THE WHOLE WORLD IS WATCHING
Novelist William Faulkner said, “The past isn’t dead, it isn’t even past.”
Founded in 1875, Santa Monica’s been famous for all sorts of things, but it’s been beloved because it’s the real thing – as natural and odd as the steep bluffs that preside over the northern reaches of the beach, as easy as the old men who’ve been playing beach volleyball on the sand at the foot of the bluffs every day for 40 years, as complete as a town can be without being finished.
The beach has always been the primary fact of Santa Monica, the shaping element, the basis for both the oceanic air that infiltrates the flimsy soil and the holy bounce of light off the water that illuminates everything.
At sunset, any day, some residents inevitably appear on the beach. They are not there to swim. They just stand at the ocean’s edge, silent as stone, watching the sun go down. Their expressions are inscrutable. Some smile. Some don’t.
According to the City’s statisticians, an unusually large number of Santa Monica residents live alone – by choice.
Despite its age, Santa Monica remains a very small town — 8.3 square miles, between Los Angeles, that great, graceful, endless sprawl of a city and the Pacific, which roars, slaps, growls and mutters across half the globe. It doesn’t feel small. It feels boundless, and ageless. It demonstrates and illustrates its own
long history. In this gloriously idiosyncratic beach town, the past is always present.
But, here and now, the past is on the municipal chopping block. .
Several decades ago, City Hall set out to “improve” Santa Monica. New “luxury” hotels rose on Ocean Avenue. Luxe office complexes replaced small factories in the eastern reaches of the town.“Mixed use” complexes fractured portions of the townscape. A three-story mall replaced two blocks of small local businesses. The serene pedestrian mall on Third Street became the frenzied Third Street Promenade that attracted all the haut schlock chain stores that were in all the other shopping centers on the West Side of L.A.
By 2008, City Hall had overseen the insertion of 9 million square feet of new commercial developments into its once relaxed, easy streets, along with chronic traffic gridlock that made getting across town a Rhine battle. The City estimated the daily transient population of the town of 85,000 residents at 300,000. City revenue exploded. The annual budget soared, but the living wasn’t nearly as easy as it had once been.
When residents tried to pass a measure to control commercial development, their own City Hall turned on them and spent $700,000 donated by developers on a tsunami of lies about the residents’ plan. Today, another two million square feet of proposed commercial developments are in the pipeline.
One case has attracted world-wide attention. A developer proposed that a small trailer park, a remnant of an earlier era, the Village Trailer Park, be bulldozed to make way for another gargantuan mixed use commercial development. It had, over time, become an idyllic garden, with a pool, a library, trees of various sorts, over 100 of them, tropical plants, fruit trees. Its longtime residents – most whom were older people, some in fragile health – were to be offered small units in the large development.
That Santa Monica, the legendary beach town, where sweat shirts, jeans and flip-flops were high fashion and the Z Boys ruled for a while would willingly raze an irreplaceable, vital piece of its past, and demolish the homes of some irreplaceable residents to make way for another mixed use commercial development was incomprehensible. The story moved from local newspapers to regional papers, to local TV, to hundreds of American newspapers and all three major networks, to the Associated Press wire, to Canada, and across the pond to Great Britain and Germany. Well over 200 stories have run.
Huckleberry Finn, Butch and Sundance, the Hole in the Wall gang, surfers and beach bums, the Z boys, and all the American rogues and rebels the world loves in spite of itself came to mind. This time it was the Over the Hill Gang, men and women in their 60s, 70s and 80s, mad as hell, and eloquent and smart who’d found paradise in a trailer park in a beach town on the Southern
California coast…and were not willing to go quietly into that good night.
And so the whole world will be watching tonight when the City Council writes the end of the story. But, of course, no matter what the Council does, the trailer park residents will have the last word.
Dear Editor Peggy Clifford:
I am one of the Over the Hill Gang not willing to go quietly, or in fact go at all. My husband Peter Naughton, who has a Masters’ degree in Land Use Planning (!) from Cambridge University (!) in England and I, a retired California lawyer with 20 years’ experience working for the Santa Monica Rent Control Board and against it representing landlords, and founders of a now-permanent 501(c)(3) charity to promote ultra low cost housing, with related goals, are just two of the cadre that will not go. We have spent two years preparing a legal and planning challenge. Others did publicity, which you can see has already been successful. One has the very specialized job of riding his bicycle to get everyone copies of the free papers in newsstands near here every day. Along the way we, like the others before us, fell in love with the Park and our neighbors. Now these include a baby possum who adopted us a few weeks ago, and a 19-year-old Siamese whose parents we are the third Park residents to be.
This community is indeed irreplaceable. That is why when I returned in October from Occupy Wall Street–where I slept in the Park on concrete with people from homeless to some of the smartest and most politically astute, bar none, I have ever met, including those I graduated with at Berkeley and UCLA Law School–Peter and I knew this was the place for Occupy Santa Monica, even if Occupies everywhere were not being allowed to really occupy space that was supposed to belong to the public. We have met every Sunday in the community room at 2930 Colorado every since then, and we will continue even after the development fight ends, as it someday will.
We share potluck and sympathy, divide up work, figure out what to do about the cat of a neighbor who may not return from being hospitalized, consider what to do to help another who has been threatening suicide–we have the work of any community to do, while at the same time we stop this proposed bulldozing of our homes.
We all invested in those homes and we own them even more so than do the $2 million condo owners on leased Indian land in Palm Springs. Their 99-year leases will end at a fixed time. Some of us as few as six years ago, I 26 years ago, one 37 years ago–we all bought these homes with the thought we had guaranteed being able to live here under rent control as long as it lasted in Santa Monica. I am sure we were right. We now have 53 legal bases to stop the bulldozing–and counting. Every time the City tries something else, it’s a new cause of action.
But as you said, it is also a new stain on the City’s history. Thank you, for saying that so eloquently.
In solidarity,
Brenda Barnes, Resident, Village Trailer Park