Former Mayors Tackle Thorny Issues Facing City

By Jorge Casuso

Tuesday, July 27 -- Skyrocketing rents - for both housing and business - are threatening the character of Santa Monica, which must find ways to curb the fallout from a booming local economy or become a city only the wealthy can enjoy.

That was the prognosis delivered by three former mayors - Judy Abdo, James Conn and Dennis Zane -- during a Leaders Club meeting at the Victorian House Monday evening.

The changing nature of the city of 94,000 can be seen both in an escalating rental market and in the transformation of the Third Street Promenade into a strip of chain stores.

With Promenade storefronts renting for up to $12-a-square-foot, the trendy shopping strip is quickly losing the smaller local independent stores and restaurants that lent it a quaint, neighborhood flavor, the mayors warned.

"My concern is the loss of smaller and indigenous retailers who were there from the beginning that find themselves the victim of their own successes," Zane said. "How many Banana Republics and Strabucks can there be?"

Zane said the city should consider placing a moratorium on conversions of restaurants to retail uses, a proposal being studied by city staff. He also proposed requiring conditional use permits for stores over a certain square footage.

"Sometimes it takes proposals on the table to get anyone's attention," Zane said.

But Herb Katz, who sat with Zane on the city council, argued that the proposed moratorium could backfire.

"Those (property owners) who don't have restaurants won't take on restaurants because they'll be stuck with them forever," warned Katz, who chairs the Bayside District Corp. board, which runs the downtown area, including the Promenade.

Katz complained that there was no communication between the board and city officials. "We know the problem," Katz said. "We started to address it. No communication is the problem."

The former mayors also are concerned that the changing face of the city has been accelerated by the Coasta-Hawkins state rental law, which allows landlords to raise the rents of vacated units to what the market will bear. The law, which took full effect Jan. 1, has sent rents spiraling, with some units going for double the previous rate.

"The preservation of our community really has to do with the people who live there," said former Mayor Judy Abdo. "It's the challenge of this community to stay here. We must look at areas where you're not taking this group of people and replacing them with another group."

The mayors, who are all leaders of Santa Monicans for Renters Rights and are instrumental in shaping the powerful group's policies, say the city must encourage the construction of new housing in commercial and residential zones.

"That's where we have a lot of opportunity," Zane said.

The mayors also urged the city to build more affordable housing that is income based, and acknowledged that rent control sometimes benefitted higher income tenants who didn't need housing subsidies.

"How do you match affordable housing with people who need affordable housing?" Abdo said. "We never found a way to make sure rent control units were lived in by people who had low income. The truth is that building affordable housing where income-qualified people live is an answer."

Zane argued that a large percentage of rent control tenants were low and moderate income, and said the law does not allow tenancies to be income-based.

"It is rule that there is a share of higher income tenants, but the law doesn't allow us to treat them differently," Zane said. "It's the property owner who makes the choice as to the income of the tenant, not the city. It's a problem in the marketplace, not the government."

Panelist Nancy Greenstein, who with Zane is the co-chair of SMRR, also fielded questions about the role of the powerful grassroots tenants group, which holds five of the seven council seats. She said that although SMRR is a political organization, it is non-partisan.

She also noted that at least half of the members of SMRR's steering committee have traditionally been homeowners. Greenstein, Abdo and Zane, who all sit on the committee, own homes.