The ocean-side community of Santa Monica is one of California’s premier tourist destinations. It covers just under 22 square kilometres and is home to about 90,000 residents. Santa Monica is encircled on all sides by Los Angeles (LA), a city of 3.5 million people that in turn lies at the heart of the LA metropolitan region, which – at 18 million people spread out across 12,500 square kilometres – is one of the largest urban agglomerations in the world. Market analysts contend that Santa Monica has now gone ‘from beach town to boom town’ (White 2013), with a slew of dense, mixed-use development projects slated for completion in the near future that many see as a tipping point in the city’s development. Creative industries (film, fashion, new media and tech companies) along with tourism activity dominate the economic landscape. Urban tourism has now been clearly recognized as a driving force in the urban politics and governance of US cities (Judd 2002; Eisinger 2000), and Santa Monica is no exception. Newcomers and temporary visitors clash with long-term residents in their visions for the city’s future, and the new, developer-friendly climate in Santa Monica is seen in stark contrast to ‘the People’s Republic of Santa Monica’s’ earlier tradition of lower-density, slow growth, progressive urban development policies that were focused on the supply of public benefits. Yet these public benefits – well-maintained parks, affordable housing, good public transit and parking – were precisely the key elements that distinguished Santa Monica from its larger neighbour Los Angeles and made the city a more attractive place to live, work, visit and play in the first place.1
In the case of Santa Monica, the somewhat familiar story of a well-governed, progressive, attractive place becoming victim of its own success contains some interesting twists, and these will be the focus of this chapter. Following a short historical review linking developments in Santa Monica to longer-term and larger processes of urban revitalization, the chapter will unpack the complex scales of protest and resistance in tourism-related developments. Three different vignettes will discuss (a) the unionization efforts of Santa Monica’s hotel workers; (b) residents’ reservations and resistance against additional densification in general and three key visitor-oriented development sites in the Civic Center, Bergamot and Downtown areas in particular; and finally (c) new debates surrounding the recent heavy ‘airbnbfication’ of housing in Santa Monica and in adjacent Venice Beach. The vignettes will reveal new fault lines among protagonists, not just between recent and long-term residents but also along ethnic, generational and class lines. There is an important flip-side to the cliché of the elderly, white anti-development resident: a majority of Santa Monicans between the ages of 18 and 24 strongly supports new hotel development, and over 70 per cent of Hispanics are in support of proposals for new hotels in downtown (Godbe Research 2014: 60–1). At the same time, young and minority residents are typically those most affected by the housing affordability crisis in the city, while the recent influx of young, mostly white and often well-to-do tech workers moving down from Northern California’s Silicon Valley additionally complicates the picture in Santa Monica.
Figure 5.1 Aerial view of Santa Monica, 2015.
Source: Google Earth, map data by Google, labels added by author.
Santa Monica, California: from beach city to ‘Silicon Beach’ boom town
From beach city to ‘Silicon Beach’
Santa Monica is one of America’s quintessential ‘tourist cities’. As California became the United States’ 31st state in 1850, the Mexican ranchos of Santa Monica changed hands and declined. Tourism soon became an inseparable ingredient in the city’s prosperity. As gold seekers arrived in Southern California, Santa Monica quickly developed into the region’s first recreational resort, with vacationers sometimes prospecting for gold along the beaches (Garbee et al. 2007: 20). Soon after the arrival of the Southern Pacific Railroad in the 1890s, Santa Monica lost out to San Pedro as the location for Los Angeles’ major seaport, enabling the town to maintain its quaint seaside charm. Tobacco millionaire and land developer Abbot Kinney developed the Ocean Park neighbourhood and its adjacent ‘Venice of America’, providing significant new residential areas alongside Santa Monica’s first of many major amusement parks. A whole string of wooden piers were built, key among them the Santa Monica Pier, the only one remaining today. Railroad and development magnate Henry Huntington invited the Hawaiian-Irish surfer George Freeth to the coast in 1907 to promote his Pacific Electric Railroad lines, paying him to demonstrate his skills at several venues along the beach. Freeth’s surfing and swimming lessons drew significant crowds and are credited with increasing ridership along Pacific Electric’s beach routes. The city’s population doubled to exceed 30,000 by the 1920s, and resort tourism became increasingly important in the city’s economic mix. The Miramar Hotel and the Club Casa del Mar opened their doors and the area surrounding Marion Davis’ Ocean House mansion became known as the Gold Coast. Santa Monica Bay became a key location for film production and film-star living.
Donald Douglas Sr built his first Aircraft Plant along with the airfield at Clover Park in Santa Monica in 1921, employing over 40,000 people by the early 1940s, many of them women. Douglas remained the area’s largest employer throughout the 1950s (Garbee et al. 2007: 27). From the late nineteenth century until the 1950s, a large number of amusement piers lined the Santa Monica shoreline, yet all but one were eventually brought down by storms, fire or bankruptcy. The opening of the Santa Monica freeway in 1966 promised to improve accessibility and bring additional economic development but it was routed through and thus tragically decimated Santa Monica’s long-established African-American enclave in the Pico District. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the city’s economic base changed significantly. The Douglas plant closed in 1968. Some health and sports-related businesses opened but the economy slowed overall. Many residents liked the slower pace of life in the city. By the late 1970s, Santa Monicans for Renters’ Rights (SMRR) was founded and soon emerged as a major local political force, gaining a council majority by the early 1980s and being instrumental in passing a rent control ordinance, partially as a response to early gentrification along Main Street and other parts of Ocean Park.
A new indoor mall, Santa Monica Place, was built in 1980, directly competing with the adjacent outdoor mall that opened in 1965 on Third Street. The eventual revitalization and transformation of the outdoor mall into the highly successful Santa Monica Third Street Promenade further cemented Santa Monica’s reputation as a desirable place for play and stay. The city re-zoned multiplexes out of other areas, forcing them to relocate along the mall, bringing in millions of dollars of investment. Interestingly, Third Street’s successful reinvention was not led by local business leaders but by then-mayor Denny Zane, one of the early SMRR leadership figures and someone Santa Monica residents inherently trusted (Pojani 2008: 147).
Since the late 1980s, economic and tourism development have been on a steady upward trend, much of it owing to the high quality of life progressive politicians were able to create and maintain in Santa Monica by consistently investing in public infrastructure, services, education and public amenities. The 1990s saw the opening of several new high-end hotels in the city, most notably Shutters On The Beach between the pier and Pico Boulevard, the Loews and Casa del Mar. The coastal stretch running from Santa Monica to Venice and Marina del Rey is now considered Southern California’s second most popular tourist destination, behind Disneyland but ahead of Hollywood and Downtown Los Angeles (Wallace et al. 2014). In the new millennium, hotel development became increasingly complemented with the relocation of major tech firms to the area.
Although Santa Monica is generally considered a model city for urban sustainability planning in the US (Farr 2012: 78; Riposa 2004), it still struggles to keep its famous beaches clean and water healthy (NRDC 2014: 2). Santa Monica also houses a large homeless population, is increasingly gridlocked by traffic and faces issues of displacement and a crisis of affordability.
Play, toil and stay: Santa Monica as a place to visit, work and live in
Santa Monica’s 92,185 residents have a median income of $62,816 (City Data n.d.). Two-thirds are renters, 63 per cent are White and 13 per cent Hispanic. Compare this to LA’s 3.9 million residents: their median income is $46,491, 52 per cent are renters (still the highest among major US cities) and the racial mix is 49 per cent Hispanic, 28 per cent White, 10 per cent Asian and 8.5 per cent Black (Civic Publications 2015). Median rents in Santa Monica climbed to $3,595 by mid-2015, compared to $2,300 in the LA metro area (according to www.zillow.com). Santa Monica has over 9,000 businesses, including branch offices for entertainment industry giants like MTV Networks, Universal Music Group and Lionsgate Universal and technology giants such as Google, Apple, Microsoft and, soon, Intel. In recent years, many tech start-ups from the Bay Area’s Silicon Valley have relocated or opened new offices in Santa Monica, Venice and nearby Playa Vista, earning the area the name Silicon Beach.
The city’s official tourism board, the Santa Monica Convention and Visitor’s Bureau (SMCVB), recorded record numbers for 2014: 7.9 million visitors generated $1.72 billion in revenue. Visitors’ average length of stay was just 1.44 days (but overnight visitors stayed an average of five days). With a transient occupancy tax rate of 14 per cent, these overnight stays added $45.5 million to the city’s General Fund (up 7.6 per cent from 42.3 million in 2012). Overnight visitors accounted for 67 per cent of visitor spending in 2014, down from 77 per cent the previous year. International visitors accounted for 55.5 per cent of visitors in 2014 and mostly came from Australia/New Zealand, England, Canada, Mexico and various EU countries (SMCVB 2015). Two-thirds of visitors mainly visit Santa Monica for pleasure/vacation, but one key business event is the American Film Market, held every November in the Loews Hotel. The AFM brings 8,000 people from 70 countries to Santa Monica for a week to sell, finance or buy films. Beach hotels are converted into movie marketplaces and the whole city is abuzz with movie screenings, conferences and parties.
Tourism as an integral part of urban development in Santa Monica: conflicts and key stakeholders
Santa Monica is a city with a lively history of political activism. Resident groups are sometimes divided between renters and homeowners and between business owners and employees, but overall, a loud and strong political force exists in this city advocating for ‘slow(er) growth’, i.e. a kind of economic growth that shuns massive development projects and resists city plans for additional office development even when it comes packaged as part of mixed-use projects that also propose residential and hotel units. Santa Monica may only have about 90,000 residents, but with work commuters, beachgoers and tourists, the city’s daytime population can swell to anywhere from 250,000 to 450,000 people, with weekend congestion at times surpassing weekday rush hour traffic. Not surprisingly, many residents are thus increasingly wary of any developments further exacerbating this trend.
Urban politics in Santa Monica has also long been defined by a stark contrast between its upper class, increasingly super-rich, celebrity-studded and overwhelmingly white North of Montana area, where the median sales price for residential homes lay above $3 million in 2014 and median household incomes are above $115,000, and the Pico area to the south, where individual homes sell for a quarter of the price and median household incomes are around $57,000.
Santa Monica has been governed by a city charter reliant upon a mayor–council system since 1906, but corruption and inefficiency in the 1930s brought about the adoption of a new city charter in 1946, which is still active today. It is still based on a council system, with seven city council members reviewing, setting and passing key local laws and decisions. Political forces in the city remain divided between (the nominal majority of) renters and (politically well organized) homeowners as well as business owners and developers, including hotels. For the last three decades, the political action committee (PAC) Santa Monicans for Renters Rights (SMRR) has dominated Santa Monica local politics. All council members, school board officials and planning commissioners elected in the 2013 mid-term elections had been endorsed by SMRR.2 SMRR is by no means a monolithic organization, however, covering a spectrum ranging from fierce anti-development individuals to moderate players more amenable to responsible development. In 2014, SMRR for the first time endorsed a slate of all anti-development candidates. Renters also cover an increasingly wide demographic spectrum, representing many different ethnicities, income brackets and political viewpoints.
Hotel workers are politically organized through Unite Here! Local 11, the local hospitality workers union that traditionally turned out to support SMRR-endorsed candidates, often joining forces and bringing in lots of volunteers for door-to-door campaigns. The fight for hotel workers’ unionization and living wage campaigns was primarily led by an organization called Santa Monicans Allied for Responsible Tourism (SMART). But few hospitality workers can afford to live in Santa Monica, which weakens their voice. On the pro-development, pro-business side, the key local PAC is Santa Monicans United for a Responsible Future (SMURF). They often stand diametrically opposed to the city’s leading anti-development group Santa Monica Coalition for a Livable City (SMCLC). In 2014 a new anti-development group called Residocracy rose to the fore over resistance against a large mixed-use project in the Bergamot area, a fight described in more detail in vignette II. Many other specific-purpose PACs supporting or fighting a multitude of causes exist, most recently relating to the closure of Santa Monica’s small aircraft airport.
Protest and resistance in the tourist city: three vignettes
The three vignettes below illustrate some of the central fault lines that exist in urban economic and tourism development in Santa Monica today.
Vignette I: Hotel workers campaigning for a living wage – protesting and resisting tourism-related exploitation
Despite the city’s heavy reliance on tourism, workers and residents have resisted ‘selling out’ to tourism’s private interests. The movement that received the most attention is the living wage campaign led in the early 2000s by Santa Monicans Allied for Responsible Tourism (SMART). While eventually evolving into a much broader community movement, SMART formed in 1996 to fight an effort by the Fairmont Miramar Hotel, a historic beachfront luxury hotel in downtown Santa Monica, to decertify its union. Originally built in 1924, the Fairmont then remained the city’s last unionized hotel. The coalition included the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union (HERE), community activists, clergymen as well as the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE), a local research and advocacy organization (Erskine and Marblestone 2006: 250). After its success in the union fight, the coalition moved on to a tackle a new element of workers’ rights: a living wage.3 Benefitting from city investment and a policy that froze hotel development in the 1980s, many of Santa Monica’s hotels still paid some of the lowest wages in the state – an average of $14,250 a year with no health benefits (Flad 2002; Gottlieb et al. 2006). In 1997, supported by LAANE, the Los Angeles City Council passed a living wage, and Pasadena passed its own ordinance during the same time period. Inspired by LAANE’s success in LA, SMART decided to bring the living wage to Santa Monica, specifically to the exploited hotel workers of the city’s tourism industry. Mobilizing a broad-based coalition of community activists, hotel workers, college students, law students and community members new to activism, SMART popularized the idea of introducing a living wage in Santa Monica and by 2000 had drafted a living wage ordinance (LWO) to recommend to the Santa Monica City Council. The proposed ordinance was designed to target the businesses in the city’s coastal zone, which benefitted the most from the tourism industry and had the greatest proportion of low-wage workers (Erskine and Marblestone 2006: 251). The living wage itself was set at $10.69/hour plus health benefits (or an additional $2.50/hour if not provided).
Before the city could approve or reject the proposal, a business coalition of opponents pre-empted SMART’s LWO by getting its own ‘living wage’ proposal placed on the November 2000 ballot as Proposition KK. The coalition misleadingly called itself Santa Monicans for a Living Wage, and proposed a much weaker LWO that featured a wage of $8.52/hour and applied only to city employees and businesses receiving $25,000 in city contracts, thus covering only about 62 people in total. Thanks to intensive campaigning and canvassing by SMART Proposition KK did not pass (Erskine and Marblestone 2006: 252). After the election, the City Council began working again with SMART and the business community to draft an LWO for the city. Some of the council members were concerned about the legality of indirectly targeting a specific industry and as a result, the actual ordinance adopted by the City Council was less ambitious than the original proposal, dropping the required wage to $10.50/hour and applying only to businesses grossing more than $5 million in a year (City of Santa Monica 2001).
The LWO nonetheless met business opposition yet again, this time with a coalition called Fighting Against Irresponsible Regulation (FAIR). FAIR lead a referendum campaign to put the recently approved LWO on the ballot for repeal. Despite SMART’s efforts to discourage people from signing petitions, FAIR got the required 10 per cent of voters to sign, and Measure JJ to repeal the LWO appeared on the ballot. In another act of questionable politics, three weeks before the election, FAIR used the Political Reform Act to create three committees called ‘Quality Schools Coalition’, ‘Pro-Choice Voters Committee’ and ‘Democratic Voters Ballot Guide’ and sent out pamphlets to make it appear as if these groups were against the Santa Monica LWO. Predictably, on voting day, Santa Monica’s LWO was rejected and subsequently repealed. SMART later organized a public hearing on the election to expose FAIR’s deceptive tactics, but while FAIR was found guilty, the repeal held (Erskine and Marblestone 2006: 253–5).
Despite the LWO’s failure at the polls, Santa Monica and HERE did not give up on the living wage. In 2005 the city of Santa Monica officially adopted an LWO into its city code, setting a moving living wage requirement for city employees and the employees of city contractors that reached $15.37 in 2014, as per the Santa Monica Municipal Code, Chapter 4.65. Additionally, several hotels came to individual agreements with the union and others instated higher wages as part of their development agreement (DA) process with the city (Islas 2013a, 2013b). The political climate in the rest of LA County has also been changing quickly. In 2012 Long Beach passed a minimum wage of $13/hour. Los Angeles, meanwhile, passed a minimum wage of $15.37 for all hotel workers in 2014 (Lowery 2012; Walton 2014) and then made national headlines in 2015 with a commitment to push its general minimum wage to $15/hour by 2020 (Lazo 2015).
Vignette II: Residents waging density wars: protesting and resisting dense mixed-use projects
Homeowners and renters in Santa Monica are often united in their concerns over overdevelopment in Santa Monica, but alliances can be brittle. This second vignette is best begun by a quick look at Santa Monica’s Land Use and Circulation Element (LUCE), a hefty 540-page major planning document approved in 2010 after a series of lengthy and heated public debates that started in 2004 (City of Santa Monica 2010). Visionary in many ways, Santa Monica’s LUCE won several major local and national planning awards. Among other things, the plan calls for the development of a new Specific Plan for Downtown, the city’s main commercial and visitor destination, and dedicates significant attention to two other major areas where battles over development have been fierce: the Civic Center Area, for which a Specific Plan is already in its implementation phase, and the so-called Bergamot Area, a clustering of creative sector venues where residents successfully mixed plans for a major mixed-use redevelopment project in 2014.
In fact, by regular North American urban development standards, the LUCE is incredibly restrictive, specifying that almost all of the city’s remaining undeveloped land area should be conserved and that land use changes in the city should be directed to commercial and industrial areas that comprise only 4 per cent of the land area, mainly concentrated around the Civic Center and Bergamot areas. Both areas lie mostly within walking distance of a new light rail line that is set to open in 2016, allowing residents, workers and visitors direct transit access to many key LA locations, including Downtown LA. The intention to locate future development near this important new transit line was a huge impetus for the development of the LUCE, and for rethinking development in Santa Monica more generally.
In the Civic Center area, two adjoining redevelopment projects have just been completed. The area is cut off from the dense, vibrant Downtown commercial area by the I-10 Freeway and features overly wide streets and an overabundance of parking lot space. The landscape ‘starchitecture’ firm, James Corner Field Operations, best known for designing the Highline in NYC, moulded six acres of surface lots into the award-winning Tongva Park, completed in the fall of 2013. With its different themed hills, meadows, curved walkways alongside drought-tolerant gardens and striking vista points overlooking the ocean, the park became an instant hit with many residents and visitors. Immediately adjacent to Tongva Park, the Village at Santa Monica mixes 160 affordable rental units with 158 luxury residences developed by Related Companies and partners. A central feature is the ‘walk street’ through the site that connects pedestrians from Main Street to Ocean Avenue and is dotted with retail, restaurants and landscaped plazas. Public reactions to the project cover the entire spectrum from praise to outrage. The LEED-Silver-certified affordable Belmar apartments, which included work/live studios with roll-up fronts as well as 1–3 bedroom apartments, were targeted at artists, actors and other creative class workers rather than low-income hotel or other service sector workers, who were priced out of Santa Monica long ago. Lottery applications were provided via the Actors Fund (2013). Rents were as low as $439/month for studios and $650/month for three bedrooms, compared to Santa Monica’s average rental price of $2,600/month (Logan 2014). The two luxury condo complexes, the Waverly and the Seychelles, meanwhile, offer 1–3 bedroom residences priced between $1 and $4 million dollars. Amenities offered at these locations are largely congruent with those of a high-end luxury hotel.
For the Bergamot area, the City developed an entirely new plan. In June 2013, a draft document of over 200 pages was released after extensive community feedback (City of Santa Monica 2013). Like the LUCE, the Bergamot Area plan was a solid planning effort that sought to address the essential struggles of densification in Santa Monica via a long-term vision that hoped to transform this rather drab light-industrial and commercial area into a transit-accessible, bike- and walk-friendly district for creative-class workers and, increasingly, outside visitors. Planners envisioned the future of the area as one where visitors would arrive by light rail or bicycle to enjoy the art galleries, improved amenities and dining options as well as a new boutique hotel. However, while planning efforts for a revamped Bergamot Arts Center appear to be moving forward, the corresponding plans for the adjoining Bergamot Transit Village were toppled by community resistance.
On 4 February 2014 Santa Monica’s City Council approved the Bergamot Transit Village (BTV), a massive 765,000 square foot (about 70,000 square metres) mixed-use development project on the site of an old Papermate factory sitting adjacent to the future Exposition light rail transit stop at 26th Street and Olympic Avenue. BTV included 375,000 square feet of creative office space, 29,300 square feet of retail and 330,000 square feet of housing (471 apartments and 27 live/work units for artists). As a commercial developer, owner Hines underemphasized the residential potential of the site while at the same time drawing the immediate ire of locals worried about additional traffic impacts in an area with already nightmarish congestion.
In January 2014, Residocracy, a new ‘slow-growth’ group emerged, quickly vying to become a major political force. Residocracy founder Armen Melkonians led the campaign for a veto referendum petition, which was also supported by SMRR, SMCLC and many other community groups including all seven surrounding neighbourhood associations. They were mainly concerned that BTV would bring up to 7,000 new daily car trips to the area.4 Their petition gathered 13,500 signatures, far more than the 6,091 required, thus forcing the City Council to act. Rather than put the veto referendum on the 4 November 2014 election ballot, the council voted to rescind the development plan. Residocracy’s activism ultimately resulted in the developer Hines walking away from the entire project and selling the Papermate factory site to another developer, Clarion, which wants to reactivate existing entitlements and simply redevelop the site for office use as of right. Clarion will thus not need to provide any of the community-oriented benefits or innovative street redesigns associated with the larger mixed-use residential/retail/office project, although their bland project will still generate similar amounts of additional car trips. As Barragan (2015) aptly summarized, ‘BVT opponents were worried about traffic and they’re going to get it anyway.’ Clearly, slow-growth proponents once again held the upper hand in Santa Monica by successfully stopping a large mixed-use project, but the pyrrhic nature of this victory is hard to miss. The proponents of ‘slow growth’ are primarily older, white residents, many of whom are homeowners. This stands in sharp contrast to the 96 per cent of the city’s Hispanics and 75 per cent of Asian Americans who had been fully supportive of the Bergamot plan (Godbe Research 2014; Smith 2014).
Another important recent battleground for contested development takes us back to the Fairmont Miramar Hotel. Located on Ocean Avenue just one block away from the Third Street Promenade, the Miramar was designated as a ‘prominent site’ for community development in the city’s General Plan, according to the 2010 LUCE amendment (Epstein 2013). In 2011 the hotel proposed a LUCE-friendly plan to develop the site into a mixed-use location with larger hotel rooms, underground parking, expanded food, beverage and retail space, condominiums, a one-acre public park space and an off-site affordable housing project (Santa Monica Daily Press 2011). The project sparked immediate controversy and fierce opposition by the adjacent Huntley Hotel. As the two largest hotels in Santa Monica, they are clear economic rivals. The Huntley lies just to the east of Miramar on the other side of Second Street, and Miramar’s building plans put the Huntley’s ocean views in jeopardy. Given its size, the Miramar proposal is subject to the city’s so-called ‘float-up process’, in which proposed projects are to be presented at public hearings with the community and the Planning Commission before complete plans are made. Public interest was tremendous: early hearings were standing room only.
While many were in support of the revitalization project, many other locals were concerned about bringing in such dense development, especially when it had the potential to block the ocean views of those who lived and worked nearby. The Huntley, eager to fuel this fire, formed Santa Monicans Against the Miramar Expansion (SMATME) and began distributing anti-development flyers and other informational materials, warning of increased traffic, loss of street-level light and calling the project ‘Miramarmageddon’ (Santa Monica Daily Press 2012). From here the mudslinging continued, reaching almost comical proportions. Miramar responded to the Huntley’s campaigning with a PR strategy of its own, launching a website called HuntleyFacts.com, which accused the Huntley of being against organized labour (the Huntley is a non-unionized hotel) and affordable housing, committing tax evasion and of making questionable campaign contributions to try to block the Miramar expansion (Huntley n.d.). In response to public comments Miramar changed its plan in 2013 to a layout that will maintain the current footprint of the hotel (thus reducing ocean view obstruction), but also features a 21-storey tower (Archibald 2013). This appeased many community members, but some, including the Huntley, still continued to protest vehemently. The fight has gone on in PR campaigns, opinion pieces, community polls and threats of legal action. At the time of writing (mid-2015) Miramar was still planning to go through with their project but will have to continue to contest with strong and adamant opposition from anti-development advocates.
Vignette III: Rethinking the new ‘sharing economy’ – protesting and resisting the ‘Airbnbification’ of Santa Monica
While many residents are opposed to new and expanded hotel operations, many are equally dismayed at the recent expansion of ‘hotel alternatives’ in their city. Similar to other popular urban tourist destinations around the world (see Opillard on San Francisco in this volume), Santa Monica has seen a spectacular rise in so-called ‘sharing economy’ offerings via sites such as Airbnb. The overall situation is still somewhat messy, murky and in flux, with less clearly defined front lines of protest and resistance than in the other two vignettes. Airbnb turns residents into hosts and thus into competitors for the hotel industry. By extension, it potentially pits increasingly squeezed renters in the least affordable market in the nation against struggling hotel workers. But while Airbnb may have started out in 2007 as (mostly) a ‘sharing economy’ concept promoting simple peer-to-peer rentals, it is now at a very different stage of its operations. At around $13 billion, Airbnb has a higher market value than hotel giants Hyatt or Wyndham (at $8.4 and $9.3 billion, respectively) (Bradshaw 2014, also cited in Saman 2015: 5). The highly successful ‘culting’ of its brand (Atkin 2004) is based upon establishing a sense of community among its customers who are to buy into Airbnb’s ‘San Francisco air mattress’ founding myth. In a blatant act of self-boosterism and rhetoric of ‘community building’, the company released an ‘analysis’ immodestly entitled Airbnb’s Positive Impact in Los Angeles, claiming that host incomes and visitors’ spending generated an overall economic impact of $312 million while supporting 2,600 jobs (Airbnb 2015a, 2015b). This is how Airbnb characterizes its local ‘community’:
Airbnb hosts in the City of Los Angeles have been welcoming guests into their homes since late 2008. Over the past six years, Los Angeles residents have formed a vibrant Airbnb community, sharing unique experiences with travellers from around the world. [. . .] Between May 2013 and April 2014, 4,490 Los Angeles hosts welcomed guests into their homes. [. . .] 38 per cent of hosts are low to middle income, [earning] below $65,900/year. Almost half of Airbnb hosts work in the arts, entertainment and recreation occupations.
(Airbnb 2015a)
The spin in the corresponding press release is even more extreme, basically recasting Airbnb not as a multi-billion dollar business empire but as a charitable, environmentally beneficial endeavour that ‘can help locals out’ in multiple ways:
‘Home sharing helps Angelenos stay in their homes, pursue creative careers, and share the city they love with visitors from around the world,’ said Airbnb Regional Head of Public Policy David Owen. ‘Nearly three quarters of all Airbnb hosts use the money they earn to stay in their homes and about 30 per cent of hosts say hosting helped them to start a new business.’ [. . .] ‘Many hosts are aspiring stars in the entertainment industry, and the additional income from Airbnb is what allows them to keep their LA dreams alive.’ By helping residents share their homes, Airbnb also promotes the efficient use of existing resources and a more environmentally sustainable way of traveling. The study found that home sharing results in a significant reduction in energy, water use and waste generation, compared to hotel stays, and also encourages sustainability awareness among both residents and visitors.
(Ibid.)
A closer look at Santa Monica’s and Los Angeles’ Airbnb market reveals this rhetoric that touts win-win ‘creative class peer sharing’ as a preferable, personalized alternative to hotel booking as a partial truth at best (for additional insights, also see http://www.insideairbnb.com). The listed units are a far cry from the proverbial ‘actor’s couch’ lower-income tourists were supposed to crash on: nearly 90 per cent of the rental offers were for whole units, often listed by leasing companies with multiple units. By early 2015, as many as 8,400 hosts and more than 11,400 units were listed for rent in Los Angeles (which for the purposes of the report included all of Santa Monica) via the rental site, clearly indicating its growing influence on the Los Angles tourism sector. And Santa Monica and the adjacent beach community of Venice Beach together were responsible for a whopping 40 per cent of total Airbnb revenue in Los Angeles (Saman 2015: 29). Yet contrary to Airbnb’s own claims, a report by the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (Saman 2015) detailed how this impact is likely to be negative rather than positive, especially in the longer term:
By incentivizing the large-scale conversion of residential units into tourist accommodations, Airbnb forces neighbourhoods and cities to bear the costs of its business model. Residents must adapt to a tighter housing market. Increased tourist traffic alters neighbourhood character while introducing new safety risks. Cities lose out on revenue that could have been invested in improving the basic quality of life for its residents. Jobs are lost and wages are lowered in the hospitality industry. [. . .] Airbnb has created a nexus between tourism and housing that hurts renters. The 7,316 units taken off the rental market by Airbnb is equivalent to seven years’ of affordable housing construction in Los Angeles. In Venice, as many as 12.5 per cent of all housing units have become Airbnb units, all without public approval. There are 360 Airbnb units per square mile in Venice and long-time residents who never intended to live next to hotels now find themselves dealing with noise and safety concerns that negatively impact their quality of life.
(Saman 2015: 2–3)
The report distinguished between three main categories of hosts, namely ‘on-site hosts’ who actually ‘share’ a room or other portion of their home, hosts who rent out a single unit and hosts who are actually leasing companies or landlords taking advantage of the lucrative short-term rental market. And while on-site hosts actually make up a majority of all listings (52 per cent), they only generate 11 per cent of all Airbnb revenue, while the multiple listers, who only make up 6 per cent of all agents, generate more than a third of all revenue. Generating considerable buzz and press in local Los Angeles real estate and urban development blog sites such as Curbed LA (Kudler 2013, 2015a, 2015b), the report prompted Airbnb to delete listings and cancel bookings for some of its biggest hosts, mostly in and around Santa Monica. A month after the report was released, the Santa Monica City Council voted unanimously to curtail allowable Airbnb operations to on-site hosting and to require hosts to obtain a business licence from the city and pay a 14 per cent hotel tax. This new legislation is tough for many Santa Monicans who relied on the additional rental income collected whenever they were away. Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti, meanwhile, simply wants to use taxes collected from Airbnb to bankroll a new affordable housing trust fund (http://www.lamayor.org/sotc).
The ‘Airbnbification’ of Santa Monica and surrounding Los Angeles is yet another indicator of changing practices of place consumption (as discussed in the Introduction to this volume). Indicative of the rise in so-called ‘post-tourists’, many visitors like to ‘live like locals’. Sometimes, new practices purposely circumvent established regulations, taxes and protections in the hospitality industry. At the same time, we have witnessed impressive recent labour victories in the hotel worker arena. Clearly, more research is necessary in order to better unpack and unbundle the implications which the actions of new opportunists in the so-called ‘sharing economy’, such as Airbnb and others, have on urban tourist economies in highly valuable, high-profile and high-stakes markets such as Santa Monica’s.
Concluding remarks: what does Santa Monica teach us about (new?) urban tourism?
When discussing patterns of protest and resistance in the arena of urban tourism in Santa Monica, a complex picture emerges that involves different interest groups – residents, employees and business leaders in the city. As the city densifies and its economy further develops and diversifies, the call for the equitable sharing of tourism profits from hotel worker unions intertwines with the struggle to equitably share increasingly scarce public spaces, infrastructures and amenities between new and old residents and a much larger daytime population that also includes hundreds of thousands of additional visitors and employees. The vignettes above detailed how hotel workers struggle for fair wages and fair treatment in the tourism service industry, how residents fight back against the perceived over-densification of their city and how hosts and commercial landlords now all welcome visitors to Santa Monica via new short-term sharing sites. Is Santa Monica a typical or an atypical example for protest and resistance in urban tourism and does it offer broader insights into the state of tourism in post-industrial cities across the Northern Hemisphere?
As is the case in other urban tourism hotspots around the world, Santa Monica’s dual reliance on both a vibrant tourism sector and a strong creative class economy effectively blurs the boundaries between visitors and a new class of residents it seeks to attract. One might say that although, early on, Santa Monica at least partially fitted the characteristics of a typical ‘tourist city’ that continuously (re-)built infrastructures to attract tourists (Judd and Fainstein 1999), these spaces never became exclusionary, insulated tourist ‘bubbles’ (Fainstein 2007). In fact, Santa Monica’s most important tourist amenities – the beaches, the Pier, the Third Street Promenade and, more recently, Tongva Park – are all public spaces and they can be equally enjoyed by locals and visitors who are drawn to Santa Monica as a general ‘creative urban area’. Santa Monica is somewhat atypical in that it is already so thoroughly gentrified that there are really no ‘alternative tourist spaces’ left to discover. The city has reached a breaking point in terms of its affordability for lower- and middle-income residents, many of whom are regularly spending half or more of their income on rent.
But the case of Santa Monica also illustrates the nascent attempts to regulate the manifestations of the so-called new ‘sharing economy’, such as Airbnb. Moreover, old-fashioned progressive labour victories are not all a thing of the past. We also see that residents in the ‘new tourist city’ of Santa Monica are not always as monolithically divided between homeowners and renters as might be expected, but that differences are more apparent along race, class and generational lines. Many of Santa Monica’s new tech sector-oriented residents crave rather than fear the construction of large new mixed-use developments that the older residents are so wary of. And younger and non-white residents are not just much more supportive of Santa Monica’s efforts to ease its housing crunch and traffic congestion via transit-oriented mixed-use developments around the new Expo light rail line, they are also more likely to take advantage of its revamped bus system, its newly expanded network of bike lanes and its brand new bike sharing system. For the time being, however, a lot of what many planners and urban designers would consider ‘progressive planning and policy-making’ seems still to get trampled by the anti-density activism of particular groups of residents who continue to resist and resent both the advent and expansion of Silicon Beach and the advancement of beachgoers into their wealthy single-family home neighbourhoods.