Pity the poor developer, attired in oversized bib overalls, fraying flannel red shirt and clodhoppers with mismatched shoestrings, who drives his wheezing, dying, dust-drenched old Chevy into Culver City, hoping to sell an imaginative enough project to City Hall so that he can feed his large, usually hungry, family down on the farm for the next several years.
Possibly you may not recognize the profile since it did not match up with any of the stone-faced team of suits that monopolized the first couple of rows at this week’s Entrada Office Tower deliberations by the City Council.
My colleague Tom Supple nailed the developers perfectly when he branded them as undertakers.
But even in our town, morticians are people, too, with a darned strong right to make a living, a lusty living.
Let us not get carried away by “will of the people” hysteria.
Let us not mistake “the will of the people” for mob rule.
Let us not mistakenly call a chorus of loud voices “the will of the people.”
Says who?
Starting with Bob Champion’s illy conceived venture into Culver City a couple of years ago, developers ever since have been smeared with more mud than has been dropped on a a sensible Culver City Republican.
It Ain’t a Numbers or a Volume Game
Even though a certain City Councilman confoundedly disagrees, America and parts of Culver City still support a representative form of government. It is not the job of Council members to instinctively bow to the loudest voices across town. Elected officials generally are perceived to have more information and thereby more knowledge on certain disputed subjects. You may lobby, or badger, them all day. But the binding decision is theirs. That is my point. If you disagree, vote them out of office. But voters usually have conveniently short memories.
Councilman Gary Silbiger’s poorly received filibuster notwithstanding, what, praytell, was wrong with the developers’ plan to build a 13-, now 12- , story office building next to a similar sized hotel? Without a detectable aesthetic flaw, Entrada fits perfectly into the surrounding architecture.
Drive the neighborhood. If you are objective, you may agree.
Won’t Anyone Answer?
In the still-smoking rubble of the firestorm raised over Mr. Silbiger’s gimmicky filibuster, Councilman Steve Rose inserted a swiftly dismissed but sterling question on Monday night or Tuesday night — the back-to-back marathons are hazy by now.
Worn out by complaints from numerous Westchester bluffs residents that the proposed building would blunt, or interrupt, their view of the nearby mountains, Mr. Rose, a sensible Republican, inquired, rhetorically, as it turned out:
Where does it say that the hilltop view of several dozen residents automatically trumps the visionary desires of a developer in pursuit of aesthetic enhancement and, horrors, a profit?
Nowhere, my friends, outside of fist-raised rule.
Does the Question Make Foes Uncomfortable?
Mr. Silbiger, champion of the people, blew off the question.
Last time I checked, he was not responding to any questions.
But if I could get down on my knees and hands, and crawl toward the interior of Mr. Silbiger’s brain, I would like to know if he test-drove his filibuster because he genuinely found something wrong with the project or because he heard a mob banging on City Hall’s door and got into line, as populist politicians tend to do.
(Raising this issue could easily lead us into a discussion about eminent domain, which is a separate, ugly, frightening subject we shall confront later.)
Away to Make Peace
At the heart of developing a beautiful community, we are told by City Hall, is the artful concept of striking a balance, preferably between the traditional and the modern, ideally through a consensus of the community.
A hundred stentorian voices storming City Hall, prepared to hang the first rootin’, tootin’ varmint who has the audacity to disagree, is not my idea of striking a balance.
If you ever have enjoyed the company of a plus-sized, seams-bustin’ person, the politically correct response is to say, “Wow, Bertha, big really is beautiful.”
Why can’t plus-size architecture be equally appealing?