To the continuing chagrin of many residents, City Hall insists on calling Santa Monica “Art City,” even as fewer and fewer artists can afford to live and work here.

But now that the City’s ”Creative Capital” report has concluded that the arts are a major economic asset, it has finally added live/work artists’ studios at reasonable prices to its “To Do” list.

According to a story in the Los Angeles Times last week, Venice is wrestling with the same problem.

Billy Al Bengston, Ed Ruscha, Laddie John Dill, Peter Alexander, Robert Graham, Ed Moses, Charles Arnoldi and actor-photographer Dennis Hopper all arrived in Venice decades ago when it was an outlaw of a place and they were young and unknown. Today, they are all top dogs in the
art world, and Venice has become chic and, as the Times reported, the artists want to end “the artistic cleansing” of Venice, and create what Dill called “a self-sustaining center for the arts for the next 100 years,” where young and emerging artists can afford to live and work.

As City Hall and residents continue to revise the land use element of the General Plan, which will include decisions about the best uses of the last and only under-developed area in Santa Monica, the Light Manufacturing and Studio District (LMSD), we hope they recognize and respond to what is clearly a regional, not a local crisis — the plight of our artists – in a smart, comprehensive and generous way.

A community that has no room for artists is not a community at all.