The Changing Face of Santa Monica : Neighborhood: Residents struggle to preserve small-city life style threatened by high-priced homes, commercial development.

By LINDA FELDMAN

Oct. 15, 1989 12 AM PT

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Men were warned to blindfold their women while passing through Santa Monica at the turn of the century because it was such a tough town. Saloons were everywhere, and park benches were “strewn with unsavory characters.”

According to the history books, a well-to-do citizen led the fight to close Santa Monica’s bars by offering to pay the city what it would lose in licensing fees. He won the fight, and Santa Monica left its frontier reputation behind.

And today, Santa Monica residents are fighting still, struggling to preserve a quality of life that is quickly disappearing because of high-priced homes and commercial development.

Not only are traditional neighborhoods being disrupted by new building and heavy traffic but new home buyers tilt the city’s old economic balance toward the wealthy.

The 96,000 residents of Santa Monica like the 3-square-mile city just the way it is, and if it were up to some they would close its gates to protect the pleasures of small-city life.

Once Quiet Community

They enjoy their 15-plus-mile bicycle paths, four-minute emergency response from police and fire departments, two hospitals, a college, a thriving art community, a public bus system and a pier with a carousel.

When Roy and Maxine Naylor moved to the Sunset Park area of Santa Monica in the 1950s, Santa Monica was still a quiet ocean-side community.

The Naylors raised four children in a California bungalow they bought for less than $20,000. Today their children cannot afford to buy a home in the neighborhood they grew up in, where prices now start at $400,000.

“I wish we’d bought property when it was cheap,” Maxine Naylor said. “I’m amazed at values now.”

The Naylors have remodeled their home three times, enclosing a porch and adding onto the kitchen. Many residents choose to remodel rather than move because of the familiarity of the neighborhood. “Almost half of the people who moved in about the same time we did are still here,” she said.

Red Erickson has been selling real estate for 26 years from his Montana Avenue office, and remembers that the now-costly homes of Sunset Park were tract homes developed on open fields for the Douglas Aircraft workers.

Today, Sunset Park is one of Santa Monica’s two solidly residential areas, albeit the less prestigious community. The prime real estate area is the exclusive north of Montana section, where former $30,000 homes now sell for an average of $750,000 and what was once considered high-grade housing at $50,000 now sells for $2 million.

A house on La Mesa Drive, considered the most expensive street in Santa Monica, recently sold for a record $4 million. This street, where comedian Mel Brooks and actress wife Anne Bancroft live, recently had a bargain for under $3 million dollars, but that’s the lowest-priced home in the area.

Erickson said there are currently 55 houses for sale over the $1 million dollar level, and they are all north of Montana.

Who’s buying these houses?

“My last eight sales have been to developers (who often tear down the existing and build a new, bigger home for resale) and buyers of Korean, Chinese and Japanese descent,” said John Richards of Jon Douglas Co.

“First-time buyers are priced out of the market, because sellers can’t resist the all-cash deals or the 50% down sale,” he said. “Sellers feel secure with contingency-free offers. Even physical inspections and termite reports are being waived.”

Also driving home prices up is the fact that Santa Monica doesn’t have a large housing stock. Kenyon Webster, principal planner for the city, reported that “of the 47,000 housing units in the city, only 7,700 are single-family houses. The remaining 78%, according to a 1980 census, are renter-occupied.”

That number is changing monthly, because of the removal of rental units by building owners fed up with the low return on apartments under the city’s strict rent control laws. Owners are either leaving their units vacant or giving them to family members. Some are being torn down and rebuilt as condominiums.

Rent-controlled apartments range from $235 for a one-bedroom unit to $500 for two bedrooms.

Another prime residential area is north of Wilshire and west of 22nd Street, where streets have college names and houses sell for $800,000 on Berkeley Hill. A tear-down will sell for about $600,000, while a livable house can still be bought for $700,000, Richards said.

Condos Next Choice

If a buyer still wants to live north of Wilshire but can’t afford a house, Richards said condos are the next affordable housing.

“But there aren’t too many new ones. A single-level, two-bedroom, two-bath conversion north of Wilshire is selling between $260,000-$275,000. A townhouse built after 1982 is in the high $300s-low $400s. . . .”

Tom and Caroline Carroll moved to the Sunset Park area a year ago with their 8-year-old son after renting in West Los Angeles. She’s a facility planner at UCLA, and he’s the executive director of the new 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica’s revitalized downtown area.

They paid in the mid-$300,000 range for a 1,200-square-foot, three-bedroom, one-bath house, managing the down payment by getting relatives together to invest in the property. According to Tom Carroll, the value of the house has already gone up, and it has been worth the sacrifice.

Back to Downtown

Carroll is a member of the team responsible for bringing people back to Santa Monica’s downtown area. The once-popular outdoor mall fell on hard times and became a depressed area. Santa Monica’s pier, considered the soul of Santa Monica, is also under development, and blueprints promise a family-oriented entertainment center.

Beyond these two projects, it’s hard to find any consensus regarding the proposed 8.3 million square feet of commercial development. There are at least three petitions being circulated to stop growth.

Most people, like Caroline Carroll, want to protect the privileges of living in Santa Monica.

“I don’t want to entice anyone to come to Santa Monica,” she said. “I want to keep it the way it is. It feels like a small town. Services are generous, the air is nice and it’s family-oriented.”

But development is not the only threat to the way of life in the city, residents say.

Crime by Homeless

Santa Monica is drawing homeless people by the thousands. More than 200 residents at a recent gathering blamed the city’s generous services for the influx of the homeless.

The majority of the homeless people are harmless, but crime is increasing by this group. Recently, two lifeguards were attacked by a homeless man wielding a corkscrew.

“There were 4,700 citizen-initiated calls in 1989, and 1,120 of those calls were because of transients,” said Sgt. John Miehle of the Santa Monica Police Department. “We spent 410 hours running down these complaints.

“This year, we had 276 burglaries, and 37% of them were committed by transients, five of the seven murders were committed by transients on transients, and eight of the 18 rapes were perpetrated by transients.”

The business community, working through the Chamber of Commerce, demanded city action on the homeless problem.

“The mayor admitted we have a problem, and concrete action like forbidding panhandling and stepping up security in the parking structures has started,” said chamber President Duane Nightingale. “We’ll always help people--but we want them off the streets at night.”

In spite of the homeless problem, Nightingale said business is booming, even though small retailers and workers cannot afford to live in the city.

“It is difficult to lure large businesses to center here,” he said. “That was one of the reasons why my company, GTE, left town.”

The business boom, according to Nightingale, is coming from the trend of more attorneys, doctors, dentists and other health professionals setting up their offices in the city. The medical field and its associated businesses make up the No. 1 work population in the city.

Shelly Roth, a chiropractor, and her husband, John Kaufman, commercial real estate broker, both work in the city. They bought their home in the Ocean Park area 10 years ago. Their 1,400-square-foot house was recently enlarged to 2,600 square feet. Roth values it at more than $1 million, 10 times the original purchase price. If they sell, they’ll stay in Santa Monica.

‘It’s Quieter There’

“When we moved in, John wanted to remodel immediately, but I wanted to move eventually, if the house became too small for us,” Roth said. “Now he wants to move and I want to stay in the neighborhood. If we move, we want to start from scratch and remodel a house north of Montana. It’s quieter up there and (there’s) less traffic, but the advantage of living here is the young children. But we haven’t decided yet.”

Ocean Park has pockets of single-family homes, but according to Erickson, none has sold for a million dollars. A high-quality duplex on 3rd Street, with a second-floor view of the ocean sold for $600,000.

In the Main Street area, south to the ocean, there’s a low turnover for the wood-frame houses whose deceiving exteriors conceal modern, artistic interiors. Many of them are beach house rentals--bringing in sizable rents, since they are not under rent control.

Ocean Park still has the last piece of affordable housing in the city, according to Felicia Allen of Jon Richards Co. She can get you into a two-bedroom one-bath dwelling for $269,000. It’s half of a duplex, and it’s the cheapest property in Santa Monica. For $269,500 you can get a one-bedroom, one-bath house.

The Ocean Park area has a well-organized neighborhood association, one of three associations that receive support from the city-sponsored Santa Monica Neighborhood Support Center.

Airport Project Protest

Members are firm about maintaining their neighborhood’s quality of life. Recently, 700 people attended a hearing to protest a development project at the Santa Monica airport. Traffic and noise were the key issues. City officials expect marathon meetings as they get closer to making the final decision.

What may be the unifying thread for all Santa Monicans--politician or resident--is the concern for the quality of life.

Stan Scholl, general manager of the city of Santa Monica, considers the city to be in the environmental vanguard.

“We started a recycling program 11 years ago,” he said. “We started the pilot program for treated storm drain water. We’re going to require sampling for toxic chemicals from 1,118 of our 15,000 businesses.”

The city, at no cost to residents, retrofitted one-quarter of the city’s households with water-heater blankets as well as requiring ultra-low-flow plumbing fixtures. “We also have our own hydroelectric power plant, which creates less pollution,” he said.

As a result of families being priced out of the housing market, the Santa Monica Malibu school district has suffered from eight years of declining enrollment.

School Enrollment

To counter the problem, school officials created a plan that allows people working in the city to enroll their children in the schools if they retained child care in the city.

Dane Woll, associate general director of the 2,800-member YMCA, and the city’s largest child-care provider, lives in Westchester but sends his daughter Katie to the Roosevelt School--north of Montana.

“There are about 300 non-resident kids who are currently in the school system,” he said.

Santa Monica residents want to protect their small-town life style. As new resident Caroline Carroll said, “It’s the atmosphere--maybe it’s a false sense--but it feels real open. It’s more than living in a house; we are living in a neighborhood. I would hate to see it overwhelmed.”

AT A GLANCEPopulation

1989 estimate: 96,428

1980-89 change: +9.2%

Median age: 36 years

Racial/ethnic mix

White (non-Latino): 71.9%

Latino: 18.2%

Other: 6.5%

Black: 3.4%

Annual income

Per capita: 22,210

Median household: 33,847