Viral video highlights the current issues that Santa Monica faces.
August 23, 2024
By: Matthew Hall
Santa Monica’s presence on YouTube is often dominated by the namesake Everclear song or travel vlogs but a recent video from popular real-estate influencer Graham Stephan has gained massive attention on the platform generating almost 3 million views by exploring “WTF Happened to Santa Monica.”
The obscene title summarizes Stephan’s confusion as he reconciles his memories of the City as a teenager with its current reality.
“What used to be a thriving, vibrant culture and economy is now a barren wasteland of empty buildings and crime,” he says at the start of the video.
Stephan focuses on the Promenade and talks about the vacancy rate of the area, growing homelessness crisis and the perceptions of crime. While he doesn’t offer any concrete solutions to the problem, he does highlight the problem with landlords keeping rents high to justify property values, pandemic-related retail losses and broader retail trends. However, a significant portion of the video focuses on the City’s damaged reputation with multiple clips from local news channels highlighting crime and anecdotes regarding businesses feeling under siege from homelessness, mental health concerns, drug use and theft.
“I would personally say though as someone who grew up here that the nail in the coffin was the 2020 riots and a lot of these businesses were broken into and ever since then it just seems like they’ve had a really difficult time recovering from that,” he said.
The YouTube video is one of several from the past months highlighting the City’s problems with homelessness, crime and store closings. While there’s been a spate of YouTuber interest in the City recently, video critiques of the City go back decades and include South Park’s Eric Cartman jumping his skateboard over a trio of homeless people in Palisades Park as part of the 2007 episode “Night of the Living Homeless” (S11, E07).
While officials say the situation isn’t as bad as it appears in the YouTube videos and is in fact improving, many of the economic indicators point to a real problem in recent years.
This year, crime increased in Santa Monica for three consecutive years driven largely by thefts and petty assaults.
Car theft has been a rising trend everywhere and Hyundai is the most stolen car for the past five years followed by Toyota but Kia thefts have spiked in the past two years. While fraud crimes were relatively low in number (241) the category had one of the largest percentage increase of 16.6%. Simple assault, which results in minor or no injuries came in at 859, a 15% increase from last year.
The number of arrests increased by 12% (totaling 2,723) and while that is still below 2019 (3,840), it has steadily increased since 2020.
As has been the trend for several years, about two-thirds of the city’s arrests are of homeless individuals. Homeless arrest numbers were up to 1,839, making up 67.6% of the total number of 2,723 arrests (an 11% increase compared to last year). In 2022, the total number of arrests was 2,438 and the unhoused percentage of that was 66.9%, a total of 1,632.
The City’s tourism market has declined substantially. Total visitors are down 12.8% from 2022, tourism related sales tax revenue is down 7.9%, total visitor spending is down 2.5%, there are about 10.8% fewer tourism jobs in the city and total international visitors is down 7%. The average hotel room rate was down 11% in 2023 and hotel room occupancy rates are still below pre pandemic levels (77% in 2023 vs. 82% in 2019). Foot traffic on the Promenade is still heavily down with only 452,678 visitors in July of this year compared to 759,563 visitors in July of 2019.
Sales tax has also declined in recent years. In the first quarter of 2024 actual sales were down 4.8% from last year (which were down from 2022 by 2.2%). While tax revenues did drop at the county and state level in the first quarter, Santa Monica’s decline was vastly more than the others with county sales declining 0.8% and State sales down 0.2%.
Councilwoman Caroline Torosis recently said the local economy was “thriving” in an email to supporters and told the Daily press that economic growth is on the horizon.
“Santa Monica’s downtown is in the midst of an exciting revitalization, with new businesses opening and more than $1 billion of investment in commercial and residential projects. This is in part due to strategic changes the city has implemented to allow for more kinds of shopping, dining and entertainment downtown and make it easier to open a business in Santa Monica. In addition, we continue to invest in programs and initiatives to keep our public spaces clean and enhance public safety,” she said.
She said the YouTube video did point out the role that private property owners play in the situation and said the city was making good progress working with landlords on improving conditions.
City spokeswoman Lauren Howland said the YouTube video gave an inaccurate impression of the Downtown area as it highlighted vacant units without providing any information on the upcoming openings filling those spots.
She said Google is combining two spots to open a new store in the landmarked Keller Building, the former HSBC Bank property has been leased to a prominent video production company who is deciding what type of business to open or sublease the space to, an internationally known specialty footwear retail is taking the former Hollister location, a lease is under negotiation for the former Forever 21 store (that moved to the mall), MINISO recently opened in the former Cotton On location, an existing restaurant business is in negotiation for a new entertainment venue where T-Mobile used to be, the corner of Santa Monica Blvd and Third St. has been leased to a national restaurant chain that will occupy the existing food use location as well as two additional retail spaces along Santa Monica Blvd, 1360 Third St. is to become HQ Gastro Pub, with construction underway and the former food court will become Holey Moley (a miniature golf and restaurant use).
“The city remains optimistic about the future of downtown and the Third Street Promenade, with many exciting openings on deck in the next few weeks alone. Change is always challenging and can take time, but it is clear that the city’s strategic efforts to make it easier to open a business in Santa Monica are paying off,” she said.
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