Santa Monica Tree Executions: What’s wrong with these
pictures?
By Cary Shulman and Hillary
Kaye
Nothing, except the City of Santa
Monica is going to replace trees like the one on the left with trees like the
one on the right. Suppose you need a tree in this era of global warming to
absorb CO2 and pollution. This tree should also provide canopy shade to relieve
the heat produced by urban concrete, cool in the summer, keep rainfall from the
drains in winter and give a sense of neighborhood. Which tree would you choose?
The big one? Not Santa Monica.
On Sept. 21 of this year, Santa Monica
posted notices on 54 mature Ficus trees and 21 Palm trees on 2nd and 4th streets
between Wilshire and Colorado announcing they were to be removed. You might ask
what are the reasons offered for this ecological insanity that will cost million
of dollars? Well they vary depending on whether they are being challenged or
not.
At first, Santa Monica said they
were removing 21 of the trees because they were diseased. When that was
challenged, the reasons expanded to include internal decay, extensive root
pruning, poor canopy structure, damaged canopies from oversized vehicles, design
factors and too large for relocation.
A short walk to see the trees along
2nd and 4th street will reveal the truth. Healthy, mature trees with a lifespan
of 150 years, bringing much needed tree canopy coverage to the downtown area. As
for the gingko replacement trees, Knoxville’s Street Tree Master Plan
said: “Rows of ginkgo trees are not recommended as street trees because of
their slow growth and spindly appearance for many years.”
So what is up with all this? Removing
Ficus trees that the Center for Urban Forest Research says is the second most
beneficial tree in Santa Monica and has yearly netted the city $1 million over
management costs because of it numerous benefits. Well the key phrase is
“design” factors. It’s part of a $8 million redevelopment plan
for 2nd and 4th streets.
Kathleen
Rawson of The Bay District Corporation, the consulting firm set up by the City
of Santa Monica to aid in downtown planning, has said it plain. She would like
to see 2nd and 4th streets become another 3rd Street Promenade, and that
doesn’t include Ficus trees. To be fair, the Bay District Board originally
split on the issue of removing the
trees.
To give you some idea of what
this “promenading” of downtown Santa Monica means there’s this
quote from the Los Angeles Business Journal of January 8, 2001.
“Santa Monica’s Third
Street Promenade is undergoing a change of character as independent restaurants,
increasingly falling victim to escalating rents, are driven to cheaper space on
less trafficked streets.
Operating on
narrow margins and unable to compete with their national retailer neighbors
(corporate chains), independent restaurants have seen the popularity of the
trendy retail strip, once their life blood, turn against them. In a matter of
years, local real estate and retail observers said, the Promenade might resemble
an indoor mall of chain stores within a halo of restaurants on Second, Fourth,
Broadway and Wilshire.”
So in
effect this plan will not only destroy 54 mature Ficus trees and 21 Palm trees,
but also the “halo” of small businesses on 2nd and 4th streets with
them. All vestiges of what made Santa Monica unique will soon be gone. In its
place a clone of urban malls everywhere. Just how many Tommy Hilfiger stores
does a country need?
What we are
dealing with here is not just gentrification but corporatization. Who else can
pay the soaring rents charged by real estate speculators. And since the downtown
area will be just a corporate clone, it will have to compete with the other
look-alikes for attendance. And so the spiral of development and overdevelopment
will be everlasting. The escalating cost of real estate per square foot will
inevitably send building skyward.
So
what does the public say about preserving the trees and Santa Monica. Plenty,
only the City Council isn’t listening. Shortly after the plan was
introduced in 2005, business owners on 4th street organized a petition that was
signed by more than 1,600 tree supporters. After the removal notices were put up
on Sept. 21 of this year, the issue really heated
up.
The following day the Treesavers, a
group started by activist Jerry Rubin, green ribboned every tree along 2nd and
4th streets with the words “Save the Trees.” By 6 am the next
morning the city of Santa Monica had seen to it that their signs were taken down
to silence their voices of protest to try to limit public awareness.
The fact that the trees could be removed at
any moment swelled the Treesaver ranks. They now included John Quigly, the
environmentalist who tree sat for a year to save a 400-year-old Pico Oak Tree in
Santa Clarita that came to be called “Old Glory.”
The internet and newspapers took up
the Santa Monica Ficus story and the public which had largely been uninformed
about the pending destruction now added their voices to the protests. In a
manner more suited to Cornelius Vanderbilt than an elected body, the City
Council has ignored all this, in effect saying, “The public be
damned.”
The “damned”
public meanwhile have filed for Landmark status for the trees. This latest
development essentially stalls any work on the trees until the Landmarks
Commission brings the matter up during one of its scheduled meetings anytime
within the next 65 days. The commission probably won’t hear the matter
until its December meeting.
It remains
to be seen whether Santa Monica’s reputation as a “green city”
refers to its environmentalism or just refers to the color of all the money it
makes its developers.
For more
information on the trees and to sign their petition: www.thetreesavers.org and
treesavers.blogspot.com.
Posted: Thu - November 1, 2007 at 02:11 PM