Editor:
I appreciated the November 1 article by The Transparency Project “The Battle of a Santa Monica 2016 Ballot Measure”. It was a refreshing breath of air in comparison to the drivel clogging my mailbox from Santa Monica Forward that is paid by developers and other special interests spending more than $1.25 million to defeat the LUVE Initiative, Measure LV.
I would like to elaborate a little more on Santa Monica Forward’s claim that LUVE will hurt renters and make the city even less affordable by incentivizing landlords to tear down rent-controlled apartment buildings and build two-story luxury condos. This flies in the face of what happened to me in West Los Angeles when a developer bought our moderate income rent controlled two-story apartments and destroyed them and replaced them with a big, ugly four-story condominium building that only rich people could afford and were not under rent control. There is more motivation and incentive for developers to do this if they can build up to four or six stories rather than only two stories. For luxury housing Measure LV’s 32-foot limit is really a two-story building. Therefore, Measure LV will help preserve our existing low and moderate income rent controlled housing and prevent it from being destroyed and replaced by high rise luxury condominiums and apartments that only rich people can afford and are not under rent control. This is what the developers did in Westwood and West Los Angeles in the 1980’s and they are now here in Santa Monica to do the same thing again.
The LUVE Initiative, Measure LV, is really rather simple. If you want to have more overdevelopment, more traffic, congestion and gridlock and help destroy our existing low and moderate income rent controlled housing and have it replaced by high rise luxury condominiums and apartments that only rich people can afford and are not under rent control then vote no on Measure LV. However, if you want to have less height, less density, less traffic, congestion and gridlock and if you want to help preserve our existing low and moderate income rent controlled housing then vote yes on Measure LV. It is our City of Santa Monica and it is up for us to decide which way we want our City to go.
Dr. Daniel Galamba
Santa Monica
