Thank you for your fine piece on the heart and soul of Malibu.
Malibu’s DNA, for better or worse, contains a passionate involvement with development issues, and even a touch of the Wild West. Picture Grandma Rindge, whose family once owned all of Malibu, standing with her men, rifles at the ready, to keep the state from coming in with a railroad and a roadway.
Decades later, the community rose up to remove ourselves from the county’s jurisdiction to become the City of Malibu precisely on the issue of development and to put these decisions in the hands of the local Malibu community.
Once again, Malibu dwellers are asserting themselves to establish some control over their future. We knew rents were driving local and small businesses out of Malibu. But we didn’t know that we are all at the mercy of absentee hedge fund flippers and the brutality with which this system operates. Hopefully you and John Evans (whose bookstore is closing at the end of the month) will educate us further on these grim realities.
We are not anti-development or anti-business. We are pro-Malibu. We are concerned that future commercial development will negatively impact community safety, degrade the natural beauty—and value—of our community, and lead to further horrendous congestion and infrastructure burden. In short, will we be paying the costs into perpetuity while the developers reap the profits, throwing us a bone here and there?
Carol Moss