The Birth of a Movement

By Jorge Casuso

April 16 -- Former Santa Monica mayor Dennis Zane pulls to the curb of a leafy residential street in Sunset Park and searches for the past.

Straining to remember, he stares at the tall hedges and bougainvillea. Behind the overgrown vegetation, Zane finally recognizes the nondescript white garage where the rent control movement began.

"That's it," said Zane, now a consultant on urban issues. "We staged our first campaign there. We spent so much time in there we put a port-a-potty in."

It was inside the one-car garage a quarter century ago that the first rent-control campaign was mounted by an unlikely alliance of senior citizens from the city's north side and young, long-haired activists from Ocean Park.

Alarmed by a volatile housing market that sent rents spiraling out of control, the two groups united to wage an uphill fight to stay in their homes. The first campaign failed, but it planted the seeds for a grass-roots movement that would win a stunning victory on April 10, 1979.

Click on photo to enlarge

Santa Monicans for Renters' Rights soon seized control of the city, ruling it for most of the past quarter century and leaving behind a legacy that shaped the face and soul of Santa Monica.

"We were part of something that was major," said former mayor James Conn, an early leader of the rent-control movement. "We were making history. We were participating in something that changed the way Santa Monica ran."

Unlike the elders who ran City Hall, the new regime was brash and young. Many were wide-eyed activists whose ideals were kindled in the 1960s counterculture. They honed their organizational and political skills fighting for the environment and farm workers' rights or against the war in Vietnam.

Almost overnight, they became powerful leaders who helped forge a new identity for the staid, middle-class suburb long run by homeowners, bankers and real estate brokers.

A few, like Zane and Conn, would become mayors of a politically daring city soon known nationwide as "Soviet Monica" or "The People's Republic of Santa Monica."

"A lot of people had experienced the excitement of major political change on the periphery of the civil-rights movement," said Conn, a minister whose Church in Ocean Park became the unofficial town hall for the early rent-control movement.

"This was the real thing. This was palpable. These are experiences that one never forgets."

Those who took part treasure their mementos of that first historic battle. Zane still has the rock 'n' roll tapes played at the fund-raising dances that were called "the boogie strategy."

Political strategist Parke Skelton keeps a tattered poster and tenant organizer Michael Tarbet has a faded campaign T-shirt. Former City Council member Cheryl Rhoden has all the notes she took at the early strategy meetings stored in her Venice garage.

"I've moved four or five times since then, and I always take them with me," said Rhoden, director of public affairs for the Writers Guild of America, West. "It was a point of time in history where people came together for a common good. It was exciting, exhilarating and meaningful."

***

The garage where it all began belonged to the late Syd Rose, a former Santa Monica housing commissioner and labor arbitrator. Rose is now a minor footnote in the prevailing version of Santa Monica history.

Popularized by the television news show "60 Minutes" and the national press, this version stresses the role of the young activists at the expense of the seniors who started it all.

"There's no question that the seniors deserve the primary credit," Rhoden said. "They did the bulk of the work."

It was Rose who called a series of Housing Commission hearings at which he gathered reams of testimony from seniors. One after the other, panicked tenants told of being driven out of their homes by escalating rents and a rash of demolitions and condominium conversions that, between 1977 and 1979, would eliminate about 2,000 rental units.

"He went to the City Council and said, `If you guys don't do something, I'm going to start a rent-control campaign,' " recalled Conn, who is now the urban strategist for the Methodist Church in Los Angeles.

"I just went, `Oh my God. We're not ready for that. We can't win.' "Syd could be very crusty," Conn said. "He had very definite ideas, and it was very hard to move him from those ideas. He had taken on this issue and, by God, he was going to see it through."

After Rose lighted the spark, it was seniors such as Lillian Storik who fanned the flames.

Storik, who gathered about 600 petition signatures in the winning rent control campaign, was one of a dozen seniors who, day in and day out, walked the precincts, answered phones and handed out literature.

"There were a lot of seniors living here," said Storik, who credits rent control for enabling her to remain in her apartment. "Rents were going up, and they were smart enough to see what side was up.

“We had a lot of work and we all cooperated,” she said. “We had lots of support from the young people."

If seniors initiated the campaign, it was young activists who shaped it, guiding its strategy and organizing the rag-tag army of volunteers. They held dances to raise money and recruit workers. They even had a kazoo band that played at rallies and demonstrations.

"We had to take an alienated group and say, `You're stable. Let's do something here,' " Tarbet recalled. "It really came from the grass roots, this thing, and it really developed as it came. It changed the whole fabric of community life."

Two of the key organizers, Zane and Skelton, were members of Tom Hayden's Campaign for Economic Democracy. Hayden was concerned that rent control was a local issue that would diffuse CED's statewide solar energy campaign. Still, he let the local chapter decide.

"Hayden regarded rent control as a distraction and thought we couldn't win because landlords had too much money," Zane said. "He tried to discourage the chapter from participating."

However, the local chapter voted to join the seniors' crusade. When Rose asked for organizers, Zane and Skelton's hands shot up. It was the start of an exhilarating but exhausting battle.

Skelton, then a philosophy student, began organizing the 100 or so tenant unions that sprang up throughout the city as beleaguered residents struggled to stay in their homes.

"It was a spontaneous spasm of organizing," said Skelton, who is now a partner in Skelton, Grover & Associates, a Los Angeles-based campaign consulting firm.

"There were apartment buildings turning over every four or five months. It was very common to get $50, $75, $150 rent increases. There was a lot of panic in the city, no doubt about it."

Tenant leaders knew that, even with their frenzied organizing, it would be difficult to overcome the well-funded landlord campaign.

"We knew we were fighting uphill," Zane said. "It became apparent that the seniors had little idea how to run a campaign. For us it was like crazy difficult, so we were scrambling constantly."

***

The initiative, which failed on the June 1978 ballot but passed the following year, was drafted by Robert Myers, then a 26-year-old attorney who ran the Legal Aid office in Venice.

"I got a call from Syd Rose saying he was interested in a rent-control measure," recalled Myers, who served as city attorney from 1981 to 1992. "I didn't know a whole lot about rent control."

Myers studied rent-control laws in New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts. More important, he scrutinized a 1976 California Supreme Court decision that set the parameters for Berkeley's rent-control law.

"My job," Myers said, "was to ensure that whatever I drafted was legal."

It was. For 16 years, the law Myers wrote withstood a relentless blitz of lawsuits filed by outraged landlords. The law, and the subsequent defense Myers waged, made the burly, deadpan city attorney perhaps the most hated man in Santa Monica's 120-year history.

"I have a file of threats," said Myers, now a lawyer in the San Fernando Valley. "I got everything. A mortuary called me up saying they had received a card saying I was interested in a burial protection plan.

“One conservative landlady said, `Your mother should have had an abortion.'"

The charter amendment Myers drafted was viewed by landlords in the same
light as the Communist Manifesto. The activists who backed it were called radicals, a label scoffed at by movement leaders who consider their struggle a victory for true grass-roots democracy.

Rent control was treated as if it was the second coming of the Soviet invasion," Zane recalled. "It was seen as a New Left beachhead rather than a grass-roots revolt. To say the rent law is radical is absurd, because its terms were dictated by the courts."

Although the first rent-control campaign failed by a 56 to 44 percent margin in 1978, it spawned Santa Monicans for Renters' Rights, which immediately plotted a rematch.

Proposition 13, which also appeared on the 1978 ballot, would plant the seeds for a future victory. Rolling back property taxes, Proposition 13 won after chief sponsor Howard Jarvis promised that a victory would mean lower rents.

Rents, however, continued to skyrocket, and the broken promise fueled the growing tenant movement.

"Landlords were feeling, `This is our chance to cash in,' " Conn said. "They could see the dollar signs. That there was an organized reaction was shocking to them, and it was possible because Santa Monica is a small community."

Conn and Myers met with city officials to hammer out an agreement to limit rent increases. When negotiations broke down, the two walked out.

"Had the negotiations been fruitful, the landlords could have avoided a second election," Conn said. "They would have taken the steam out of the rent-control campaign."

Instead, the movement got a second wind. Joining the seniors and activists were new recruits such as Dolores Press, a secretary for the Retail Clerks Union, which lent its hall for rallies.

Press, a widow who raised three children in a Santa Monica apartment, had grown up in a household where a portrait of Franklin Delano Roosevelt hung in the living room. Rent control reawakened her New Deal democratic roots.

"It was a matter of self-preservation," said Press, a former City Council member elected to the first Rent Control Board. "You live here, you love it, you got involved. Working people were outraged at the premise this would become a haven for rich people.

"There was a lot of passion," Press said. "People came from all over the state to walk the precincts, sleep in sleeping bags on the floor of the union hall and eat communal food. All the seniors were doing the paperwork."

***

The campaign was a rough-and- tumble affair that resembled a ward battle in an industrial city such as Chicago more than a typical media-driven California race.

Opponents spied on rent-control leaders with binoculars, popped campaign balloons with BB guns and ripped down posters as soon as they were put up. In the midst of the battle, construction workers began renovating the building housing the movement's headquarters on Main Street.

Ida Singer, an elderly volunteer, watched in disbelief as walls crumbled around her.

"They came and cut the sewer lines and took out the toilets," Tarbet recalled. "Ida called us. When we got there, she was gathering signatures sitting on a toilet in the hall."

On April 10, 1979, when all the votes were counted, the tables had turned. Rent control had won a stunning victory with a 54-46 percent margin. In addition, tenant representatives won two seats on the City Council.

Three months later the fledgling tenant movement would sweep all five seats on the newly created Rent Control Board.

The 16-year war had only begun.

After winning four seats on the seven-member City Council in 1981, SMRR would control city politics – defining everything from the sweep of its skyline to the location of a stop sign.

Tenant rights would be the cornerstone of SMRR's agenda, but the SMRR-led council also would tackle major projects. It restored the storm-battered pier, ransformed a sagging Third Street into a thriving promenade and turned Santa Monica into a mecca for the arts.

It also increased services for the homeless, with City Attorney Myers and his staff making sandwiches for the poor on the lawn of City Hall.

"We were thinking more than rent control," Tarbet said. "We were thinking of all kinds of social change. We were thinking of an art center, education, senior services. We wanted to run the city, which I think we've done."

SMRR’s celebration of rent control’s 25th anniversary will be held Saturday at 7 p.m. at the Church in Ocean Park, 235 Hill Street.