken us three straight years of almost fulltime work to do that, when the City and the Rent Control Board are fighting the residents every step of the way, not helping us as they are required by the law and philosophy of the City to do.

Besides, people tell me you voted for the Water Garden when you were on the Council only because it would bring benefits to the homeless and increased affordable housing. That really hasn’t happened even from that development, and it certainly isn’t happening from recent developments. Affordable housing is a 325 square foot single residency occupancy box in a high rise for $1500 a month. Homeless people have OPCC services and the Samoshel, Step Up on 2nd, and several other agencies, but they still are sleeping on the streets.

Please tell me what you think we should do to get some of the decency we had here in the 80s back. Is it too late? Do we have to get the resources to fight each step legally? When I saw Gleam Davis change her vote from no to yes on 710 Wilshire after Bobby Shriver had been convinced the workers were not going to get a living wage because they have to pay $3 an hour of their wages to get a decent health plan, I was in such despair. Is the key as I’ve started to think, that we need to find a different way other than hotels’ and developers’ fees to fund the City?