We are in the midst of an era of conflict over space. Not war in the traditional sense. No tanks, no declarations, but a conflict all the same, fought in Council chambers and comment periods, in the margins of environmental impact reports, in the language of zoning ordinances that almost nobody reads and almost everybody is governed by.
Who controls public space, who benefits from that control, what residents have to say about any of it. These questions sit at the center of the fight, and they rarely get answered clearly, until one looks closely. A sidewalk is not just a sidewalk, it is a statement about who a city is for. A building height limit is a claim about the future, staked out in feet and stories, defended or attacked depending on who owns what, and who wants what built next door.
The terrain of this conflict is familiar to anyone who has sat through a City Council meeting and seen little discussion of how people move through a city, whether a twenty-story building belongs on a street that has never seen anything taller than three, and whether the view from a resident’s kitchen window is a private amenity or a public good worth protecting. These disputes look local, almost parochial, but they are also proxies for something much larger: a redefinition of who has standing to shape the place they live in.
Four camps have staked out positions in Santa Monica. Local residents, who tend to want the city they already have, or some improved version of it. Outside interests, capital that sees underused land and calculates return. Political ideologues, who have decided in advance what the right answer looks like and are seeking the means to impose it. And local government, caught between all three, accountable to residents on paper but to a much wider set of pressures in practice, and often not an honest broker itself.
The extremes increasingly talk past the people in the middle. At a recent City Council election debate, one candidate declared that developers should be given completely free rein. Total deference to capital, dressed up as pragmatism. That posture leaves little room for the resident who simply wants a say in what happens on their block and in their city. But the more troubling failure is not the fringe candidate saying the quiet part out loud. It is the elected and appointed leadership that claims to represent residents while quietly often working against their interests.
That is the real casualty here, not any particular building, nor any particular policy. The erosion of the idea that residents have a legitimate claim to influence over their own town. Development interests have learned to frame local control as obstruction, a relic standing in the way of housing production, climate goals, equity. Ideological movements, including some on the dais, have learned to frame local control as a mask for exclusion, a euphemism for keeping people out. Both framings are convenient, and both let the people making the argument avoid the harder work of persuading their neighbors.
Somewhere in this, the neighbor gets lost. The retiree who has lived in a rent-controlled unit for thirty years. The family that bought a small house near the coast decades before it became unaffordable to buy anything near the coast at all. The renter who has no equity in any building but plenty of stake in whether the street outside remains walkable, whether the light still reaches the yard, and whether the character of the neighborhood survives one more approval. These people are not opposed to change, most of them have lived through plenty of it. What they resist is change engineered somewhere else, by staff and legislators coordinating outside the public process, then handed to the city as a fait accompli by officials who were supposed to be on their side.
There is a mechanism running underneath all of this, and it deserves naming. State preemption. California has spent the last decade building a legal architecture that strips discretion away from local governments and hands it to developers who meet certain thresholds. Density bonuses. Ministerial approval. Streamlined review that removes public hearings from the process altogether. Each law arrives with a defensible rationale, usually tied to the state’s housing affordability crisis, and each one further narrows what a city council, let alone a resident, actually gets to decide. The debate at the local level increasingly happens after the real decisions have already been made in Sacramento and, often, behind the scenes in this city as well.
None of this means residents are always right, or that every objection to new construction reflects some legitimate stake in community character (a term described as racist by a City Council member earlier this year) rather than simple resistance to anyone new moving in. Plenty of local opposition has hidden behind traffic studies and shadow analyses, while the real objection was never spoken aloud. But the existence of some bad-faith opposition does not settle the larger question. It only makes it easier for city leaders to wave off legitimate concern as more of the same.
What gets lost in the shouting is a basic proposition: that people who live somewhere have some claim to a voice in what it becomes. Not a veto, and not control over every parcel forever–a voice. The current fight has structured itself so that voice barely registers, drowned out by capital on one side and ideology on the other, both certain they already know what the city should look like.
The city is not an abstraction to the people who live in it. It is where they raised children, buried parents, learned the names of the people who run the corner store. Free rein for corporate developers and their ideological allies treats that history as friction to be engineered around. A Council that co-sponsors its own preemption treats it as an afterthought, something to be managed rather than protected. Somewhere between those two failures is where most people in this city actually live, and the space left for them keeps getting smaller.
Daniel Jansenson, Architect, for Santa Monica Architects for a Responsible Tomorrow.
Dan Jansenson, Architect (former Building & Fire-Life Safety Commissioner); Robert H. Taylor, Architect AIA; Mario Fonda-Bonardi, Architect AIA (former Planning Commissioner); Sam Tolkin, Architect (former Planning Commissioner); Michael Jolly ARE-CRE; Jack Hillbrand AIA, Landmarks Commission Architect; Phil Brock (SM Mayor, ret.); Matt Hoefler, Architect NCARB; Charles Andrews, columnist. journalist; Bruce Leddy, Human Services Commissioner and NOMA Co-Chair.
