Dear Editor,
Thank you for your article in the Friday June 22 issue of The Mirror (“Village Trailer Park Redevelopment Moves One Step Closer to Reality”) concerning the June 20 meeting of the Planning Commission. The failure of Commissioners Ries and Anderson to support a motion that would have required that an Area Plan precede Mark Luzzatto’s conversion of Village Trailer Park into a massive development is a blow to the opportunity this project should present.
It’s bad enough that the elderly and disabled residents of the Trailer Park are being forced out of their homes. Luzzatto’s replacement is a dark, dense, warren-like series of canyons that will become a ghetto we will all have to suffer should it win City Council approval at the Council meeting of July 24.
How Commissioner Anderson can look at this project and predict that it will be “vibrant” and how she can also block proposals for a community park on this site is beyond comprehension. There will be no sense of place in these bunker-like towers packed with tiny studios large enough for sleeping room only. If this plan proceeds as designed, when the residents step outside their sleeping bunkers they will find trees growing in pots and a new street that will have to serve as “open space.”
Thanks to those commissioners who advanced and supported the motion calling for an Area Plan first: McKinnon, Winterer and Kennedy. A special thanks to Commissioner McKinnon for asking the city staff to display the drawings of the project on the City Hall monitor as it was being discussed. Why was this project not on view throughout the discussion? I was there and watched the response of all when confronted with what this project will actually look like.
The residents of Santa Monica need to wake up and engage and to stop the piecemeal destruction of our beautiful small city. This is an election year. The Council needs to hear from the voters. The Bergamot Specific Plan should come first and Santa Monica City Council needs to make this happen when this project comes to them on July 24 even if the Planning Commission did not.
Tricia Crane
Santa Monica
