Over the prone bodies of two City Council members who live in West Culver City, a homeless shelter sponsored by a gold-standard name, Upward Bound House, was squeakingly approved last night for a West Culver commercial neighborhood that, itself, is in the midst of a ballyhooed transition.
The quality of overheated rhetoric — early this morning — by Council members declined perceptibly in the final 80 minutes of an enormously long meeting.
The disappointed Mayor Alan Corlin and the disappointed Scott Malsin were warriors. They employed the strongest words and logic at their command to stave off what everyone in the room knew was inevitable.
Mayor Corlin and Mr. Malsin rode gallantly but vainly to the rescue of their disciplined West Culver City neighbors.
Too Much Momentum
The two fiercest verbal warriors on the City Council, Mr. Corlin and Mr. Malsin, fighting City Hall as it were, tried to lasso a runaway freight train, as represented by the views of Vice Mayor Carol Gross and Councilmen Gary Silbiger and Steve Rose.
Standing up stoutly for their West Culver neighbors, the mayor and Mr. Malsin dipped into the deepest crevices of their considerable bags of locutional largesse, hoping to produce magic words that would convince their adversaries.
In one of the spectacular neighborhood uprisings in modern Culver City history, an apparent record of 69 speakers and a dozen more card-writers — 81 passionate voices were heard.
Wrong Place, Wrong Timing
In the 3 to 2 vote to reject a vociferous appeal of the Planning Commission’s confirmation of the homeless shelter’s renovation plans for a low-rent motel last autumn, the five Council members gave four different reasons for their positions.
Only Mr. Malsin and the mayor were in tune with each other.
They concurred heartily, in steel-wool terms, with their aroused Westside neighbors that Upward Bound is the wrong enterprise for a shaky neighborhood that is trying to re-envision its footing.
The mayor was “disgusted” last night — “This is being shoved down our throats,” he roared in his best stentorian tone. “When I hear that no other property was available for Upward Bound, let me be blunt. I don’t believe it.”
Different Businesses Needed
Good organization, he conceded, but it is the wrong time and the wrong location for such a business because the neighborhood thirsts for genuinely muscular commercial help, an influx of creative “pedestrian-oriented” businesses, not a homeless facility.
Upward’s pending arrival “will make it economically distasteful for all other businesses in the area,” Mr. Corlin said.
“We need that intersection. We need it as an economic stimulus for the neighborhood.”
In lashing out at the tactics of Upward Bound — the plan to move into Culver City has been in the works for three years but the Council only became aware of it nine months ago, he said — the mayor’s net caught a few big fish. The mayor’s club of criticism was pointedly aimed at an old City Hall favorite, attorney Paul Jacobs, who works pro-bono for Upward, and evidently public relations maven Geoff Maleman and attorney Ken Kutcher.
Aware that hundreds of important Westsiders are associated with Upward, Mr. Corlin fumed that the organization is just so, so perfect. “They do everything right,” he said, with a blend of perceived admiration and sarcasm.
Mayor Fires Salvos
Mr. Corlin and Mr. Malsin were outraged that a homeless shelter, which both felt creeped into town on cat’s paws, should be almost stealthily — and forcibly — inserted into a neighborhood that City Hall has been promising for years to revitalize with fashionable, revenue-generating enterprises.
As is his custom, Mayor Corlin did not hold back. He loaded his cannon and fired.
“A mistake was made by our city staff,” he charged. “They did not tell the Upward Bound people that putting a non-profit there was inappropriate for that part of Washington Boulevard.
“I feel sorry for all the poor people (in West Washington) who bought into our line of b.s.
‘What Outreach?’
“I am not embarrassed that we have Upward Bound, even though I don’t think we have the same (agreement with the organization) that Santa Monica does.
“I am embarrassed that the Upward Bound people, who claim to have done outreach, did not make an effort to reach the right people (especially in City Hall).
“You may have won this battle,” said the steaming mayor. But he added, tartly, that he expects the Upward Bound officials to return to City Hall in half a year, when a different Council has been seated, to request new favors.
“While it may be expeditious for the Upward Bound people to covet the SunBay Motel (property) because they will have a cheaper time renovating it, the potential damage that a non-profit will do in that area is incalculable.
“Upward Bound’s unwillingness to be flexible, reasonable, even at this 11th hour, I hope is not a true reflection of the way they will run their property.”
Time to Go Hunting?
With equal iciness in his tone, Mr. Malsin said that if Upward Bound wanted to become a truly invested member of the Culver City community, as it claimed several times, it could do residents and nearby merchants a favor. He indicated that if Upward Bound would immediately set about pursuing an alternate property, the homeless organization would be repairing what in his view was an injustice that just had been inflicted on Westside residents and the city as a whole.
Mr. Malsin’s speech largely echoed the one- or two-note drums of war that objecting merchants and residents had banged all evening.
Perhaps aware that they would be accused of Nimby-ism — Not In My Back Yard — many, possibly a majority, of the speakers raised the spectre of Nimby-ism before the claim could be leveled against them.
‘Children Imperiled’
With a surge of energy, scores of protestors proclaimed in unison that they were not against having a homeless shelter in their neighborhood. Rather, a number said they were worried for the safety of the children belonging to the single moms who would mainly comprise the adult population at the shelter.
Vehicle traffic was a minute-by-minute threat to the welfare of defenseless children, they said. Further, they added, the immediately neighborhood has become appallingly blighted, scarcely maintained and stands even now as an aesthetic eyesore to the least discerning observer.
In speaking for the Council majority, Councilman Steve Rose pounced on the neighborhood-in-rags argument.
He spun it around, rebuking merchants and residents for not seizing the initiative themselves, for not displaying a patch of pride and scrubbing clean their environs instead of complaining.
One View, Two Perspectives
From the audience, it was plain old war, neighbor against neighbor.
People who live within view of each other argued as if they came from opposite sides of the world. The pro-homeless crowd asserted vigorously that the neighborhood is as safe as a church sanctuary. The anti-shelter residents said the neighborhood was so crime-ridden they would not walk the streets even if armed with two snarling dogs.
Here is a statistic that may have been incidental but should be noted: Forty-seven speakers favored Upward Bound’s arrival, stating enthusiastically that a reputable homeless organization happily is awaited while 34 well-organized protestors said anywhere but the busy, traffic-drenched corner of West Washington and Beethoven.
Geography was the main subject of the meeting.
Pride of Home
More overtly than their colleagues, Mr. Corlin and Mr. Malsin, from the dais, frequently and proudly allude to their home bases. Casual observers know where each gentleman lives and is reminded regularly how involved each is in his area.
The other three Council members probably never have mentioned their home streets or neighborhoods.
The emotional, free-swinging almost bar-room-style skid by City Council members at the end followed 4 hours of highly repetitious opinion-slinging by 81 protestors and supporters, probably a record number.
Seldom has a battle this bitter been contested in Council Chambers, which groaned from an extraordinary overload of emotionally wrought persons for 7 hours, pretty close to another record.
The Fire Marshall must have been out of the state because the capacity for Chambers was heavily oversubscribed. After every seat was filled, perhaps 125 persons encircled the auditorium chairs. Dozens more persons were forced to stand outside the large doors, beyond the hearing area, in the capacious vestibule of City Hall.
From sheer exhaustion, the meeting (and not a few of the many participants who hung around until the end) dropped dead at 1:18 this morning.
This was Marathon Man cloned times a hundred.
The corpse of the meeting took to his death bed 5 hours after the angrily divided City Council began debating the placement of a homeless shelter at the corner of West Washington Boulevard and Beethoven on the site of a motel that never was mistaken for the Waldorf.
