Can We Send This Order Back? It’s Not Well Done

Thoughts on the McDonalds Project Proposed for 2nd and Colorado

By Mike Feinstein, Santa Monica City Councilmember

Sometimes a community achieves greatness by acting fully upon its beliefs at a critical moment.

At other times, failure stems from the profound mediocrity of missed opportunity.

This dichotomy is what faces our community at 2nd Street and Colorado Avenue -- a corner with enormous potential, but with a future yet to be defined.

In a few years, 2nd and Colorado could become a critical gateway, helping to connect the Pier, Palisades Park, Santa Monica Place, the Civic Center, the Promenade and even the Exposition Corridor Light Rail station destined to be at 4th and Colorado.

Or, 2nd and Colorado could look -- and function -- like a corner lot in a suburban shopping mall or business park.

Where We Are Today

The current proposal for the site -- a rebuilt McDonalds surrounded by surface parking, enclosed within a two story commercial office building -- is a suburban drive-through model out of touch with -- and inappropriate for -- Santa Monica’s downtown.

The driving force (pun intended) behind the project’s design is 30 ground floor parking spaces, along with the circulation space necessary to support them.

The dedication of so much ground floor area to the automobile dominates the project, limiting its creativity and flexibility -- and compromising its ability to provide quality outdoor dining, a meaningful pedestrian connection to its surroundings, and interesting and permeable commercial spaces,

Elsewhere in our downtown, new development is required to place its parking underground, or pay assessments to support the city’s six above-ground parking structures. These policies exist so that valuable downtown ground floor space can be devoted to people, not automobiles.

This same basic, urban planning principle should also apply to new development at 2nd and Colorado.

New Thinking

How can development at 2nd and Colorado realize the corner’s unique potential? Consider these possible key steps:

• 1) The creation of a significant Public Plaza at 2nd and Colorado. Such a Plaza would connect nearby civic destinations, by drawing and facilitating pedestrian traffic throughout the area.
  
  
• 2) The Plaza would be designed to promote vibrant people-watching between diners and pedestrians.
  
  Outdoor dining would be served by the rebuilt McDonald, as well as by at least one or two more restaurants. This would offer diversity in content and price, and encourage a variety of types of people to populate the public space.
  
  Either (or both) of nearby Il Fornaio and Ivy by the Shore could provide food service, utilizing waiters and waitresses and/or creating an annex along a redesigned and refurbished alley.
  
• 3) The Plaza would have a strong connection to the pedestrian passageway from Ocean Avenue that already exists between Il Fornaio and Ivy by the Shore. This synergy would create multiple pedestrian flows to and from the site.
  
• 4) Building heights would be allowed to go up to four stories in many places, in exchange for setting back the project to create the Plaza.
  
  Exceptions to the four story heights could be in places necessary to preserve the coastal view corridors from the 2nd and 3rd floors of Santa Monica Place that are mandated by the Coastal Commission.
  
• 5) The footprint and scope of the project could be enlarged -- if all parties were interested -- to include the adjacent Pacific Sands Motel Annex parcel to the north.
  
  Currently, the Annex is made up of twelve small motel rooms and a surface parking lot. If redeveloped along with the McDonalds site, a combined project would be more flexible in design, and better able to coordinate on issues like underground parking, curb-cuts, alley access, and 2nd Street frontage, making the project more efficient and profitable.
  
• 6) In terms of uses, a new project should address existing community needs, by providing housing, affordable lodging and ground floor retail, instead of unneeded commercial office space as in the current proposal.
  
  Such a mix of uses would help address city housing needs, and improve, not worsen, the city’s jobs/housing balance.
  
  Such a mix would also have lower traffic and parking impact than the current plan, and would bring additional tax income to the City through an increased Transit Occupancy Tax collected.
  
• 7) But perhaps most significantly, new growth on the site would be "smart," not "stupid."

Stupid growth would be increasing density on the site by adding uses we do not need, in auto-dependent patterns we do not want.

Smart growth would increase in density in a way that actually provides more of what we need, through a design in which profitability arises from fitting in and enhancing the pedestrian environment, not standing apart from it.

What is Possible?