In 1980, following residents’ adoption of a strict rent control ordinance, proposed by Santa Monicans for Renters’ Rights (SMRR), an amalgam of self-described “old radicals,” and ‘60s activists, New York’s Village Voice anointed Santa Monica as “the most radical city in America.” 60 Minutes did a segment called “Left City,” even as the Wall Street Journal inveighed endlessly against what it saw as Santa Monica’s sharp left turn.

Today, a generation later, our town regularly reaps toy awards , as it did several months ago, when FORBES magazine named it one of the nation’s “best shopping downtowns.” City Hall issues press releases celebrating these tinhorn honors. Residents merely sigh.

Iconoclasts of every stripe have always been drawn to Santa Monica.
and have endowed it with radiance and rhythm, mystery and snap. Among them were the first surfers on mainland America, a platoon of women tennis champions, and aviation pioneer Donald Douglas. In the late 20s and 1930s, Hollywood established a beachhead in Santa Monica. It was called the Gold Coast, and four of the five studio heads, MGM’s “boy wonder,” Irving Thalberg and his wife, Norma Shearer, and several dozen other Hollywood stars had houses on the sand. Simultaneously, Santa Monica became a refuge for German writers and filmmakers in flight from Hitler. In the 1970s, it became the Z Boys’ Dogtown.

RAND invented the think tank in Santa Monica, and re-invented war along nuclear lines, i.e., “Mutually Assured Destruction” (MAD). Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda’s anti-Vietnam war movement and Campaign for Economic Democracy were both based in Santa Monica. Frank Gehry, now the most influential architect in the world, began his rise in Santa Monica, as did Waldo Waterman, the inventor of the “flying car,” Sam Cohen, the inventor of the neutron bomb, Shirley Temple, and writer-director Oliver Stone, who has been described by writer Garry Wills as “America’s Dostoevsky.”

In the glossary of Southern California cities, Santa Monica is very small –- 8.3 square smiles — bounded on three sides by Los Angeles, and on the fourth side by the ocean, The second most densely populated town in Southern California, its population has not grown, but hovered at about 88,000 for decades.

It resides on the line where the vast L.A. alluvial plain and the Pacific Ocean converge. Ocean haze infiltrates the soil and softens the air and light, and it’s the opalescent light and moist air, not the flimsy soil, that make Santa Monica gardens so prodigal. Here, in the heart of what Hamlin Garland called, “the fortunate coast,” bougainvillea riots, spilling over back fences and down into alleys, and palm trees outgrow the ground they’re set in.

The town is completed by a holy bounce of light off the ocean. The western sky is high, deep and boundless. The sky and the ocean contain everything, and never repeat.

The primary fact of Santa Monica, the shaping force is its location on the ocean. It begins and ends on the sand, But, in the early 1980s, City policy makers demoted the beach to “a visitor-serving facility” to the continuing dismay of Santa Monica’s spirited and contrary residents.

In 1982, the L.A. metropolitan area had 10 million residents and Santa Monica had the beaches. Hundreds of thousands of people were drawn to Santa Monica every year – from all over the Los Angeles area, as well as the rest of America, Europe and Asia – with little or no promotion or advertising.

But City Hall didn’t want daytrippers, it wanted more — more visitors, more affluent visitors and more revenue, created the Convention & Visitors Bureau and gave it $1 million a year to promote the town.

Though Santa Monica had plenty of hotels and motels, ranging from plain to boho to posh, City Hall approved a wave of big, new “luxury hotels” – some of which replaced grandly raffish and low-slung motels that overlooked the beach, and immediately imposed a 12 percent (now 14 percent) per night bed tax.

About the same time, City Hall established a luxe office district, just off the Santa Monica freeway at Cloverfield. What had been a loose gathering of light industry, artists’ studios and galleries and open space was plowed under to make way for blocks of high watt, massive office buildings that housed MGM, Universal Music, MTV, Sony Music, Lions Gate Films, and other entertainment industry heavyweights.

Residents countered with Prop S, a ballot measure that banned any more hotels on the beach. Still trolling for revenue, City Hall turned its sights on the Third Street mall.

Installed in 1965, the pedestrian mall was lined with small, locally owned shops, cafes and bookstores, including the legendary Midnight Special, as well as a pair of economy class chain stores, Woolworth’s and J. C. Penney.

But City Hall was bent on turning the balmy beach town into “a regional commercial hub,” as well as a bigtime tourist mill, and Third Street was to be its centerpiece.

The Third Street Mall was of a piece with the easy-going old beach town, but the new Third Street Promenade bore an unfortunate resemblance to Citywalk, the faux street at Universal Studios Tour, then L.A.’s hottest new amusement park.

The arrival of Barnes and Noble and Borders chain bookstores spelled the end of all but two of the independent bookstores on Third Street. Though the Midnight Special held on for a while, with help from its landlord, it finally choked on City Hall’s red tape. A big upscale Banana Republic replaced the no-nonsense J.C. Penney’s, and a trendy restaurant took over the Woolworth’s slot. Rents soared, and small, locally owned businesses were replaced by the haute schlock chain stores that are everywhere now.

Just as the Promenade opened, a UCLA student was shot in a gang clash in Westwood, abruptly ending its run as the Westside’s premier hangout, and making the slick, shiny Promenade the new place to see and be seen.

At the time, the Council members were SMRRs Denny Zane, Judy Abdo and Ken Genser, all of whom were afflicted with absolute self- confidence, SMRRs Kelly Olsen and Tony Vasquez, both of whom served only one term, and pharmacist Bob Holbrook and architect Herb Katz.

When Zane retired after ten years on the Council in 1992 to undertake more lucrative endeavors, he said, “In 10 years, we have made this a wonderful city.”

In fact, Santa Monica was a ”wonderful city” long before Zane and his cohort took over, and, in their decade in City Hall, though they had added some worthy social programs, they had made the town itself significantly less wonderful in the view of an increasing number of residents. Its tarted up Promenade, hotel row, luxe office district, “regional commercial hub,” crowds and traffic were at profound odds with the low-key town and its very independent residents.

A wave of high commerce rolled through this fine old beach town, bruising its character, but City Hall couldn’t have been happier. As if to signify its triumph, it began to capitalize itself. It was the City. The rest of us were consigned to the lower case – as in city.

I first saw Southern California when I was six. I hadn’t seen much of the world, but nothing I’d seen was like anything I found in Los Angeles.

It’s like no place else on earth. Everything converges here — deserts, mountains, alluvial plains, the ocean, dreams, people. Its dreams for itself have always been larger, brighter, and deeper than the dreams of its alleged leaders. And infinitely more dangerous.

Los Angeles’s oceanic air and opalescent light are, quite literally, intoxicating. In its sweet and sensuous milieu, children are tuned up and carried aloft on balmy currents into the rushing light and, there and then, they become free, and untameable.

Contrary to popular opinion, paradise is not synonymous with perfection, but with wildness. It contains everything, and is neither tidy nor orderly, but is gorgeous, endlessly interesting and deeply encouraging. Though it’s ultimately unfathomable, it’s readily accessible.

Los Angeles is a kind of weather, in which a number of thoroughly eccentric towns abide — Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, West Hollywood, Culver City and so on. Each was made by different people for different reasons.

In the 1850s, after California became part of America, the old land grants were broken up, and in 1875 Colonel Robert S. Baker and Senator John P. Jones, whose more grandiose plans had been foiled, pooled their land holdings and founded Santa Monica.

Five generations of weather, chance, circumstance, deals, accidents, breaks – good and bad, business, pleasure, schemers, dreamers, rogues, fools, freaks, pioneers, geniuses, idols, beach bums, greathearts and devoted residents made the Santa Monica that residents have long cherished, and made it unique, priceless, peerless, irreplaceable — paradise found.

West of the West, beyond the beyond, on the storied Southern California
coast, Santa Monica was quite simply a masterpiece of a place.

In their first days, having just scored a major victory and made enough waves to catch the collective eye of the national media, some fledgling Santa Monicans for Renters’ Rights leaders gave themselves license to do anything they could think of.

But they lost control of City Hall after only two years. Chastened by their
loss, a tough, single-minded SMRR clique took City Hall back in 1988, pulled in their horns, trimmed their benignly radical agenda and became political pragmatists.

In 1988, Santa Monica was 113 years old, famous, beautiful, prosperous and complete – more in need of scrupulous caretakers than bosses. To the dismay of many residents, City Hall was not focused on the town, but on what it could make of it.

Like paradise, masterpieces can’t be “improved.” They can be cherished or destroyed, but Santa Monica City Hall has spent more than two decades trying to reduce this eight-square-mile portion of paradise to a product.

In March, 2006, visiting spinmen and local boosters, held Santa Monica’s “First Destination Brand Summit” at Loews Santa Monica Beach Hotel.
The gathering was organized by the City’s Convention and Visitors Bureau and starred its consultants, BelievableBrands and BrandStrategy.

At a second “summit” six months later, about 60 people, including some City Council members and City employees, gathered on the beach to discuss “creating a new identity for Santa Monica.”

After spending two decades tarting our town up, City Hall officially declared it a commodity, and set out to turn the most radical city in America into a romper room for affluent visitors.

By then, the upper case City was regularly having its way with the lower case residents.

City Hall’s aggressive economic development and promotion policies had increased its revenues, and property values were rising fast, but the high octane policies were also burdening this graceful, small-scale beach town with big, bulky, undistinguished buildings, increasing traffic, and generally exacerbating residents’ discontent.

The state requires towns to revise their General Plans every 20 years.
The last revision was made in the early 1980s, just as the SMRR City Hall got up to speed, and was followed by two decades of the cranked up commercial and spec development that became the hallmark of City Hall’s drive to “grow” the town and its own revenue.

The next iteration of the land use and circulation elements should have been finished and in place in 2004, but work didn’t begin until 2004. Dubbing the land use element, “Shape the Future — 2025,” and the circulation element, “Motion by the Ocean,” City Hall initially solicited “community input” in a variety of forms. Officials enjoyed boasting about their devotion to “community outreach and input,” but seldom paid any attention to it, and residents were wary.

Like victims of some weird variant of the Stockholm Syndrome, the Council had long since bought the City Hall line that Santa Monica was a business that was too important to be left to amateurs, and ceded much of their authority to City staff, rendering the “of, by and for the people” principle more or less moot. Simultaneously, they surrendered to the flattery, and cash, of the gathering horde of developers.

Work on the General Plan revision got off to a bumpy start, when some residents protested that the City’s “community workshop facilitators” had rigged the first sessions in order to get the responses they wanted.

But residents declared their desire to preserve the low key small-scale beach town so emphatically that the City planners and consultants were obliged to include it in their first report on the revision, “Emerging Themes.”

According to the City’s synopsis of the residents’ comments, residents wanted ”A unique city with a strong sense of community; a city rich in amenities, within walking distance to shops and services from neighborhoods; a diverse and inclusive city, a community built at an appropriate town scale; a city of strong neighborhoods, protected from commercial and industrial uses; a pedestrian and. bicycle-friendly place; a city rich in its array of transit offerings; a city where traffic and parking work; a city of balanced growth; a city with attractive boulevards; a safe and secure community; an environmentally sustainable place.”

Residents wanted City Hall to return the beach town it had hijacked, but their straight forward “vision” was ignored by the imperious City planners, whose second report, “Opportunities and Challenges,” was dense with data and statistics that suggested that continued growth and development were not only vital, but inevitable — though virtually all of the problems that plagued residents could be traced back to City Hall’s force-feeding of the economy.

Easy-going functional downtown Santa Monica has become an overwrought, overloaded “regional commercial hub,” The town’s daily transient population now more than triples to 300,000, and gridlock is chronic in streets in the downtown area, adjacent neighborhoods and the eastern reaches.

SMRR was founded to save tenants from allegedly rapacious landlords, but City Hall policies have put tenants in greater jeopardy than ever. Since state measures significantly weakened rent control a dozen years ago, the town’s stock of reasonably priced apartments has been in free fall, and rents on remaining apartments have risen dramatically, though a majority of residents are still renters. Rather than renovating and preserving existing apartment buildings and courtyard apartments for their current and future tenants, as well as keeping the small scale townscape intact, the City has opted to build outsized, homely new apartment complexes for low income families and older people. Several years ago, noting that 80 percent of the town’s “core workforce” – police, firefighters, City staff — does not live in Santa Monica, City officials created a task force to explore ways and means of developing workforce housing, though City employees whose average annual income is about $70,000 were less in need of it than residents who average about $40,000 a year.

How did one of the most glorious portions of paradise become a product? Why did “the most radical town in America” choose the 19th century plantation as its model? Why did the very liberal City Council majority adopt the classic reactionary wisdom – grow or die?

When the SMRRs moved into City Hall in 1982, they meant to make a truly progressive community with a full complement of progressive programs, and they have created advisory commissions, programs and projects for virtually every segment of the population, as well as an impressive roster of environmental programs. But, seemingly stuck in some perpetual present, ignorant of the past and unmindful of the future, they have simultaneously overseen the unmaking of the iconic beach town and the consequent degradation of both the man-made and natural environments.

Despite its major mistakes and missteps, City Hall’s belief in itself remains absolute. The staff’s Sustainable City Report Card 2012 freely admitted all the major problems and cited some minor ameleorations, but, in the best Panglossian tradition, it gave itself high marks – mostly As and Bs – in almost all categories.

An earlier edition of the Report Card concluded, ”In order to become a more sustainable community all community members must be educated and empowered to achieve our goals,“ “our,” in this as in so many other areas, meant City Hall.

The City Hall bureaucracy, the Council and assorted developers and spin doctors do not see this gloriously idiosyncratic beach town, but only what they can make of it, and what they have chosen to make of it is a money mill – profoundly prosperous and increasingly mediocre. Conventional wisdom rules, and paradise and the people suffer the consequences, and costs. Having overseen nine million square feet of thoroughly third-rate commercial development in the past several decades, City Hall has another two million square feet of new projects on the way.

Large numbers of residents actively oppose the number, size and banal design of proposed projects, and they have turned up in large numbers — forty, eighty, over 100 residents at a time – at recent Planning Commission and Council hearings. They have been eloquent and very angry, but the City
has not listened.

Happily, fate is finally on our side. This is an election year and, for the first time in years, there are four open seats on the City Council. And there are four candidates whose first priority is resurrecting Santa Monica’s spirit, style, and substance. They have the brains, courage, integrity and devotion to reduce City Hall to its former supporting role, restore what has been lost in the recent frenzy, preserve what is worthy, and reject what is not.

The Dispatch endorses Ted Winterer, Richard McKinnon, Bob Seldon and John Cyrus Smith for the four open seats on the City Council. They are not
a team or a ticket or an organization, or even a set. They are independent gents, each of whom loves this beach town and wants nothing so much as to break the grip City Hall has on the municipal machinery.

They dislike what most of us dislike – the traffic that chokes our streets and makes getting across town a Rhine battle, the big sloppy commercial developments that fracture the townscape, the greed that seems to drive major City decisions. Their ambitions are not mercantile. They love Santa Monica, and their love is not for sale.

Winterer and McKinnon are both former members of the Rec and Parks Commission and are current Planning Commissioners. Their critiques of proposed projects are smart, detailed, spot on, and inevitably superior to
the staff’s lengthy, but superficial reports. Neither of them truckles to the developers, nor accepts the staff’s surrender to them. The two often agree, because they have in common a deep and abiding affection for Santa Monica, and belief in the residents’ sense of the place, and they are often in the minority.

Both men are involved in the life of the community. Winterer coaches kids’
sports and is a major domo of the Fourth of July parade. McKinnon is an
advocate of bicycles, solar energy and greening the town, and involved in a variety of school programs.

Bob Seldon, a lawyer, co-founded the NorthEast Neighbors Organization, and in a fit of high pique, called for a recall almost immediately after the last election. He admires Saul Alinsky, the pioneer community organizer, and has given his book to people he thinks are in need of it. He is also
very outspoken.

John Cyrus Smith, a news producer at NBC-TV until recently, was active
in the fight to save Ballona Wetlands, has been endorsed by the Sierra Club, now teaches journalism at USC and Santa Monica College, but sees himself primarily as a citizen activist. He ranks the needs and wishes of the residents over City Hall’s grandiose ambitions, and wants to revive residents’ authority.

As noted in the following article, the usual suspects have dusted off the same old formula – heaps of money, combined with an unhealthy dose of fear tactics mixed with bogus claims and utterly empty promises.

We have sheer numbers – about 56,000 votes, an abiding affection for this gloriously idiosyncratic beach town, and four good candidates who are immune to the blandishments and buncombe of the self-anointed bosses. It’s our town…and it’s time to take it back.