ACTION Apartment Association

Santa Monica Rent Control Board’s Attempt to Avoid Judicial Review of its RUBS Policy Defeated

07/26/2017 1:06 PM | Margaret Fulton (Administrator)

On July 14, 2017, the Superior Court rejected Santa Monica Rent Control Board’s attempt to dismiss at inception the complaint of ACTION Apartment Association seeking a judicial declaration that housing providers with master meters for water can apportion the water charges among the tenants based upon a sharing arrangement allowed in the City of Los Angeles and most other municipalities.

Read Don Woods' statement & press release: Press Release re Demurrer.pdf

Santa Monica City Council Approves Downtown Community Plan

07/26/2017 1:00 PM | Margaret Fulton (Administrator)

City Hall released the following press release today regarding approval of the Downtown Community Plan:

The Santa Monica City Council unanimously approved the Downtown Community Plan (DCP) at last night’s City Council meeting on July 25, 2017. The DCP is the central planning tool that will guide the future of Downtown Santa Monica over the next 15 years.

Dear Mr. Hawthorne [and the DCP]

07/26/2017 8:13 AM | Margaret Fulton (Administrator)

By Charles Andrews

I read your piece Sunday, about our fair city, in the LA Times Calendar section, headlined “‘A grand bargain’ and a model?” — and I too ended with a question mark.

Perhaps you were well-meaning, and you just got bamboozled. It happens. People, even journalists, come in with a less than erudite notion of Santa Monica. We have a long history, a complex one. Our politics are legendary, but not in a good way. People will tell you stuff, and it sounds reasonable, and when you check it superficially it seems accurate. But I fear you got only part of the picture, and drew your conclusions from that.

rious City

Solving affordable housing: Creative solutions around the U.S.

07/25/2017 12:30 PM | Margaret Fulton (Administrator)

But when city leadership, government leaders, and nonprofits get creative and get serious about solving the issues, solutions can take shape.

Quake maps won’t shakeup seismic rules

07/25/2017 8:56 AM | Margaret Fulton (Administrator)

Proposed updates to the seismic maps covering Santa Monica and the nearby area will have little impact on the way local government regulates construction in geohazard zones.

State regulators issued proposed updates to local fault maps this month and the documents make slight alterations to the locations of fault lines in the city. City Hall has existing rules for construction within the geohazard zone and those rules will apply to any properties covered by the new borders.

There are about 3,800 properties within the existing zone and when the new maps are finalized, any new properties covered by the faults will be notified, as will homes that were already covered by the fault map.

Council to debate subsidies for affordable housing

07/25/2017 8:48 AM | Margaret Fulton (Administrator)

The City Council has long talked about the need to support affordable housing in Santa Monica and a pair of items at this week’s meeting will earmark significant local money for housing construction and preservation.

The two proposals take different approaches to preserving housing. The first targets the actual housing supply while the second protects vulnerable tenants who could losing housing due to financial stress.

The first item is a recommendation from the city’s Housing Commission to establish a new housing trust fund.

The second item on the July 25 agenda would create a pilot program to help low income seniors pay their rent.

Downtown zoning rules make final trip to Council

07/24/2017 8:58 AM | Margaret Fulton (Administrator)

The Downtown Community Plan will have its last public hearing on Tuesday during the July 25 City Council Meeting.

The zoning document will guide development in the Downtown area between Wilshire, the freeway, Lincoln and the beach. While Council has already revised zoning rules throughout the city, Downtown was specifically excluded from the citywide standards to allow for an area specific plan.

California YIMBY’s Brian Hanlon on what real estate insiders can do to fight NIMBYism

07/21/2017 8:22 AM | Margaret Fulton (Administrator)

He may have received the blessing — and the big bucks — of Silicon Valley’s biggest power players, but Brian Hanlon has one more demographic to charm: developers

Hanlon is leading California YIMBY, a nonprofit lobbying organization that aims to push pro-housing, pro-development policies through the state legislature. So far, he’s raised $500,000 from tech bigwigs like Microsoft executive Nat Friedman and Pantheon CEO Zack Rosen.

But developers have remained tepid, despite many sharing his organization’s goal of making housing easier and cheaper to build, he told The Real Deal.

Santa Monica's 'grand bargain' on growth and housing

07/21/2017 7:57 AM | Margaret Fulton (Administrator)

Like many cities in Southern California, Santa Monica is split between two entrenched camps when it comes to the politics of growth, housing and development. Here’s how Rick Cole, Santa Monica’s city manager — and before that a deputy mayor of Los Angeles, city manager of Ventura and Azusa and mayor of Pasadena — describes the gulf.

On one side, Cole told me over lunch recently, is the slow-growth or even no-growth faction, “a group of people who think until we have more water, until the air is clean, until traffic is solved, we don’t need even one more brick on top of brick.” For them, any new housing “is too much.”

SANTA MONICA PLANS FOR DOWNTOWN’S FUTURE BY MAKING LESS ROOM FOR CARS

07/20/2017 5:48 PM | Margaret Fulton (Administrator)

The Downtown Community Plan. It was bound to get a little ugly.

With a final vote at City Council next Tuesday, both sides have had their say — community and slow growth groups on one side, the increasingly ubiquitous alliance of business, labor and transit activists on the other.

As for parking, the really big news is that the city will eliminate minimum parking requirements for new developments and halve parking maximums. And not everyone’s happy about that.

In a letter to the council, former and soon-to-be-again resident Cosmo Bua alleges that affordable housing is being used as a “sacred cow” to fast-track “projects which provide very little of it” at the expense of residents who have repeatedly called for more green, open space.

Shifting parking — instead of a park — to Fourth and Arizona, Bua says, is a “slap in the face.”