They say that travel broadens you, but I’m not sure that’s always true. What it does do is give you a glimpse of how other communities have handled growth pressures, rising rents, housing for their employees and an onslaught of tourists. This summer, Karen and I have passed through and stayed in Sacramento, California, and Denver, and Aspen, Colorado, and Bozeman, Montana. Many little towns that are partially empty, with few operating stores and even less population, surround every one of those places. There is an enormous amount of unused land in western America, but the problem is that no one wants to live on it. There is nowhere to work, nowhere to shop and little future for their young people, so they pick up and leave.
Apparently everyone wants to be where everyone else like themselves wants to be, whether you’re a billionaire in a private club on a mountain top or a college kid waiting tables and surfing in your time off. Travel and tourism is a way of life in America and no matter what you do or don’t do, if your area is attractive they will come — whether you like it or not.
Malibu is one of those places. It’s beautiful and has ocean and mountains and an oft chance that you’ll see a celebrity. Every year, 12-15 million people come to our town and we try our best to ignore them. We get stuck in traffic and curse at them, we avoid going out of the house on summer weekends, and with the benefit of all these new fancy apps, they crowd into every opening in the beach and back trail in the hills and some leave behind a truck full of garbage and trample it all to death.
The reason I raise all this now is that we have a city council election coming up in November with three seats up for grabs. Rather than the usual palaver we get at election time, I’d like to hear some candidates talk about the real problems and potentially real solutions.
Let me give you some prospective on this town. The real population of Malibu today, about 13,000, is not very different than what it was 40 years ago when I moved to Malibu. That we have been able to keep it to that is truly a minor miracle. What has changed is the traffic. In the last 40 years, it has increased geometrically. Part of that is what we call the ‘Z’ traffic, which is people traveling daily from the West Valley and eastern Ventura County to their jobs on the Westside. At one time, the traffic was all one way but not any more. Today there seems to be as much daily traffic going the other way out to the West Valley and eastern Ventura County. Apparently everyone seems to be living or working on the wrong side of town. We have terrible problems with traffic signals and backed-up intersections that need to be fixed. Since Caltrans owns PCH, it takes a lot of patience and skill to get a fix and candidates should be talking about it.
We have a civic center that isn’t much more than a bunch of disconnected shopping centers. What we have to do is get people out of their cars and walking around an integrated civic center area. To do that, you need parking, and that means parking structures. Perhaps the city can use the first floor for cheaper rentals so all the mom and pops aren’t getting priced out of Malibu. If we continue to ignore it, as we have in the past, and just talk about development, it will all continue to worsen.
Then there is that matter of esthetics. Try walking down PCH on the sidewalk — where there is a sidewalk. It’s difficult to do and it’s a pig sty. Walk through the 19 acres of Legacy Park, which I do almost every day with my dog Ella. Ella loves Legacy Park. It’s one big place to sniff and poop. We have a dog park that cost $25 million ($50 million if you count the interest) and it is totally underused and looks somewhat like a weed patch in my old neighborhood in Brooklyn.
I don’t know what the solutions are to some of these problems, but the candidates should be talking about it. Perhaps I’m just a man of limited vision but I really don’t care what Malibu is going to be in 2050. All I want the city to do is to begin fixing the intersection at PCH and Civic Center Way, so the traffic doesn’t back up to Las Flores Canyon Road. That certainly would be visionary enough for me.