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. After, in words taken from the staff report, “nearly six years in development” (not too much longer than it takes to get approval to build an apartment building!), Santa Monica’s Downtown Community…
The question I ended my post with on Saturday was why would Santa Monica enact a Downtown Community Plan (DCP) that makes it easier to build commercial development than housing? Keep in mind that this is taking place during a…
This article originally appeared on Healthy City Local. I’m sure readers are trembling with anticipation after I ended my last post with this cliffhanger: aside from drastically reducing the advantage that residential development in downtown Santa Monica had over commercial development…
This piece originally ran on Healthy City Local. There are good ideas in the Downtown Community Plan (DCP): ideas about the role of Santa Monica’s downtown, about nurturing community in “our town” with more and better housing and local-serving retail, about…
This post originally appeared on The Healthy City Local. Let me begin my further ruminations and fulminations on the Downtown Community Plan (DCP) with a quibble, namely the failure to include in the DCP’s historical background section mention of Arcadia Bandini…
The following post originally appeared on Healthy City Local. It’s back! The latest (and promised final!) version of Santa Monica’s Downtown Community Plan (DCP), is being dragged through the Planning Commission, with an ultimate destination of the Promised Land, namely approval by…
Via The Healthy City Local “Belts and suspenders.” That’s a phrase that we lawyers use to describe how we write contracts and other documents repeating the same concepts multiple times. (“Repeating” and “multiple times”—you see, belts and suspenders.) Sometimes the belts…
Via The Healthy City Local Procrastination can pay. For the past two weeks the top item on my to-do list has read, “Blog on SMO—read dox.” “Dox,” meaning the pleadings and briefs that have been piling up in multiple pending…
This post originally appeared on The Healthy City Local. As I’ve written in two recent posts, tomorrow night the Planning Commission will review the Santa Monica Downtown Community Plan (DCP). After staff makes revisions to the current draft, the City Council…
This was originally published on the Healthy City Local. In my rant a few days ago I promised (threatened?) to come back with substantive analysis of the Downtown Community Plan (DCP), which the Planning Commission will review at its meeting…
This piece originally appeared in The Healthy City Local. For a liberal like me, it’s hard not to be cranky after Donald Trump’s TKO (i.e., Electoral College) defeat of Hillary Clinton. True, my mood was elevated somewhat by the local KO…
This article was originally published on The Healthy City Local. I’ve been mulling over an article I read in the Daily Press a couple of weeks ago. The article was about how the owner of Cars with Class, the classic car…
With the latest developments concerning the future of Santa Monica Airport (SMO), I’m willing to say that we’re at the beginning of the end. One way or another, the future of the airport will be sealed within two or maybe…
