Since just before the 2000 election, I have been writing a weekly column about my town, Santa Monica, California, for a website, The Lookout, that covers local news.
My purpose has been to treat the politics of Santa Monica, and the issues that confronted Santa Monica, with the same seriousness that the Paul Krugmans and Thomas Friedmans apply to the bigger world. I brought to the subject the knowledge I had gained from community service, a cosmopolitan outlook derived from a career outside politics (as an entertainment lawyer and erstwhile movie producer), a sense of humor, and a love for my subject — Santa Monica.
But what I brought to Santa Monica was nothing compared to what Santa Monica gave me. Santa Monica is a writer’s dream: a fascinating microcosm of the 21st century, post-sprawl, American city -- the “Peoples’ Republic of Santa Monica,” a place renowned for both its beaches and its political scene, but little understood for what it truly is.
Santa Monica is not what people think it is. It’s not a rich suburb of Los Angeles, a “Brentwood West,” and it’s not a sleepy beach town or resort either. While it has always had elements of both suburb and tourist trap, for most of the 20th century it was a blue-collar industrial town famous for building Douglas aircraft like the DC-3. It has a large minority population, although much of it had to disperse when a freeway ripped the town in half in the sixties. Urban renewal followed that, and by the seventies, the city was in bad shape.
Eighty percent of Santa Monicans lived in apartments, many of them shoddy "dingbats" constructed quickly in the post-War boom. In many urban areas of Southern Californiathis was a formula that resulted in decline and blight. In fact, in the 1950's and 1960's the City government declared much of the town to be blighted, and much of Santa Monica was cleared for redevelopment. The City came up with outlandish schemes to revitalize Santa Monica, including a proposal to build a freeway in the bay, to create an artificial lagoon, and another to build an artificial island complete with a hotel skyscraper.
Fortunately, the city revived, and not coincidentally because after decades of being run by a close-knit group of local power brokers, the grass roots took power. The first sign of trouble for the old guard came in the early 1970’s, when their plans to demolish the old Santa Monica Pier provoked a new preservationist and environmentalist movement.
But politics in Santa Monica truly got “hot” when left-wing idealism found a pocket book issue — rent control — that progressives could ride to power. For most the time since 1981 the party in power in Santa Monica has been an organization called “Santa Monicans for Renters Rights.” While one can argue with what SMRR has done — and I have done so often — one cannot argue that SMRR’s activism, and the reaction to it, has energized local politics and created in Santa Monica a real democracy, with much more citizen participation in local government than is typical.
As described in Chapter 1 of William Fulton’s seminal book about Los Angeles, The Reluctant Metropolis: The Politics of Urban Growth in Los Angeles, in the early 1980’s Santa Monica, under SMRR leadership, was the first locale in the region to confront and regulate the fabled “Growth Machine.” Santa Monicans took control over their destiny. While many mistakes have been made, it is my view that if the Los Angeles megalopolis created the prototype for the sprawled, automobile-based city that has become common around the world, then Santa Monica has provided a template for how to deal with the problems created when “sprawl hits the wall” (to borrow a phrase from the Southern California Studies Center at USC).
Santa Monica has thus provided me, in a small geographic area (only 8.5 square miles), with an urban “tide pool” teeming with issues to write about — a microcosm of 21st century urban issues, from economic development, to affordable housing, to gangs, to homelessness, to schools, to NIMBYism, etc.
