By now, most residents have heard of Santa Monica’s 8,895-unit overall mandate and the 6,168-unit affordable housing subset. This general magnitude of Santa Monica’s mandated housing numbers has been floating around for almost 3 years […]
Voltaire said it best at the end of his 1759 novel Candide: “We must cultivate our own garden”. This simple phrase has special meaning today as the ecological noose tightens with brownouts (1/4 of our […]
Don’t you think that if you heard, or read, statements from controlling government agencies that said you were threatened by a health hazard if the threatening condition was allowed to continue unabated, and the same […]
In large complex systems with dynamically balanced forces, it’s paradoxically often hard to tell when something has actually happened, For example, when did the British Empire start to crumble? What was the first sign of […]
The City of Santa Monica is surrounded on three sides by the City of Los Angeles. Therefore, while the jurisdictions are different, the development processes, pressures and outcomes are very similar. This article by a […]
The Narrative: Santa Monica’s decades-long housing construction “shortage” The Narrative endlessly repeats the refrain that for decades Santa Monica has built almost nothing. The implication is that residents should feel guilty about “selfishly” wanted to […]
Editor’s note: This column originally appeared in print in 2016. In the 1980s, Santa Monica’s single family zoning code was rewritten and modified to prevent the “mansionization” of small homes on small lots, from being […]
All too often these days we find ourselves wondering how we could have been so correct about so many planning issues that we have written about over these last nine years, and yet so frequently […]
Los Angeles County recently proposed a program providing financial incentives for certain “Legacy” family businesses in their original historical location. They have been facing financial hardships for a variety of reasons like COVID, gentrification, and […]
The dream of our beachfront city is about to become a nightmare! Just imagine a tsunami of these projects washing onto the beaches of Santa Monica over the next 10 years – sad, no – […]
The decision follows weeks of criticism from residents and city leaders, including Santa Monica Mayor Lana Negrete, who voiced concerns...
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Detectives are continuing to search for two remaining suspects with additional arrests expected Two men were arrested and $50,000 worth...
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