Sandwiched between a brake shop, gritty industrial buildings and a few modest storefronts is a little neighborhood that time has seemingly forgotten.
Santa Monica Village Trailer Park is an anachronism, a throwback to another era, one when neighborhoods filled with modest, makeshift houses constructed of tin and perched upon wheels dotted coastal cities like this one from one end of California to the other. Rents were low, sunny days were plentiful and gentle ocean breezes helped ensure that the living was easy.
At Santa Monica Village, where rents on mobile homes still range from $370 to $410 a month (in a city where apartments rent for five or even 10 times that much), the living was easy â€" until recently.
On Tuesday the City Council is scheduled to take up a proposal to raze the 3.8-acre park's 47 aging trailers, some of which are just slightly larger than modern SUVs and have been around since the park opened in 1950. They would be replaced by multiple-story buildings containing more than 450 apartments and condominiums, as well as more than 25,000 square feet of office and retail space.
In order to do so, the city must change the property's zoning, which essentially allows only a mobile home park to exist on this almost-hidden, aging piece of paradise that is two miles from the beach and seemingly 50 years away from the upscale coffee bars, clubs and high-end stores that have come to define Santa Monica in recent years.
AP
A woman walks past mobile homes at the Santa Monica Village Trailer Park in Santa Monica, Calif., Tuesday, July 10, 2012. The city's Planning Commission recently recommended the 3.8-acre park's zoning be changed to allow a developer to bulldoze its modest, rent-controlled homes and replace them with nearly 200 much-higher-priced apartments and condominiums, as well as more than 100,000 square feet of office and retail space. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)
Close If the City Council does change the zoning, longtime resident Ralph Meyer is not sure what he'll do, he said as he showed a visitor around his modest home on a recent day.
"It may not look like much," he says of the home so small his bed barely fits inside, "but I've gotten used to it."
He bought the place 30 years ago, moving into what was then mostly a gritty section of aging apartment buildings and rundown warehouses. In the years since, many of those buildings have been replaced with new apartments and also sleek modern office buildings like the ones that house outfits like Yahoo and Viacom just a few blocks away. At noon each day, young hipsters pour out of those places to patronize gourmet food trucks that line up outside.
During those years of change, Meyer has lived to be 86, and that's too old, he says, to move someplace else.
"I could have moved at one time," he adds softly, "but that window has closed."
That's a sentiment expressed by many in the park, where most people are old and many are in declining health.
"When we bought this, I thought we were going to be here forever," said Ray Meeks, who moved in more than 15 years ago with his wife, Geri. The still strapping former cop is 79 and weakened by chemotherapy.
The problem, says Marc Luzzatto, the developer who wants to transform Santa Monica Village into a high-density, upscale neighborhood, is that the area is not a sleepy, modest place anymore.
"We haven't been able to figure out a way to keep a mobile home park operating in that location," he said last week. "It hasn't been viable for many years."
He's been trying to redevelop the property since 2006, facing opposition from residents at pretty much every turn. But time finally may be on his side.
As older folks have died or moved to retirement homes in recent years, their trailers have been removed and spaces left vacant. Where 109 homes once stood, only 47 remain and a handful of those are used only as weekend getaways.
沒有留言:
張貼留言