This past Sunday, we held our Dolphin Awards Ceremony at the Malibu Swim Club on Broad Beach, on a glorious Malibu day (with a slight touch of rain in the middle). When people talk about the beauty of Malibu, they generally just mean the physical environment, but the real beauty of this small city is the people and their willingness to reach out and do for others. It’s our small town (if there is such a thing) on the edge of a metropolis. At a time when institutions all seem to be suspect, the soul of Malibu is in the schools and the PTSAs, where parents get to meet and know each other. It’s the churches and the charities, the book sales and the farmers market, the shopping centers that put on programs, the Film Society, Malibu Playhouse, the music groups, the book clubs, the ocean athletics and the soccer, baseball, basketball and swimmers. It’s the kids at Pepperdine who study, live and work here, the gyms, the yoga groups and multitudes of clubs, both formal and informal, that give our town its soul. Those people and activities, just like the natural environment, also have to be protected so we keep our rural-feeling small town.
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Toward this goal, the state legislature passed a law that went into effect in January to make it easier for people to build granny units (really small bungalows) in R-1 zones. Most cities hate them and do everything to make it impossible or uneconomic to build these units. The legislature acted because there is a critical shortage of housing in California, especially along the coast where many of those who work here can’t afford to live here. Recently, Los Angeles edged out San Francisco as the most expensive city in the state, if not the country, and we are at crises levels. The cry everywhere is the same—that there is too much traffic—and people are absolutely right. Despite that feeling, no one ever thinks of themselves as traffic; it’s always the other guy getting in your way, that’s the traffic. Truth is that Los Angeles, the auto city, doesn’t work very well anymore and we need more rapid transit and ride sharing and maybe in the near future things like Uber and self-driving cars will change the paradigm. When you think about it, spending $50,000 to buy a vehicle, which you use to drive downtown, and then park in a very expensive parking lot for eight hours, makes absolutely no sense, but we all do it. It is tough to change that habit, but we will.
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The last city council meeting really hit a hot button when many of the parents and kids felt no one seemed to care much about them and their sports and places for them to play. Parents were lined up at the weekend Malibu Little League opener to sign petitions demanding the playing fields, and there was a definite buzz about recalls if the council backed away from the plans for Bluffs Park. The whole point of the swap of Charmlee for Malibu Bluffs Park was to get additional playing fields for the kids and the parents are steaming. Just to give it some perspective, there are 615 kids playing soccer on 60 teams with only one regulation soccer field at the Bluffs. Malibu Little League (including softball) has roughly 300 players and plays seven days a week. There are roughly 260 kids playing basketball. There is a very large swim community that wants a pool. Many of these kids have voting parents, in many cases the same parents who don’t want to see much additional commercial development; however, it would be a big mistake to just assume that these same parents don’t want fields and facilities for their kids. It might make some sense if there was a shortage of open space, but there are 93 acres at Bluffs Park and the proposed development would only take about 20 percent of it, leaving all the rest as open space. This battle is just beginning.
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This week, Wednesday in fact, my son Anthony and I are taking a guy’s road trip (actually a flight) to Washington, D.C., to check out for ourselves what’s really going on, sniff the Washington air visit some of the watering holes and take the Trump pulse. Years ago, I was stationed in Washington for four months when the Navy Diving School was still at the Naval Weapons plant on the Anacostia River, probably then America’s dirtiest river. Still, I always love to go back to D.C. It’s American history in three dimensions. Anthony spent a year in D.C. as the bureau chief for salon.com and he still has some contacts, so we’re going to nose around. I promise you all good gossip to follow.
P.S. If you have it, read Jonah Goldberg’s Monday LA Times column about Trump. He’s convinced that when the sun goes down, the sensible President Trump metamorphoses into some kind of a night creature, sleepless and pacing, his fingers itching, his demons pursuing him, and the only way he gets relief is when his fingers hit the keypad and those Twitter bursts go off onto the blogosphere.