Go Sell Crazy Somewhere Else. Santa Monica is All Stocked Up

Hi everyone,

A month ago, I took a long walk through the city with our new Manager Oliver Chi, who, to his credit, who heard me out regarding the revulsion I had about the loss of chief Batista, as well as the challenges the city faces. We spoke candidly off the record and believe me, I didn't hold back.

While it was off-the-record, I can report we saw two naked people on our walk, including one in Tongva whose pants were off as a group of middle-school girls jogged by. It was a satire snapshot of what's wrong with Santa Monica. The other was in front of Samoshel, getting ready to defecate, as a dozen people collapsed or doing drugs didn't look twice. Welcome to Santa Monica! The rest of the downtown was flooded with disorder, mentally ill homeless, and drug addicts. The promenade was empty. I'm naturally a positive person, but it depressed me, the state of our city. It seemed sad and downmarket, compared to when I would take people on tours of what was, 10 years ago, the apple of Southern California.

Oliver seems energetic, talented, and able to understand our challenges, as stated in this interview. He is directionally correct in his plan, as much as I've had time to review it (rushing it through in a council meeting before people can absorb it seems shortsighted). Still, he's identified the main driver preventing our recovery after being mercilessly looted, and allowing years of neglect change our brand from sterling to unsafe bummer (it's hilarious how our situation is always described as "recovering from Covid," most recently in an LA Times piece, while every other mall in Southern California seems to have easily recovered). Oliver seems to understand we are 5 years past peak covid, and still drowning, with our brand severely tarnished by the unmentioned riots that seared a new image of Santa Monica worldwide, and an ongoing reputation as unsafe and dirty. How quickly and effectively Oliver moves on the following will determine his success, and how much credibility he will have in 6 months:

Close or move Samoshell: It's a magnet for the most disturbed people and the downtown won't revive without it. Oliver seems to understand that the disorder and lack of safety and cleanliness is killing our economic engine, investment, and tourism. This is priority one. I personally don't care where it goes, out of the city entirely with vans to take people to it is fine by me. But we can't be a vibrant place international and regional tourists want to visit until we remove the dangerous and depressing march of need through our downtown. You can argue it shouldn't be so, but it is impossible to recover without doing this. After being attacked twice, robbed of expensive e-bikes from our locked garage, removing feces from the condo's carport, and hassled too many times to mention, to say we have compassion fatigue is an understatement. Although we live downtown and get the worst of it, the entire city has had it.

Downtown is rundown: The sidewalks are cracked and old, the streets are perpetually grubby, and the vibe is tired. Oliver is correct that we must invest in all public infrastructure West of Lincoln (and then the rest of the city). I don't know the details, but if we still have money in the rainy day fund, then we should invest it wisely because it's raining! This is beyond mere cosmetics, it means creating an image of vibrancy instead of one of neglected despondency. Start with the dirty cracked sidewalks. Restore the fountains on the Promenade. Spit polish everything and then don't allow transient addicts to use it as a toilet.

Relatedly: Create a new catchphrase and make "Santa Monica–NOT the 'Home of the homeless'": Enough is enough. We should aim to be like Southern Beach cities (Redondo, Manhattan, La Jolla) in terms of vibrancy, cleanliness, and safety. We are like a well-meaning swimmer rushing out to save a drowning person, and then drowning in the process. We cannot solve the problems of the world. You can call it nativism, or heartless, but the strategy to deal with the tsunami of need coming into the city has failed. The "care in place" philosophy is a failure. Supplying needles in our parks is a failure. Shelters without sobriety is a failure. "Housing first" is a failure. Right now, our focus has to be on saving our city from a doom loop. This and ONLY this. So our motto should be, as Jack Nicholson said in As Good As It Gets, "Go sell crazy somewhere else; we're all stocked up."

So, immediately do what it takes to shut down the planned shelters on Ocean Ave: I watched the entire NOMA meeting on this, in which Oliver made a presentation and answered questions. And then the County health officials came in to try and justify what was done in the dark. People were rightly furious at the lack of transparency in putting two shelters in the middle of a neighborhood, with ocean views on the only park in the city that isn't inundated by naked transient addicts. A park I walk to almost every day because my local park Reed is unsafe to have a picnic in. Lots of talk about "security" from the county (protecting the shelter's inhabitants) and very little about the fact that the "residents" (severely addicted and mentally ill people with no sobriety mandate) can come and go as they please. Again, the message has to be "Go sell crazy somewhere else; we're full up here." So, I don't care who knew what and when. I care whether the city will use any excuse to SHUT IT DOWN ANY WAY YOU NEED TO. Show me you can think outside the box on this.

Save the Civic Center: The core of good leadership is vision, a bias for action, and the ability take big swings. We've lost this, getting caught up in small ball details while missing the big picture. An unforgivable miss? Settling for "watch parties" during the Olympics rather than the hundreds of millions of dollars of rebranding that having drones lifting off from the sand of Beach Volleyball would provide us. Santa Monica INVENTED beach volleyball, but we traded a smaller vision because it was going to cost us some money upfront in the ultimate pennywise, pound foolish decision. Another miss in the making? Not doing everything it takes to bring the Civic Center back to life-this will show me we have lost the ability to take big swings. It's one thing to sell off parking lots (not garages) to balance the books, but don't you DARE allow our Civic Center heritage to be sold to developers. Find the public/private partnership that can restore the Center. We will reap millions a year from the income it will throw off in terms of restaurants, hotels, and general vibe. Show the residents you can be bold on their behalf because the majority of us want the Civic Center restored so it can be a living metaphor of a restored Santa Monica. Please show me you understand the symbolism of this.

Restore the moral of our city: This is an intangible that comes from taking big swings and succeeding at them. The Olympics, the Civic Center, the restoration of our city streets for the 99% of actual residents that want to walk safe streets, and see a movie on the promenade without being accosted by need, neglect, and needles. This means we must get out of survival mode. It will mean development, but not a wholesale destruction of what makes people want to come here. It means that we need bigger swings than allowing booze in the "entertainment zone," which hasn't seemed to move the needle. Restore downtown and then relentlessly promote a "we are back" message. Find other ways to return Santa Monica to a place everybody loved to live, rather than a place that people now look at me with pity before saying: "It used to be so nice, what happened?"

Play hardball regarding the train: The County is NOT our friend. We seem to be the victim of every social experiment the county wants to run, from needles in the park, to letting the train unload, to shoving shelters into residential neighborhood, to, with the state, green lighting an unprecedented level of development. If they won't cooperate with stopping fare jumping, with dealing with the offloading of a nightly march of the addicted and/or deranged, then shut it down in a case of "city civil disobedience." Then call every newspaper in the country to document it. Put the county on the spot, and with before and after videos (and pictures) of the Promenade back then, versus the hollow shell of what it is now. Seriously, this state and county has made disastrous decisions regarding addiction and transient homelessness, spending tens of billions of dollars with no KPI (key performance indicators) to show for it. At some point the county we will realize we need to build institutions for people who can't care for themselves, not embed the on our streets and call that "compassion."

I could go on, but we've all got lives-however, I'd like to end by saying I'm rooting for Oliver. I want the council to succeed and the new deployment plan of policing downtown to work. (I hope the police are given the mandate of waking up every addict sleeping it off in a public place and searching them for drugs and warrants). Santa Monica must gain the reputation of zero tolerance and a tough place to land for transient addicts, the dealers that supply them, and the disorder that accompanies them. Enough is enough.

Because truly, we're stocked up on crazy here.

Best,

Arthur Jeon