Last Weekend in Santa Monica--what is your vision Council?

Arthur Jeon

"Residents" of Reed Park, near the home of the author. Is this a reasonable way to deal with drug addicts and the mentally ill?

Dear Council,

The sad part about this letter is I've written some version of it every year for the last 8 years. It is a lesson in failure at every level. Or maybe a lesson in my own insanity expecting something might change. I'm going to tie several things together here, so excuse the length. First, last weekend:

FRIDAY NIGHT: After dinner out my wife and I went to the CVS on Wilshire where we encountered a deranged shirtless man threatening CVS staff with a skateboard, trying to get in the store. Three employees fended him off. In the parking lot were two DTSM security guards who had pushed this person out of the promenade. Screaming gibberish, the man sprinted into traffic and disappeared, heading north toward Reed Park. The security guards didn't call the police, all they did was push him into my neighborhood. We walked home in the dark on Wilshire, with addicts in front of us, to the side, and behind us. The couple in front pushing shopping carts, arguing, turned down the alley before our street to shoot up. It was as dystopian as it gets anywhere I've lived, including Manhattan during the crack epidemic.

SATURDAY MORNING: One thing that still feels somewhat normal, albeit not nearly as busy, in Santa Monica, is the farmer's market. Walking to it, I saw two men wrestling with a third man with the scratched arms of an addict over a bag. They were undercover security at TJ MAX and the man's bag was full of clothes, multiple hats of the same kind, obviously stolen for resale. And a foil-wrapped tube for smoking Fentanyl or Meth. I called 911 and got an indifferent dispatcher who told me "There has to be a victim." The man grabbed his empty bag and ran off. I told the guards that they, and everybody else, should call the police because no doubt this person has a warrant, or might be wanted for something worse, and it will give the police a reason to detain. But I understand why they don't. Earlier last week I walked by the side-door cubbyhole to the same TJ Max and saw a fully naked man doing drugs. When I went to report it to the store, the manager shrugged and said it wasn't their property. It is literally on their property, but I just gave up. I didn't have time. And it's everywhere all the time, so what's the point?

SUNDAY MORNING: My neighbor in my small condo complex told me their clicker to get in the main garage wasn't working. The gate was half open, which is deeply disturbing because we've had our bikes stolen from our own garage after the main gate was broken into. We've also found deranged people smoking meth. It turns out thieves had broken in overnight and stolen the transponder. In a scramble, I got our gate person (Eli at LA GATES, who is excellent), to come out Monday morning. I locked the main gate manually and everybody had to park on the street Sunday night because we dare not leave it open, as breaking into individual garages is often the second part of a two day planned heist, the first of which is breaking the main gate. I wrote a check to Eli for $400, and darkly joked we're putting his kids through college, that's how often we've had addicts and criminals break the gate.

SUNDAY NIGHT: My wife and I drove to a friend's house for dinner. A couple blocks out from our house, at Santa Monica and Lincoln, a man was screaming and wrestling with another man on the street and then suddenly, smashing up against the hood of our car. It turns out the transient addict tried to steal the man's bike and the other guy caught him. It was a brawl, and luckily the police pulled up as we fled the scene.

Santa Monica is in free fall. Businesses can't get traction downtown because of the disorder and danger-they open and close within months. All local residents like us who moved near downtown to be in the once thriving scene, and to live the "15 minute city" lifestyle so supported by our council, now go (drive) elsewhere for dining and shopping. The Osteria, a restaurant that opened on 4th and Wilshire has closed, the two new sushi places will not survive. There isn't enough foot traffic because it's dangerous to walk anywhere after dark.

To be clear, as a moderate Democrat, I lost twice in last year's election: I voted against Trump, and against our current city council. What I got was Trump, who seems intent on dismantling the world economy and our constitution for kicks, and a council that I fear is too far left, and paying no attention to the fact that the majority of Santa Monicans voted for Prop 36 and dumping Gascon. They seem to care more about the criminals and addicts than their victims. And of course every fringe virtue signaling issue you can dream up. This is the result of single party rule in a city that's essentially gerrymandered, that's how much of a strangle-hold SMRR has on Santa Monica, minus a brief interregnum. They've got a lock on those rent-control emails and they work them with a relentless flow of disinformation and fear-mongering around rent control (permanently in the city charter).

I hear no bold solutions to this crisis that keeps our downtown an outdoor mental ward and drug shooting gallery (with occasional actual bullets). The streets, alleys, and sidewalks are filthy with litter. You can't go into our alley without seeing an addict stumbling around, passed out, tossing garbage around, or scoping for any lapse in security. I've lived here for over 30 years, and see no sense of emergency at the crisis, no daring proposals. SMRR and the far left fully owns this decline; they have been in power for 40 years:

SMRR (and Danny Zane) own bringing the train here, and its steady stream of addicts, mentally ill, and criminals. Unless the 30-60 people a day stumbling off the train can be addressed, everything we do is treading water. Now the plan is to curfew the beaches at night, which is another blinking red sign of emergency. Makes sense given the mayhem and murder happening down there, but those criminals will surely end up in my neighborhood, in my carport, or attacking me or my wife. What needs to have a curfew is the train. Vans and buses need to take the people back downtown, because many get woken up by sheriff deputies and have no idea they are in Santa Monica as they stumble off the train at midnight. Then they get dumped into the city and become our problem. They are not our problem, but they are overwhelming our services.

SMRR owns the decision to put "The People's Concern" downtown, which is as clueless as you can get, and shows no concern for residents, or its downtown. Like the train, we will never recover with it there, operating as it does-as an outdoor drug market and magnet for the most sick amongst us, blocks from the high school (and Pali now too), and downtown. It should be closed immediately. Visitors to the city are owed a better welcome than the addicts populating the onramp from the 10 to Lincoln Blvd, drifting over from the ineffective non-profit. The trash on the onramp looks like a bomb went off.

SMRR owns the idea of "supportive housing" in one of the most geographically beautiful cities in the world. So come here all the mad, the indigent, the addicted, the criminal, the deranged, come and commit crimes, indulge every addiction with impunity with free needles, and be given lifelong free housing at a million dollars a pop, destroying the neighborhoods into which it's put. Brilliant. Ground was broken a few blocks from my house on a large new one-and it will embed permanently disturbed people in my neighborhood. Caroline Torosis mumbled some words about abundance, but not in her neighborhood! Another is planned on 4th and Arizona downtown. Serious question, are you trying to destroy the city? Meanwhile, the Rite Aid on Wilshire in my neighborhood is closing, no doubt throwing in the towel on daily disorder and shoplifting.

SMRR believes Vancouver is a model for Santa Monica (a direct quote from a new council member), so rental housing is heedlessly pumped into the city, destroying what makes us charming. The same crowd have big plans for the airport, last week they sent out a "questionnaire" urging their constituents to vote "housing" throughout the survey. Meanwhile, the stack and packs going up with endlessly vacant street level storefronts create a ghost town effect, the opposite of bustling because they are too large to support small businesses that are the lifeblood of a neighborhood. Their residents drive in and out. The streets are unpopulated. Did nobody take an urban planning class?

SMRR supports SB79 because they think that the crisis will be solved by fully urbanizing Santa Monica with high-rise apartments everywhere, putting its new residents on a treadmill of lifelong rent payments. Why not build starter condos and help people with the down payment so real generational wealth can be built, as well as a commitment to the city? Never seems to occur to SMRR, who claims to be so for the little guy. But that program would breed independence rather than dependence on SMRR's "largess," and make no mistake SMRR is a socialist organization that does not believe in property ownership (except for themselves). Their model is public housing a la Vienna, Austria. Most of the council own their homes, because they believe in the American Dream, even if they cynically don't envision it for their constituents.

It's easy to ignore all the mayhem in some parts of Santa Monica. North of Montana and Sunset Park, where council members live, insulated from the danger and disorder, in single-family homes on leafy streets. No paying a fortune for a small one-bedroom in a bland low rise for them, they are building wealth through their property. Council, I promise you, that if you lived where we live, and had the weekend we had (just the norm now), all your luxury beliefs would evaporate. You would gain some empathy and understanding for what residents go through. You would learn at an experiential level that what we are suffering isn't a "housing issue." That's just an excuse you tell yourselves to feel good about your obeisance to developers pushing this agenda, and your own blind ideology. Meanwhile, the rest of LA County slowly recovers, while we flounder, our big mall 70% empty.

But like it or not, you have to solve this becaue the city's fortunes are tied to downtown. And this is a solvable problem with a few swift actions that boil down to a policy of more stick and less carrot. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, car break-ins in the city have plunged from 28,500 in 2017 to 8,500 last year thanks to a focused police crackdown. So crime and the disorder from which it emerges, can be solved with the right leadership (in this case moderate mayor Daniel Lurie, who's lowered property crime 45% in one year by arresting the few thousand repeat thieves). You just need to make it a priority because everything waterfalls down from clean and safe streets. Everything. The fact that the council doesn't see this, and won't act to solve it, breeds contempt and conspiracy theories for our governance because we have more people living on the streets than any area in LA county except Skid Row in downtown. How is that even possible?

I could go on, but I'm exhausted, as I'm sure you are too. My wife, who has wanted to move for years, asked me Sunday night after we got home and parked on the street because our gate was locked: "Why should we live here?" I've been arguing and doing my best to change minds, saying that things were going to change. But they haven't, and I fear they won't because this council is out of touch with the direction of its own residents, both state and local. I see no sign they see clean and safe streets as the first and only thing that needs to be solved. They claim the crisis is one of housing, when it's one of addiction and mental illness, that we alone cannot solve. But we can allow our city to be destroyed.

Last night a brother and sister were randomly stabbed on 1700 Ocean Front Avenue. I can no longer come up with a reasonable answer to my wife's question.