Santa Monica Agency Saves Homes
A dedication ceremony was held a few weeks ago in the Ocean Park section of Santa Monica for a sensitive and sensible renovation of a Craftsman-styled bungalow of some historic interest.
The well-detailed bungalow at 2302 5th St. dates to 1913, but in recent years had been battered by rent control, trashed by tenants and neglected by owners to become a sorry eyesore at the southwest corner of 5th and Strand Street.
Then. last year, the innovative nonprofit Community Corp. of Santa Monica stepped into the picture to save the structure from further humiliation and probable demolition by recycling it into six apartments.
In keeping with the housing corporation’s philosophy, the largest and more desirable of the apartments will be rented at market rate, estimated at $1,200 a month, with the money going to help reduce the rents of the five other units so they can be made available to eligible low- and moderate-income families.
Of course, to do this the 5th Street project had to be exempted from rent control.
That is no easy task in Santa Monica. Rent control there stands with God and motherhood in the pecking order of, if not the universe, the tenants who make up the vast majority of Santa Monica’s voters and who are subsidized by the system, whether they are in need or not.
(Most tenants are not, but this does not stop them from enjoying artificially low rents, which, in effect, are being subsidized by landlords. It is no wonder that apartments in Santa Monica are so desirable and generate sizeable finder fees.)
Neverthless, the corporation won the exemption. It was granted on the basis that the project would have been economically infeasible if rents had been limited to the so-called maximum allowable established under the restrictive guidelines of the rent control board.
(That the rents of most units in Santa Monica are limited to these maximums says something about the economic feasibility of owning and operating an apartment house there.)
No doubt helping in the decision for the exemption was the corporation’s noble effort to create affordable housing for senior citizens and families. Not coincidentally, one of the purported goals of rent control is to maintain such housing.
However, the respective efforts have had quite different results.
While rent control, as admninistered in Santa Monica, ironically and sadly has diminished housing, the community corporation has been saving a modest amount and creating more. One has to be impressed with the corporation’s efforts, especially in this Reagan era of housing subsidy cutbacks.
After a slow start hampered by too much talk and too little action--a common Santa Monica malady--the corporation with each new project has been gaining credibility. So far, it has produced 144 new and rehabilitated units, with construction to start soon on 47 more in a series of in-fill projects imaginatively designed by the young firm of Koning Eizenberg Architects.
“Our success, in part, I think, is based on our ability to walk the thin line between the cliche images in Santa Monica of, on one side, the greedy developer/landlords, and on the other side, the crazed tenant activists who protest anything that might raise their rents more than $1 a month,” commented Neal Richman, the corporation’s executive director.
Richman’s candor and humor, as well as obvious ability, also has helped the corporation overcome some major obstacles in Santa Monica, not the least of them the well-intentioned City of Santa Monica itself.
As someone who was a renter in Santa Monica and is now a landlord/occupant of a small rental property there, I have had a close, if prejudiced, view of the obstacles. And in no place are their effects more in evidence than in my former neighborhood of Ocean Park, where I still walk and bicycle regularly.
Pushed and pulled by the convoluted politics of Santa Monica, Ocean Park seems at times to be going in two directions at once.
While heartening improvements in the form of new and renovated housing, such as the 5th Street and similar projects are on the increase, so is disheartening disinvestment in the form of scattered, deteriorating and vacant apartment complexes and houses, and garbage-strewn vacant lots.
The new developments generally are being encouraged by the community’s prime location near the beach and freeway and its growing array of upscale restaurants and stores, and nearby entertainment.
The deterioration is being accelerated by a perverted rent control system that caters in the extreme to tenants, while discouraging and, in effect, penalizing owners who try to maintain their buildings.
As for the oddity of vacancies in a place where, and at a time when, apartments are in great demand, some owners feel that it is less expensive and less troublesome to leave units empty rather than have to repair them and be unable to raise the rents to cover costs. Of course, a few hold out the slim hope for vacancy decontrol, which would allow them to make the repairs and pass on the costs to new tenants.
In the rent control board’s zeal to serve existing tenants, and, not incidentally, pad its own bureaucracy, it says it is doing so to preserve the social and economic diversity of Santa Monica. So much for rhetoric.
The reality is that it is apparent that in its modest way the community corporation is doing a much better job of it.
And, unlike the rent control board, the corporation is not in the process of subsidizing the rents of those who do not need or deserve them, and it is certainly not promoting housing deterioration.
In renovating the 5th Street bungalow for a range of needed housing out of the bonds of rent control, the community corporation has preserved a piece of Santa Monica’s proud past and given it a hint of a better future.
