By Ty Wapato

Unless there is a unification of voices opposing the tsunami of over-scale development that is swelling on Santa Monica’s shores, the city will drown in the rising sea of congestion and population density.

Every new development that threatens one of our neighborhoods creates a visible and vocal opposition; but usually only from the people in that neighborhood. The rest of the city tends to lay back and watch the show seemingly with the attitude that it is not their problem. The sad part is that the developers come quietly, like a thief in the night. By the time the residents realize that they are there it is too late; their neighborhood has already been stolen.

I am saddened to the point of tears as I go from neighborhood to neighborhood and see the blight of progress. Santa Monica has gone from being a city with character, where the buildings reflected the inspiration of their builders and respected the sensitivities of their neighbors to a superficially cosmeticized version of LegoLand. With a wink and a nod, the city’s Planning Commission, Architectural Review Board and City Council have approved project after project that are nothing more than stacked cubes. The “designers” add different styles of make up, like combining earth tones here, Mediterranean white and terra cotta there, but underneath the make up it is still just a stack of cubes.

During the last few years the scale of the projects has grown, as tsunamis tend to grow as they approach landfall. A monumental disaster was narrowly escaped on the remodeling of Santa Monica Place. There is no question that area residents will soon regret the developments around Bergamot Station. The alleged trade-offs the developers are giving to assure approval of their Development Agreements are so meaningless they are laughable. And when they come up for hearing before the City Council (wink, wink) all of the wonderful things the beneficent developers give will be praised and the DA will be passed by a 5-2 vote (nod, nod). Opposed will be Councilmen McKeown and Shriver.

Development Agreements, which are the legitimization of wink and nod approval, are devices that allow developers to ignore zoning restrictions, and they have become so commonplace that zoning ordinances are meaningless except for keeping individual property owners in line. Heaven forbid that one should build a fence six inches over the allowable height.

The Miramar Hotel is the hot spot today. Now at the float up stage, the project has energized a fierce opposition, as well it should. It clearly is an abomination that should not be allowed to destroy another block on Ocean Avenue, completing the devastation of the Wilshire Boulevard and Ocean Avenue intersection that began with the One Wilshire Building.

There is a foreboding familiarity in the process that is not accidental. Float Up gives the developer the opportunity of presenting some architectural renderings so clearly offensive that the entire city rises up in fiery resistance. Newspapers run pictures of the atrocity and the fire grows hotter. But it is a long way from Float Up to Development Agreement and public outrage tends to cool over time. After the initial firestorm, the developer trims off a couple feet here and adds an amenity there and the public ardor diminishes.

It is time for neighborhood coalitions to unite with the realization that residents in the Bergamot Station area are affected by the Miramar development, and that condo owners on Second Street will be damaged by the over scale designs at Bergamot Transit Village. Santa Monica is too small for its neighbors to be provincial in their concerns. The crawl of large scale, high profit development will be relentless until one of two things happens: Santa Monica will completely disappear being replaced by an unimaginative conglomeration outsized building inspired only by greed, or the population will wake up to the danger and replace the City Council with one that is genuinely concerned with the concerns of Santa Monicans.