Hi David:
We were not invited to the chat/soiree/coercion session (some are known to be uncooperative, so sadly just don’t get invited to a few events–actually, I am proud to be defined by my enemies). We had several alternatives when we first heard about it.

I am too busy with more important things than trying to discover whatever LL might say to (or feed or pour into) anyone. LL served an eviction notice on one of our side last Friday, and after taking various actions to protect him during the week, I worked all night on a draft for our friend of the legal response. LL is getting desperate now and making major mistakes that will cost him millions as well as lose the PR war he wages by claiming lies like he didn’t evict anyone–no, what he did was serve notices of eviction on them or send a letter claiming they were illegal tenants, and then they left “voluntarily.” Why in the world would any of us want to meet informally with him and take a chance of giving him ammunition to use against us?

LL is one of the enemy camp. The lines of battle have been clearly drawn for years. He has made it clear he is offering peanuts for valuable rights and has the City helping him coerce us into moving. And four times the City Council could have told him no but voted in favor of the development agreement–why would anyone think the Council hasn’t already made up its mind? Some just had on such wishful-thinking blinders that they could not see the lines. I will be more interested in knowing from what is reported after the meeting who are the Vichyists still among us, so I will know who not to share strategies with, than what LL says. We are inviting the press from copying them with this e-mail, so from that and other methods I am sure we will have a complete report. LL is not willing yet to say anything I want to hear.

As you may know from what I have already told everyone, I bought this trailer 26 years ago in 1986 and members of my family have lived in it ever since (or for years at a time used it in common among three parts of the family as a vacation spot). However, this last two years since April 2010 when family members told me things were heating up–and as I had been watching the newspapers since we got the closure notice in 2006 I knew LUCE was on the verge of being adopted–I decided to come here and live full-time to fight this development legally. From the beginning, when we all met after we got the Notice of Closure in 2006, I said if the City had not refused to take the development agreement on the ground it was illegal, they were going to approve it, so when that looked like it was going to happen, I would come here and sue. I can prepare the record and file lawsuits on my own behalf that protect the rights of everyone, so I have never been afraid this Park was actually going to close, or if it did, that we were not going to be compensated fairly so we could replace this housing.

Four things have happened in the last two years that have completely changed the situation for me.

The first is that I fell in love with the Park, and my now-17-year old granddaughter Autumn began to think of where she will live during her life. Talking it over, both of us realized living here for the rest of our lives would be a very smart thing to do, and getting enough money to really replace this living situation for the rest of her life, to say nothing of her yet-unborn heirs’ lives, is a very expensive proposition and very difficult to attain, certainly when the spread between what is being offered, $20,000, and what is needed, $450,000, is so wide. The combination of those two things moved our family from the fight-to-get-as-much-money-as-we-can-in-the-settlement camp to Jack Waddington’s stay-here-no-matter-what camp.

This change made me more passionate and the fight more real to me. Sometimes that is a handicap, like when my voice breaks speaking to power, which did not happen when I argued other people’s cases before the Supreme Court. Or when I become angry at the opposition or at people’s inability to understand consequences of their actions, which in 20 years of legal practice I saw over and over again and learned it is human, not something to get angry about. Plus getting angry is another handicap for my own effectiveness.

On the other hand, again and again I have stayed up all night and kept at it day after day working on what needed to be done immediately in the course of this fight, something I could never do for years at a time before when fights were not personal and for Autumn. The Mountain View tenants who come to Occupy Santa Monica meetings on Sundays tell us the City uses a staff of 38 and a budget of $43 million to oppress them constantly, as the Rent Control Board verified last year when one of the members called what the City had done in harassing tenants at MV “corrupt.” The tenants now have no recourse when their landlord, the City, uses Building and Safety, Code Enforcement, and the Police Department to threaten their homes, their safety, and even their lives. (People at OSM suggested they write to the California Attorney General, which they said is their next step, a lot harder than calling the City’s Consumer Affairs Department, as [they] did about problems before the City became their landlord.) It is no joke or passing fancy to them that we win this fight against the City, since if we do not, they will be the last targets left standing and things will be so much worse for them, a situation that given the stories they have told us, is difficult to imagine. Trayvon Martin and Sanford, Florida come to mind. I am serious. This is serious. I look all around before I get out of my car when I come home late at night. I check for cars following me and always keep a different schedule and take alternate routes. When you are a target, you have to act like one.

The second change is the economy’s continuing to stay bad for now going on four years has made me realize Jack W may be right when he says the economy of the world is going to tank as Greece, Ireland, and Spain go under, and the City of Santa Monica in the aftermath will be planning how to open more trailer parks to house the many displaced people who come here, not close the last true trailer park they have. (Not to mention beachfront citizens displaced by the tsunami–I can’t go that far.) Once again, the tenants from MV have pointed out that unless you qualify as low income, the rent at MV is twice as high as we pay here if you already own a trailer there, which none of us here does, so that won’t save us from having to either take on a $190,000 mortgage, or pay $1500 a month rent. Many of us here do not qualify as low income. Even if we did, we would then have to income-qualify every YEAR, a hassle we do not have here, and be subject to constant surveillance and harassment about “gifts” we get such as other people giving us rides, which we “failed to report,” so be repeatedly subject to eviction attempts, as has happened to several MV tenants. That is in what once was called a trailer park, under the noisy polluting freeway, on a former landfill with methane gas seeping out toward a possible future explosion, next to a City yard and recycling center with ongoing 24/7 noise and smells, as well as health hazards, from exhaust fumes and other pollution. It also is in the John Adams, not Lincoln, Middle School District we are in here.

If we stay here, on the other hand, we are covered by rent control from major changes in the rent and eviction protection we have, and with the settlements from all this litigation we may be able to buy the Park like those tenants in San Juan Capistrano. If we take anything else, we run risks people just can’t imagine. One of them I always thought was silly–that deed-restricting units in the new project here to be covered by rent control would not make it so, especially if a new owner not a party to the agreement bought the project and land, since people cannot agree to be covered by a law that states new construction is exempt–now has support in a recent case. Things just get worse, unless we can keep what we have, which is what we bought with an expectation of being able to do.

The third thing is the Landmarks Commission case educated me that the buildings here really are the last standing examples in Santa Monica–and perhaps within a much larger area–of a mid-20th-Century trailer resort that became by 1971 due to a housing shortage after WWII permanent housing in the same structures. Those structures had been the middle class’s–newly in love with the automobile, newly-liberated from the Great Depression and then the War, for the first time able to travel due to post-War prosperity–transient housing just 20 years before. This is a unique and never to be repeated historical phenomenon replicated throughout the country. Therefore I have started really thinking, researching, and talking to other people about what we could do to save these historical structures.

I can easily imagine our keeping the permanent structures as a historical destination, landmarking them and the trees throughout the Park, and using the already illegally-emptied 30 spaces to run enterprises that make real money, fit in with the residential neighborhood, and are an example to the world of how that can be done to retain low rent housing and revitalize local economies.

First we could import some really funky trailers from the period, put them near the permanent buildings, get together a lot more pictures and artifacts from the period and curate a real historical collection. Maybe we would decide to expand the concept (and extend the building across and/or behind where it now is, moving trailers as necessary, fairly compensating the owners, and making the addition period-compatible), to cover art and architecture from Santa Monica and include Bruria Finkel’s promised collection of Frank Gehry’s papers when he dies. (There would be tons of event parking in the Roberts development next door, to say nothing of cafes and retail shops to stop off at before and after coming here. If we can talk Jack Walter into going back to his 50 live-work artists’ studios on Colorado and Stewart now that Lions Gate has backed out of leasing his 100,000 sq ft building, maybe people can visit a real arts area here.) Or some other historical concept could come to light with real community input.

(Not the kind of staged pretend-outreach meetings we see the City have over and over. I first became aware there was such a thing as pretending to get community input when the decision had already been made when I read about what was happening about siting New Orleans schools after Katrina. Once my eyes were opened, I saw it in every City meeting I went to after that. Give the public very limited time. Restrict topics they can speak on. Interrupt especially effective speakers and tell them they are not civil or are speaking off the topic. Have presentation/s by “expert(s)” first, making it late so most of the public will leave. Have police and/or many staff members present to stifle creativity. Have meetings at night in some dark place a block away from parking, so only older people can come, not minority or young parents. Give only predetermined choices to discuss. Divide up into groups, which takes time, and have only a minute to report what the group discussed for 20 minutes. On and on.)

Whatever concept of the historical framework to be covered were ultimately decided upon, we could set off a part of the Park off Colorado for the historical part and charge a fee for historical tours, maybe even self-guided ones just as the Santa Monica Historical Museum at the main library does for a $10 entry fee. Then in the part of the Park not landmarked except for the trees, we could put in money-making green quiet enterprises to make real money off this land without destroying it.

We could do things such as put in a waste digester like I saw at The Plant in Chicago last October, to digest all the City’s green waste anaerobically and quietly, and make electricity from it. This is a job the City pays $2 million a year to have done in Lamont in the San Joaquin Valley, 125 miles away, by exposing the green waste in windrows and composting it. I grew up there, so I know this is in an area that already has a high level of children’s cancers from exposure to the pesticides used in factory agriculture. And what about the environmental impacts of sending trucks 125 miles across the Grapevine hauling waste and then bringing back compost? That is then given away, not profited from. Also, the money paid for composting goes to Lamont businesses, not to a local business such as we could set up, so we could keep that money in our own community, with a multiplier effect of over $6 million a year. This profit from one possible enterprise among maybe 10 or 15 we could do is more than the City would get from the pie-in-the-sky estimates made about the whole obscene project LL plans to build. That it would actually stay in Santa Monica whereas whatever amount LL’s project would make would not, is indicated by the fact that most of the companies renting west of us to 20th Street–the same companies LL plans to rent to–send their profits out of Santa Monica. Research shows the Googles and Viacoms send money elsewhere whereas people like our neighbor who grows plants here and sells them at local farmers’ markets–and our company that would create electricity here for a profit rather than sending waste to Lamont to create something given away at a cost of $2 million a year–spend money in the same community where they make it and live. The current choice is therefore hardly an environmentally or financially feasible choice. We can do better.

The fourth thing that has happened affecting my outlook in the last two years is I went to Occupy Wall Street for ten days and slept on concrete in a donated sleeping bag in Zuccotti Park in October. Days I was on Legal and Kitchen Working Groups. I loved both of them equally and knew my efforts helped build a real community. Afternoons and evenings I went to General Assemblies and attended actions we planned at GAs. I saw real direct democracy working. Now when I go to an event set up by people who have been activists for years, decades even, and I see an event with an agenda and rules such as no sidebar conversations, I so wish you all had been in the Park with us last October and seen that while order in speaking to the entire group has to be maintained, sometimes the best thoughts come from the sidebars. For instance, when I first arrived in New York, people were complaining all the time about not being able to hear what was being said because amplification was prohibited. Then someone thought of the human mike, and days of complaining about that followed–how long it took to repeat every sentence four times, how people kept losing their voices from shouting so much, how women were being excluded from power because men could shout louder, you name it, democracy in action, everyone has an opinion. By the time I left on October 13th, “mic check” was part of the American vocabulary. This is just one example of hundreds I could write about if I weren’t busy saving my home, of the synergistic effect of real freedom in meetings.

The result of this for me is I am convinced people in general just need to be awakened and organized to keep travesties such as destroying Santa Monica by overdevelopment from happening. Just awakening and organizing them now, however, has to be very different from what activists have been doing, with the very best of intentions and a lot of hard work, for decades. People have been disempowered by dismantling of all the things that got resistance into the streets and made lasting cultural change in 1965-75. We have corrupt mainstream media, Congress, the US Supreme Court, police departments throughout the country, 30 million unemployed, 10 million overwhelmed by student debt, maybe 30 million homeless and more to be foreclosed on in the next two years, and complete corporatocracy. All of this demoralizes people and makes it difficult to get them to come out of their homes for anything, certainly not for the kind of meetings where top-down imparting of information is all they get except for two controlled minutes to speak.

This is why I have been going to every televised meeting I can find for the past month to announce Occupy Santa Monica meets here from 3 to 6 every Sunday. I don’t believe just the 25 or so of us that are here and will come to a meeting are enough to stop the City-developer streamroller. We have to get 5,000 people on our side. To do that we have to have a lot of things like food and drink that I never knew were so important (even LL knows that). We also have to really listen, and to help people who come with what they are interested in to become empowered, not just try to use them for what we are interested in. We have to also stop thinking so much of how we look that we fail to use the three methods that have been found to have been effective against powerful entities lately: (1) make it personal; (2) attack the silent investors (see Peter’s blog attached from www.occupysm.com), and (3) be creative and humorous to get attention (Peter talks to the City Council about how dangerous lions are and how they will eat the homeless hordes, since Lions Gate Films was one of the big companies claiming they would rent a huge development here–which, by the way, they have already within six months backed out on, as Peter predicted at the time when he told the Council Lions Gate already had a $62 million quarterly loss last year and no sign of a moneymaking reprieve in the works).

So this is why I am not sorry not to be invited to LL’s party. Hansel and Gretel should have RSVP’d their regrets anyway.

Yours in solidarity,

bb