Last night at the Farms, Santa Monica’s supreme grocery emporium, Jeff Bixon, the Dispatch’s man on Montana, pointed out an ominous collision of facts in the L.A. Times..

A story on page two in the California section about population density in
American cities contained a graph that ranked the cities. Santa Monica with 11,006 people per square mile was outranked by all the New York boroughs except Staten Island, but it outranks Philadelphia (10,729), Washington D.C. (9,533), and Los Angeles itself (8,208). The figures are U.S. Census Bureau 2006 estimates.

11,006 people per square mile! Seems like more than enough. But it gets better. The City estimates that our population rises daily to 300,000, or 36,144 people per square mile, which puts tiny Santa Monica ahead of all the cities on the list and all the New York boroughs but Manhattan. Wow! City Hall must be very proud.

Jeff then showed us a story on page one of the Times’ business section.

According to the Times, “A new office complex is being planned in Santa Monica…international developer Hines… a Houston-based builder paid more than $75 million for [an Olympic Boulevard parcel]…according to a real estate expert who asked not to be identified because terms of the deal were confidential. The seller was a family trust that had held the land since the 1950s.

“Hines hopes to build two- to four-story office buildings totaling about 300,000 square feet on the 7-acre site….[and] plans to remove the three industrial buildings on the site, once home to a Paper Mate pen manufacturing plant that is no longer in use…There is a high demand for new office space in Santa Monica, said real estate broker Michael DeSantis of Cushman & Wakefield, who represented the seller in the deal…rents have jumped from about $2.50 per square foot per month in 2003 to about $6.25 a square foot, suggesting that the market is ripe for new development.”

Over-ripe, actually. (see following story).

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