Sects on the Beach: The 2024 Santa Monica City Council Race
A little bit of Monica in my life. In all our lives.
I called my dad from Santa Monica on my first day living in LA, outside one of the condo buildings on Ocean Avenue where I had just met a tutoring client, looking down at the big Ferris Wheel.
“The People’s Republic of Santa Monica!” I remember him saying. Meanwhile Whitey Bulger was holed up next to about a million dollars in cash three blocks away in the Princess Grace apartments, where he was caught two years later.
The “People’s Republic” tag was coined in the 70’s by some people who were very angry at a group of tenant advocates who first managed to pass one of California’s most expansive rent control laws through the city ballot, then got a pro-tenant majority elected to the Santa Monica City Council.
The slogan ended up on a bumper sticker that got plastered all over town. 60 Minutes did a feature on it titled “Left City.” “The radicals ... haven’t renamed Santa Monica ‘Ho Chi Minh City,’ but if they did, the people who used to rule here — the conservatives, the landlords, the developers, the business people — wouldn’t be at all surprised,” the reporter intoned.
One of the Councilmembers elected in the tenant wave was Ruth Yannatta Goldway, who became the city’s first real pro-tenant Mayor in 1981 (the Council votes annually on which of them gets the Mayor job). She helped start the Santa Monica Farmer’s Market and was completely despised by landlords.
One landlord, Ilse Koch, said Goldway called her a Nazi wanted for war crimes and sued her so hard for slander it ended up in federal court, which found in Goldway’s favor. “In this case, if the mayor chose to get in the gutter, the law simply leaves her there,” wrote Ninth Circuit Judge Anthony Kennedy (yes that one).
In 1982 some visiting Chinese journalists went to visit Santa Monica and hung out with Mayor Goldway to see what the People’s Republic thing was all about.
They decided Santa Monica was not that similar to Communist China, at the end of the day.
Later in the article the journalists do share that they have a housing shortage back home. “Too many people in too few apartments.”
The reign of the P.R.S.M. did not last very long. A more conservative and landlord-friendly coalition mobilized and got the Council majority back by 1984. Goldway lost her seat. A decade later the State of California made it illegal for cities to expand rent control, in part because of what Santa Monica did.
Goldway went off to do other things. In 1998 she was appointed by Bill Clinton to the Postal Regulatory Commission, where she served for 18 years and was the driving force behind the “Forever Stamp” — the rent control of stamp policy.
Now, forty years after the fall of the People’s Republic, Santa Monica is once again in the throes of a slogan war. Once again this slogan has powerful implications for both a local election and possibly the United States.
The slogan this time around is “Santa Monica Is Not Safe.” It first came to prominence on a very large banner on an empty storefront on the 3rd Street Promenade in December 2022.
The banner and the property belong to John Alle, a real estate guy who also launched an accompanying political advocacy group called The Santa Monica Coalition. Then in 2023 he was beaten by a homeless man who he was filming in Palisades Park, requiring multiples surgeries. Then he changed the sign to read “Santa Methica” and added the representation of Mount Drugsmore you can see at the top of this post.
The banner is reflective of a rising sensibility in Santa Monica, where public safety has been the prevailing political issue since the pandemic — in large part driven by backlash to the George Floyd protests, during which Santa Monica was extensively looted while police declined to respond for hours.
At the time Santa Monica was run by what was considered to be a majority-progressive Council. But in November, a few months after the protests, three out of four incumbents lost their seats to a slate called “Santa Monica for Change.”
The Change Slate — Phil Brock, Oscar de la Torre, and Christine Parra — was running on a platform of more police funding and slower housing development. When Lana Negrete, the music store owner in the story above, was appointed to the Council in 2021, they had a majority.
So Santa Monica, at least electorally, moved away from criminal justice reform as other parts of LA County and the country were moving toward it. But that didn’t calm the anxiety over crime. The Santa Methica banners, the Fox News coverage, the Youtube videos with flaming tents in the thumbnail — all of those appeared and got louder since the 2020 election that put the Change Slaters in office.
The Change Slate candidate who got the most votes in 2020 was Santa Monica-born Phil Brock, an actor (@stgactor on Instagram) and talent manager who was in an episode of M*A*S*H in 1982 and many other things since then. Here’s his IMDb headshot.
Brock became Mayor in 2023. He still leads a four-member council majority that is distinguishable by its support for slow growth, heavier police enforcement against people who are homeless, and ending a County-run needle exchange/Narcan distribution program in Reed Park. Brock was also attacked by a homeless man on the Promenade last year.
Brock recently spoke at a protest led by the Santa Monica Coalition (the banner people) in Reed Park (though Brock says he does not support the Santa Monica Is Not Safe banners and believes they are “counter-productive.”) Many attendees of the rally had thoughts about the Council’s three-member progressive minority, who support more housing development and the County harm reduction program — including Councilmember Jesse Zwick, referenced below.
Now up for reelection in November, Brock is once again running with a slate — this one called Safer Santa Monica.
The other members of the slate are:
Oscar de la Torre, an incumbent who previously led an organization that sued the city of Santa Monica over its electoral system for disenfranchising Latino voters and candidates, then got elected to the City Council, then sued the city himself after he wasn’t allowed to participate in closed session negotiations of the lawsuit settlement.
Dr. Vivian Roknian, a dentist (IG handle @thedocrok) and lead dental advisor for Flaus, a disposable-head electric flosser that three Sharks including Mr. Wonderful made offers for on Shark Tank.
John Putnam, a fashion business owner who says he’s a registered Democrat but has a long donation history of giving a lot of money to Republicans.
All of the members except Putnam are endorsed by the Santa Monica police and firefighter unions.
Their opponents are the United Democrats slate of Barry Snell, Dan Hall, Ellis Raskin, and Natalya Zernitskaya. None of them are incumbents, but they’re endorsed by the the LA County Democratic Party, the LA County Federation of Labor, the Sierra Club, and Santa Monicans for Renters Rights, the group that passed rent control in the 70’s.
There are no council districts in Santa Monica. All the candidates are on the ballot citywide (this is what de la Torre’s organization sued about, in fact). The top four vote-getters win a seat. If either of the slates sweeps all four seats, they’ll enter office with a six-vote supermajority.
But is Santa Monica safe, though? Scott Frazier and I talked about that and other things on a podcast.
One detail: crime numbers are more or less what they were before the pandemic.
There were three murders in Santa Monica in 2019 and there was one in 2023.
248 robberies in 2019, 244 in 2023.
The one category that’s way up is Grand Theft Auto, which is up all over the country.
Something that has changed since 2019: arrests are down. Something that hasn’t: who’s getting arrested.
That’s from the City of Santa Monica’s own website. Almost every year, people who are homeless make up about two-thirds of the city’s arrests and citations, despite representing about 0.8% of the population.
In case you’re wondering, these ratios are not common! In the city of LA, a civil rights group recently found that 38% of arrests and citations were of people who were homeless. That is also considered quite high. But nowhere near Santa Monica numbers.
Perhaps out of concern that the ratios in that chart were not stark enough, Brock, de la Torre, and the other two members of their Council majority passed an ordinance last month making it illegal to use a pillow or blanket when sleeping outside in Santa Monica.
That vote was made possible by the Grants Pass v. Johnson ruling by the Supreme Court’s Republican majority, which gave cities the freedom to criminalize homelessness however they choose without offering any shelter or services. Phil Brock coincidentally visited Grants Pass, Oregon, the city that triggered the legal case by banning public sleeping without providing shelter beds, two months after the Supreme Court ruling came down, and two weeks before he and his colleagues outlawed public pillow use in Santa Monica.
Brock argued that the blanket ban was a way to motivate people to get indoors. "I feel that if you have someone you’ve offered help to four, five, six times and they won’t move off the street, then we need to somehow get them off the street, get them into treatment, get them into rehab,” he said.
But the ordinance doesn’t require the city to offer any help before citing or arresting people — let alone offering help four, five, or six times. And the same month they outlawed warming fabrics and head support, both Brock and de la Torre voted against allowing a supportive housing development to move forward in the city.
It may feel like Santa Monica is a long way from its People’s Republic days. But then you read this New York Times article that ran on March 23, 1986 (also the day I was born):
“This city of 90,000 people, which is often referred to as ''the People's Republic of Santa Monica'' because of its vigorous social conscience, has long had a strong commitment to helping the homeless. But the city's policies… have created a furor among the large population of elderly people, who now fear using city parks, and among merchants and restaurateurs, who depend on the tourist trade.”
“The Chamber of Commerce has demanded in a series of newspaper advertisements over the last two years that the city get tough on the homeless and make more arrests.”
“Last Christmas some residents became so incensed that they prevailed upon the city to nail wooden dividers onto park benches so that the homeless could not sleep there.”
That was two years after Chairman Goldway and her fellow travelers lost their seats.
Here, another one, from the LA Times in 2002:
“Just last week, the Santa Monica City Council wound up an emotional debate with the passage of two laws aimed at containing homeless people--long the beneficiaries of local liberal largess.”
Those laws outlawed sleeping in a doorway downtown and giving out food without a permit — both misdemeanors punishable with a maximum of six months in jail, a $1,000 fine, or both.
There are hundreds more articles since then. Whatever the “divide” or “debate” is, Santa Monica has been living in it for 40 years. It’s still going. So is the Farmer’s Market.
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If you want to hear more about this race, including some major changes in Santa Monica housing law and politics and some crime data I found pretty shocking, you can listen to the podcast episode Scott Frazier and I did here.