I Love LUCE

By Frank Gruber

Tuesday night's City Council meeting looks like it might be one of those exciting affairs that are the benefit of living in a relatively small city with an accessible City Council. The main item on the agenda is the review of proposed alternatives for the update to the land use and circulation elements (LUCE) of the general plan, and Santa Monicans are organizing themselves to let the council know what they think.

The item has been continued from January 10, and I understand that then about 35 people had signed up to speak. In the past couple of weeks I have seen emails from pro-housing and smart growth proponents urging like-minded residents to attend the meeting, and last week someone forwarded me an email from the Ocean Park Association (OPA) urging its members to attend the meeting, too.

The OPA message was to tell the Council "to respect community sentiment and to direct staff to craft a future for our city which both plans for traffic reduction and preserves the as-built heights and densities which are part of our small beach town scale."

Readers of this column already know that it's a pretty odd "small beach town" that was known for freight railroads, brickyards, aircraft manufacture on a gigantic scale, major medical centers, etc., not to mention the birthplace of Mutually Assured Destruction, and that "community sentiment" as expressed in elections, public workshops, and polls, has favored moderate growth.

But they would probably be disturbed to think that a neighborhood organization is promoting "as-built heights;" do they mean the as-built heights of the Clock Tower Building, or the Charmont and the Sovereign apartment buildings, the "One-Life" building at Main and Pier, or the many other historic buildings in Santa Monica that exceed current height limits?

Just kidding. I know the members of the OPA don't want Santa Monica to be built out to its historic heights. I'm sure if someone could say "abracadabra" and restore the density that existed west of Main Street before the urban renewal when Ocean Park truly was a "small beach town," including the giant pleasure piers, the OPA would be against that. They want Santa Monica to stay just the way it was when they bought into it -- something that would be profoundly ahistorical and un-Santa Monican, since remaining the same is something that Santa Monica in all its history has never done.

In any case, I'm sure there are other emails exhorting residents to attend the meeting floating around the city that haven't made their way to me, but it's a remarkable fact in Santa Monica that in this high-tech and politically cynical age people believe -- and in my experience they correctly believe -- that council members can be influenced by what ordinary people say in council chambers.

So tomorrow evening many voices will be raised (in more ways than one), but I will make a bold prediction: notwithstanding the clamor, the LUCE process will not end up being controversial in any deep sense. I suspect a consensus will form more quickly that people believe possible.

In case you haven't read the staff report, staff and the consultants want the City Council to consider four alternatives for the city's future development. Three of them are new directions, and the fourth is to maintain the status quo of current development policies. Staff wants the Council to eliminate one of the four. The three remaining will then be subject to further study, along with a "no growth" scenario that the Planning Commission requested also be studied.

Briefly summarized, the three new alternatives are:

A. A "neighborhood centers" approach that would concentrate future development "at strategic locations along commercial corridors to create mixed use Neighborhood Centers," including a new neighborhood around the planned light rail stop at Bergamot Station.

B. An "Uptown/Downtown" plan that would focus development activity downtown and at a new downtown-like (or downtown-lite?) district near Bergamot. Commercial corridors would remain largely unchanged.

C. An unfortunately named "Grand Boulevards" plan that would focus future development on transit-served boulevards. I say "unfortunately named" because it's the kiss of death to refer to anything in Santa Monica as "grand," and it wasn't surprising that when the Planning Commission voted on which plan to jettison, this was the one the commissioners dropped.

It's unlikely that any one plan will be adopted in its entirety; no doubt the final plan will reflect a Chinese menu, "one from column A, one from column B," approach. What's important is that all three plans reflect various eternal verities that emerged from the process so far.

These truths, in no particular order, are (i) that no one in Santa Monica wants to see much change to existing residential areas; (ii) that nearly everyone wants to plan for the Expo light rail line that will come through the center of the city; (iii) that people are willing to accept residential growth to accomplish purposes such as preserving Santa Monica's diversity and its middle class, increasing the city's walkability, enhancing its sustainability and transit options, or improving its ratio of housing to jobs; and (iv) that there is no need for significant job growth, after the City added more than 20,000 jobs since the last general plan update.

As a practical matter, these truths will direct development mostly toward commercial zones, including downtown and currently industrial, but future residential, zones near Bergamot, along with pinpointed development along the boulevards designed to give every neighborhood a small, walkable neighborhood-serving commercial district.

Will the plan make all Santa Monicans happy? That's an impossible task, and some Santa Monicans will decry any increase in development. But if our planning commissioners and City Council members do a good job of explaining what they are doing in the course of crafting the plan and resolving differences over details, and if residents pay attention to what the plan says rather than what no-growthers say the plan says, then I suspect Santa Monicans will accept it.

See you Tuesday.