The major item on tonight’s City Council agenda is a discussion of the planners’ recommendations for the so-called “industrial lands.”

The staff report suggests that the staff wants to turn what is now the loosest and most open area of the city into the most tightly packed. What’s there now ranges from formidable to small and simple, from large, pretentious office buildings to quiet residential neighborhoods, from Bergamot Station to the City Yards, from several private schools to small manufacturers, from artists’ studios to our own gasoline alley. And, except for a traffic mess that rivals downtown, it all works pretty well.

Now, among other things, the City wants to add affordable and/or workforce housing and install a proper grid, meaning more streets, sidewalks, utilities, neighborhood-serving stores and so on, as well as what sounds like nothing so much as a whole new community adjacent to the proposed Expo light rail line.

This is madness. Santa Monica Is already far more densely populated than Los Angeles, It does not need and can’t absorb much more new housing. It should be focusing on preserving existing housing. In addition, the six-acre Papermate property in the heart of the industrial lands just sold for $75 million. Several years ago, the City paid a mere $53 million for 11-plus acres in the heart of downtown Santa Monica overlooking the ocean. Given that, to even talk about affordable housing in the industrial lands is ludicrous.

The planners need to take a leaf from Thoreau who urged people, in almost all circumstances, to “simplify, simplify.”

Indeed, the only proposal that will be made to the Council tonight that deserves to be taken seriously and approved is the Santa Monica Coalition For a Livable City’s request that the City finally adopt a workable traffic methodology (See “To the City Council” below).