Your doorbell rings. It’s a City employee. He’s carrying a tape measure and a clipboard and he’s there to make sure that your bedrooms conform to new City standards.

Unless you are dangerously flexible, you tell the City employee to mind his own business, and close the door.

As far as we know, the City has yet to set bedroom standards, but it has imposed a great many rules and regulations on us, as well as adopting standards on all sorts of things.

For the last five years, the City Council, planners and consultants have labored over the revision of the  land use and circulation elements
of the General Plan (LUCE). It will determine the shape and direction of Santa Monica, and, to a remarkable extent,  the way we live.

The 1984 revision triggered an avalanche of new commercial development – 9 million square feet in all. It was too much for this very small beach town. Many of  the new developments were merely large and pretentious. Traffic congestion was chronic. But City Hall’s  coffers swelled, and that was the point.

When work began on the 2004 revision, residents were determined
To limit commercial growth and restore the small scale that had been the rule since the founding of the town in 1875. But as work on the revision proceeded, the residents’ role shrank, and their so-called “vision” was relegated to the margins.

The revision remains in flux, and is  less coherent and more ambitious than it was a year ago.

The revision does not include bedroom standards. Yet. But, if you live here,  you had better take everything the City does personally, and seriously.
It’s your street, your sidewalk,  your curb, your curb cuts, your trees, your neighborhood, your boulevards, your parks, your beach, your town, and, above all, it’s your call.