The following first appeared on The Healthy City Local. The California Voting Rights Act (CVRA) case brought by lawyer Kevin Shenkman on behalf of plaintiffs the Pico Neighborhood Association and Maria Loya against the City of Santa Monica has been…
This piece first appeared at The Healthy City Local. “All politics is temporal” is not as well known a phrase as “all politics is local,” but in these times I suspect it is more accurate. Voting has become more nationalized,…
This post, by Frank Gruber and Juan Matute, first appeared on The Healthy City Local. We wrote in our last piece that although the City of Santa Monica is experiencing an unprecedented financial crisis during which revenues are predicted to miss targets by…
This post, by Frank Gruber and Juan Matute, first appeared on The Healthy City Local. The City of Santa Monica is experiencing a financial crisis unprecedented in living memory. If left as is, planned expenditures are likely to exceed revenues…
This story first appeared on The Healthy City Local. The 19th century saw a great expansion of global connectivity and vast increases in productivity. The century didn’t begin in 1800, but at Waterloo in 1815; and it ended in 1914,…
Note: This story first appeared on The Healthy City Local. After years of creating procedural and other obstacles to the building of much-needed new housing, the City of Santa Monica is poised to do something significant to encourage housing development.…
The following article first appeared on The Healthy City Local. Wednesday night there will be a joint meeting of the Planning and Housing Commissions to discuss the future of Santa Monica’s housing policies. (Don’t ask me why there is a…
(Note: This story first appeared on the Healthy City Local. Two Thousand Nineteen seems remarkable for the number of historical events that are being commemorated with round number anniversaries. Fifty years ago, 1969, saw the Moon landing and Woodstock on…
This article first appeared on The Healthy City Local. I ended my blog last week about Santa Monica’s housing policies with some good news, namely that a lot of housing was either under construction in the city or had approvals to proceed…
This article first appeared on The Healthy City Local. When in the summer of 2017 the Santa Monica City Council, after six years of work, adopted the Downtown Community Plan (DCP), the then architecture critic for the L.A. Times, Christopher Hawthorne, wrote…
This post first appeared on The Healthy City Local. Earlier this year I wrote a post about two development projects that were staggering through the approvals process in Santa Monica. One was an apartment building on Lincoln Boulevard, replacing worn-out automobile repair…
(This post first appeared in The Healthy City Local.) The silicon-enabled “new economy” is now disrupting transportation much as it previously disrupted retail, journalism, entertainment, publishing, etc. Starting with ride-sharing, and now with dockless scooters and e-bikes, infusions of new…
This originally appeared at The Healthy City Local. It’s been a while since I’ve written about a specific development project in Santa Monica. About a year ago I was busy writing articles about the Downtown Community Plan (DCP), and after that…
The following post originally appeared on The Healthy City Local. (Note: I haven’t written here about Santa Monica politics since my last blog last summer on the Downtown Community Plan, but I was invited to give a 20-minute talk to the…
This post originally appeared on The Healthy City Local. At the City Council meeting last Tuesday night on Santa Monica’s Downtown Community Plan (DCP) the ironies abounded. As planning staff has told us many times, the DCP is the result of…
