We trust you are enjoying this holiday in celebration of Independence. Independence to be embraced, personally and civically, thru active participation in your community. Maybe you came to the Main Street Ocean Park Parade and joined the crowd lining the street and cheered your friends and neighbors in their colorful, enthusiastic, sometime slightly irreverent but always respectful, and always fun march from the civic center down Main Street to the beach celebrating that independence.
Then, while at the beach, we bet you looked around, enjoying what it is to have unlimited views, blue skies, shade where you might find it, or brought with you in the form of an umbrella, and reflected on what a free and open beachfront community this is and what it provides to those that swelter in the heat of the adjacent valley’s and east side. People come to Santa Monica for relief from their dense, hot neighborhoods, not for a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day type parade squeezed between high-rise buildings. (Excuse the two towers that are a symbol of a previous misguided effort to build high and dense in our beach town. A lesson not to be forgotten.)
So let’s continue to celebrate what Independence Day symbolizes by doing everything we can, every day, to maintain our independence in planning and controlling responsible growth as a free and independent low rise beachfront community. Free and independent of developer and developer financed State legislation that is, once again, pushing against our providing the beach front ‘Central Park’ relief for the entire region that Santa Monica has always provided.
This is an election year, and the choice of candidates to fill what will be four seats on the City Council this November is critical if we are to maintain that ‘Central Park’ low rise beachfront role. Like ‘Joe’ has said, when you’re knocked down, get back up, don’t quit. Any candidate backed by any of the council members that served prior to 2020 should be looked at with concern as they will be supporting those backers and would most certainly continue their over-development policies. Policies that did not ‘get up and push back’ on State legislation and that have resulted in what you see rising up around you on Wilshire, on Lincoln, and downtown, taking the sun from the streets and sidewalks now lost in the shadows of more and more tall structures. We can push back.
Be careful and attentive in your choices. Your vote will matter, and remember, you are celebrating that you do have a choice by having honored Independence Day on the 4th of July.
Continue to enjoy the celebration, and be safe.
Bob Taylor, AIA
For SMa.r.t.
Send comments to santamonicasmart@gmail.com
Santa Monica Architects for a Responsible Tomorrow
Robert H. Taylor AIA, Architect; Dan Jansenson, Architect & Building and Fire-Life Safety Commission; Thane Roberts, Architect; Mario Fonda-Bonardi AIA, Architect; Samuel Tolkin Architect & Planning Commissioner; Michael Jolly, AIR-CRE; Marie Standing, Resident; Jack Hillbrand AIA, Architect
For previous articles see www.santamonicaarch.wordpress.com/writing
