Bergamot Envisions Development 'Karmageddon'

Less Parking = Less Traffic

Here is the current dogma of the Santa Monica Division of Planning and Community Development:  Less Parking = Less Traffic. Developers, who haven’t wanted to pay for adequate parking, are eager to chant that mantra. So were the builders of Expo, who wanted the profits from building stations throughout Santa Monica but did not want the cost of building and maintaining parking structures around them. Now, with last week’s Workshop on Bergamot and the Creative Economy, designed to focus on integrating the arts with the Expo, artists and residents at 11 different discussion tables reported that Santa Monica’s development karma threatens to run over that dogma. They called for subterranean parking structures to prevent a Karmageddon at the Cloverfield & 26th Street Exit and at 4th Street, where cars from both Freeway 10 and Pacific Coast Highway would, otherwise, clog our streets on their way to the Expo line.  

Reframe the LUCE

This Bergamot Workshop brought into focus the problems Santa Monica has created for itself in approaching each development project separately.  Despite having an overall plan—the LUCE, the Land Use and Circulation Element plan—that lays out what should be happening in each area of Santa Monica, each project is done piecemeal. Even City Council members Mayor Richard Bloom and Pam O'Connor recently remarked that projects need to be knitted together with the neighborhoods around them. If we were to do that and confront our parking problem head-on, we might be able to use the Expo line along with enhanced public transport to turn Santa Monica into The Major Arts and Leisure Shopping Destination for L.A. County.

Oakland = Santa Monica's Worst Nightmare

Instead, we seem to be headed in the direction that the Oakland Division of Planning and Community Development has taken. Visiting there between City Council meetings, I felt I was waking up to the nightmare of what Santa Monica could become. 

Let the Photo Essay Begin

Words cannot convey my horror. Only pictures will do. But, like the banality of evil, what is malignant in our culture may also appear benign.

Ask, "Why?"

The first photo of my essay is a composite of two buildings that answer the question they raise. Why would a city want to replace crappy, dilapidated buildings with something all shiny and new? Of course, many of those buildings end up being much larger than human scale. That size increases their worth to developers. Planning and Community Development call Building Incentives. These Building Incentives are supposedly balanced by Community Benefits. Sometimes those benefits are wider streets, wider sidewalks, green space, public art, playgrounds, bike-paths, community rooms, public-serving retail, plans for Traffic Demand Management and Parking Demand Management, affordable housing, and funding projects favored by various council members, who can, then, show what they have done for the community. I would like to show you a photo collection of Community Benefits for Oakland and for Santa Monica.  Here, again, these structures raise questions: Ask, "Why is this considered a 'Community Benefit'?"

Community Benefits?

Let's begin with playground structures. The second photo shows a playground structure as the lone feature in a small park in Oakland. There was nothing else in the park to attract anyone but a few homeless men, sitting on a bench and at a table. The third photo shows a small playground structure situated at the far corner of an over-watered grassy rectangle at Yahoo! Center. People running the Day-Care Center next door (another Community Benefit) call the structure "boring." Fortunately, there is only enough room for two families to gather on the grass to watch their kids play.

Architects at Play

The fourth photo is of an affordable housing project on Broadway in Santa Monica. Though it won a design award based on a photo, the latest affordable housing project now under construction has no sign to announce its arrival to a wary neighborhood because some projects have not appeared so attractive in reality. Actually, today, most affordable housing has an "International" look. We can see this look in the fifth photo, taken in Oakland. Though this did not appear to be affordable housing, other areas with greater density and less parking, had affordable housing with a similar design. The sixth photo, shot in Santa Monica provides an example of "International Design," which may not have gone global but has certainly gone viral in Santa Monica. Next time you are able to drive downtown, take a look. It has spread everywhere.

International Design Meets Mixed-Use Retail

Most of the new projects are described as "Mixed-Use." They bring housing into the picture so that we don't face the problems we have with The Water Garden and the Yahoo! Center, where there is no local shopping culture—just a horde of hungry workers wishing a food truck would come by to provide some flavorful options. The problem with these projects is that there are no guarantees that they will bring the kinds of retail to the neighborhood that people really want. Look again at that sixth photo, taken at Broadway near Cloverfield. It shows how everyone suffers as a result. Here, retail outlets count on customers parking at Ralph's and walking over. Can you imagine paying top dollar to live in the apartments above?

Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Of course, we don't know what the Roberts Center, Paseo Nebraska, and Lionsgate will look like when these separate projects come together in the area southeast of Colorado Blvd. and Stewart. People are supposed to be able to walk around, sit outside, shop, and eat in a tight but relaxed environment.  I know the photos I have shown you are not really horrific. But, neither were the creatures in "The Invasion of the Body Snatchers." They looked just like mom and dad and Bobby down the street, but without soul. They are the look of Corporate America, now morphing into Corporate World, filling all the empty spaces with franchises to live off the appetites of their customers.  So, forgive me if the seventh photo and eighth photo from the Oakland City Center don't strike terror in your heart. But allow me to tell you about how the artists and residents at the Bergamot Workshop would make things better.

Picture This!

The Bergamot Art Gallery would be used to leverage the kinds of changes we want throughout the city.  True, as one developer told me privately, "I don't want to sound like a developer, but those galleries at Bergamot aren't much of a draw to build a station around." But, add certain elements to the mix and people from the neighborhood and other parts of town would have a reason to come on over, especially with the Expo just down the street. When you wonder what would constitute a true community benefit, consider the following: a small theater, some locally successful restaurants, affordable work-living spaces for artists, an art school extension, a community workshop area, an actual park for people of all ages to sit on the grass with their families and friends as children play and dogs head out for their own set-aside park, and an expanded Santa Monica Museum of Art to serve as an anchor. We keep hearing about all the creative artists in town, yet there is nothing iconic in this city that would help us to visualize that.

The Bergamot Vision

As the Bergamot artists reframe the LUCE and add sufficient parking to keep outside cars off our city streets, the Expo line, enhanced by various kinds of public transport not yet envisioned, could allow people to ride the rails from one part of our fair city to the other. Suddenly, people might start going to The Water Garden for small concerts at the gazebo or putting a blanket out on fairly dried lawn at Yahoo! Center to sit and watch an outdoor movie. Our community might actually come together to have a good time. If we hold in mind the Bergamot Vision, we could use the strength of our arts community to leverage individual, piecemeal developments into a large construct, one that realizes the potential our city has to bring people together for the benefit of everyone.

I have no photos to show you that. But, perhaps you would describe your own vision for this city in the comment section so we might picture what you see.