Our Santa Monica Local Accountability Journalism

THE MONEY AN INVESTIGATION

Who Gets to Live Here?

Santa Monica, CA built the strongest tenant protections in America. These worked — for 27,668 households, nearly six in ten homes in this city. This is the story of how the same machinery closed the door on everyone else, and why the people who run it still talk like insurgents long after capturing the city.

Photograph by John Salatas, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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Nothing is invented.
Every figure traces to a primary source, named where it appears. Where a component needs data we do not have — a roll call not yet pulled from City Clerk records, a photograph not yet licensed — it renders empty and says what is missing rather than showing an illustrative stand-in.
Corrections are permanent.
A correction is appended to the article and listed in the corrections index. It is never quietly edited into the text. Updates, which add new information, are kept separate from corrections, which fix an error.
Reporting is published unattributed.
No bylines. The work stands on its documents, and the documents are published so you can check them. See Ethics.
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A community-led record of how this city is governed.

Our Santa Monica is a community-led project, researched and published by residents. It is entirely self-funded. We do not solicit donations, memberships, subscriptions or support of any kind — none is asked for or implied. If you have documents, records or recollections, we would like to hear from you.