CITY HALL — With the City Council scheduled to give final approval tonight to an ordinance allowing a modest trailer park to be replaced with hundreds of high-end condos and apartments, a six-year battle over the future of some of this beachfront city's last inexpensive housing may be coming to an end.
Or it may not be.
The City Council is also scheduled to meet behind closed doors Tuesday night to discuss the possibility of a lawsuit, which some residents have threatened to bring if the razing of the 1950s-era Village Trailer Park is approved.
"That's a possibility because it's a breach of our Fourth Amendment rights," said 30-year resident Ralph Meyer, citing the Constitutional right of people to be secure in their homes.
After months of debate before various municipal agencies, the City Council voted 4-2 earlier this month to adopt an ordinance allowing the park, which sits on 3.8 acres, to be replaced with 377 condos and apartments and thousands of square feet of office and retail space.
The Village Trailer Park, the last of two small, rent-controlled trailer parks remaining in this upscale city of 90,000, is a throwback to Santa Monica's more modest days.
As much of the rest of the city was redeveloping during the past 30 years, the park, two miles east of the Pacific Ocean, went largely unnoticed. Rents for mobile home spaces range from about $370 to $410 a month in a city where the tiniest apartments routinely fetch five times that much.
For the past six years, developer Marc Luzzatto has been attempting to close the park and remove its old-fashioned trailers, many no bigger than modern-day SUVs. He said in an interview last July that it is no longer economically feasible to operate.
As longtime residents have died or moved out in recent years, their trailers have been removed and spaces left vacant. Only 47 homes now remain in a park built to hold 109.
Luzzatto has offered residents as much as $20,000 to relocate, as well as the opportunity to move into one of the new apartments, saying he'll match the rent they currently pay for five years.
He's also said he'll buy new mobile homes for those who want and place them in the city's one remaining trailer park.
Meyer is skeptical of that offer, saying he recently visited the other mobile home park.
"The manager there told me there are no vacancies, and there's a waiting list," he said.
