SMart (Santa Monica Architects for a Responsible Tomorrow) hopes you are enjoying a great 3-day weekend as part of your 4th of July Celebrations. Always a fantasia of fireworks, barbecues, parades, and speeches, this summer holiday is the most patriotic of American holidays, harkening back to the birth of our nation. It celebrates when the Declaration of Independence was signed, announcing the radical step of the Colonies’ separation from the tyranny of King George’s Great Britain. To justify the separation, that Declaration listed 27 specific charges against the king, just a few of which are quoted below:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent
He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.
Now, these charges may sound familiar, not because we are all amazing US history scholars, but because these same events are happening all around us today:
Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” is essentially lowering the taxes of the wealthy 1% by stripping the medical insurance of the poor. No voter consented to this.
He has passed a flood of executive orders tying us to the sinking ship of oil, coal, and gas and preventing us from climbing onto the lifeboat of solar, wind, tidal, and geothermal power.
His tariffs, both threatened and imposed, and his travel bans are cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world.
Americans are being captured and shipped to foreign jails without due process.
Marines are stationed in Los Angeles in times of peace.
Finally, from mask-wearing ICE to DOGE, to a swarm of unqualified political appointments, to mass firings, he is daily harassing our people.
The list could go on and on, but you know where this is going. The list of King George’s offenses was sufficient to start a revolt that eventually resulted in a new country: the United States of America. The growing list of Trump’s offenses is also starting a revolution that will result in a new and improved United States of America.
The founding fathers, having already experienced the worst of tyrannical dictators, built a series of “guard rails” (separation of Church and State, Separation of Powers, Birthright Citizenship, the Bill of Rights, etc., etc.) to insure that this experiment in democracy would not eventually devolve into another dictatorship. But here we are: after two and a half centuries, the guardrails have gotten rusty and need to be rebuilt. This is going to be a big job to undo the damage done to our country and its reputation by President Trump and his enablers (including our own Stephen Miller).
Naturally the question comes up why would SMart, an organization primarily of local architects, take such a strong position against the President? First, of course, is the interest of our clients. Trump’s menacing tariffs on Canadian lumber, Chinese solar collectors, and Chilean copper products, to name just a few, introduce dramatic pricing uncertainty (read price increases) in the bids our clients are now receiving. Add to this the even more inflationary effect of his assault against immigrants. This assault rounds up more harmless people than criminals, thus ends up terrorizing all immigrants. Immigrants do, and have always done, many of the most difficult, boring, dangerous, and hard construction jobs often at low pay. These immigrants are therefore essential to the local and national construction trades. Their absence would increase project costs or project delays, or increase both.
Trump’s inflationary spiral of tariffs and immigration assault is already making many projects unfeasible. Projects that used to cost, say $500/square foot are now coming in at $700 to $1000 per square foot. This pricing explosion and uncertainty is starting to freeze our construction industry, adversely affecting our clients, particularly those that are trying to rebuild in the Palisades with their often deficient insurance payouts or with borrowed money at exceptionally high interest rates. A frozen construction industry is not auspicious for a City that has ambitious housing goals.
Widening our lens, his assault on immigrants is adversely affecting the tourism industry (many hotel workers are immigrants), which is still suffering from the Covid collapse. The tourism industry recovery is key to the recovery of our City that is broke. Trump’s same immigrant assault will lead to higher food prices, higher prices for home care workers, higher restaurant meal costs, and countless other services our residents need. The large Santa Monica senior population, many living on fixed incomes, are very vulnerable to Trump’s self-inflicted inflationary pressures. This is without even mentioning the hazards of his cuts to Medicaid, to education, to FEMA, to NOAA, and countless other essential federal services for our City and State. It goes without saying that the three trillion dollar increase in federal debt caused by Trump’s recent “Big Beautiful Bill” will increase the interest rate everywhere in the United States, making it even harder for anyone to buy a home. Young people will be even more priced out of Santa Monica home ownership. Of course, this is only an issue if you happen to value home ownership.
With these clear and present dangers ahead, SMart would be remiss if it didn’t speak up. This critique may sound particularly partisan, but it would not matter if a Republican president or a Democratic president unleashed these dangerous initiatives; SMart would be equally critical regardless of which party the President represents. In fact, there is a real worry that Trump having so misused his consolidated power, the next Democratic president will be pressured to use the same consolidated power in the opposite direction. That consolidated power is equally dangerous, regardless of who wields it, because absolute power corrupts absolutely.
But today we celebrate that through all the twists and turns of American history, our democracy has made it this far, and actually is better than when the experiment started. So let’s enjoy the optimism of the 4th of July Celebration and carry it into the big reconstruction job ahead of us.
By Mario Fonda-Bonardi, AIA
S.M.a.r.t Santa Monica Architects for a Responsible Tomorrow
Mario Fonda-Bonardi AIA, former Planning Commissioner, Robert H. Taylor AIA, Architect, Dan Jansenson, Architect & former Building and Fire-Life Safety Commission, Samuel Tolkin, Architect & former Planning Commissioner, Michael Jolly, AIR-CRE, Jack Hillbrand AIA, Landmarks Commissioner, Architect. Phil Brock, SM Mayor (Ret), Matt Hoefler, NCARB
For previous articles, see www.santamonicaarch.wordpress.com/writing
