Historical Origins and Context

Santa Monica before SMRR: a renter-majority city under a business-aligned council

In the late 1970s, Santa Monica was an incorporated city of roughly 90,000 people, bordered by Los Angeles on three sides and the Pacific on the west, with almost three-quarters of households renting and roughly 70% of the population of moderate income; the 1975 median household income was $11,088, close to the national average VERIFIED FACT (Derek Shearer, “How the Progressives Won in Santa Monica,” Social Policy, 1982). The population mix included seniors (16%), families with children (23%), Hispanics (13%), Black residents (4%), and Asian residents (4%) VERIFIED FACT (Shearer 1982). SMRR’s own co-founders describe over 70% of residents as renters in the 1970s, many retired and on fixed incomes, with nearly half of Santa Monica renters in low-income households Organization’s own claim (Tarbet & Zane, “A Look Back at the Beginning,” 2022). By 1980, renters made up about 80% of the city’s population, easing to roughly 72% by 1994 VERIFIED FACT (LA Times, “Up Against the Wall,” Dec. 1994).

Through the 1950s and 1960s, the city was dominated by Republican homeowners, the chamber of commerce, and the conservative local newspaper, the Evening Outlook; working-class homes clustered near a large Douglas Aircraft plant, and working-class (often retired Jewish garment-industry) renters lived in Ocean Park, once billed “the Coney Island of the West” VERIFIED FACT (Shearer 1982). Shearer frames the pre-SMRR governing bloc as a real-estate/business “Growth Machine” that ruled through chamber-of-commerce-picked councils SUPPORTED INTERPRETATION, a characterization SMRR’s own 2009 materials echo, describing a “stodgy little city dominated by real-estate, business, and banking interests” Organization’s own claim (SMRR, “Happy Birthday, Rent Control!”, 2009). A specific “City Hall gang” label sometimes referenced in popular retellings was not found in the sources reviewed; the documented equivalent is this “chamber of commerce/real-estate Republican” bloc and, later, organized opposition groups such as the Citizens Congress and the All Santa Monica Coalition OPEN QUESTION.

Demographic and physical transformation, and the rise of tenant activism (late 1960s–mid-1970s)

The “awakening” of Santa Monica began in the late 1960s when old Ocean Park bungalows were razed for Miami Beach-style high-rises, a classic post-WWII urban-renewal displacement of lower-income residents, accelerated by a new freeway completed in 1966 that connected the city more efficiently to greater Los Angeles and made intensive land use economically feasible VERIFIED FACT (Shearer 1982). By the early 1970s the renter-heavy city was trending Democratic in national elections — George McGovern carried Santa Monica in 1972 — yet local turnout, held in low-salience spring elections a week after Los Angeles’s municipal elections, remained around 20%, and many renters mistakenly assumed they lived within Los Angeles city limits VERIFIED FACT (Shearer 1982).

1960s activists who had settled in Ocean Park built “alternative” institutions — a food co-op, a community newspaper, a community-oriented church — and turned their organizing skills toward coastal-environment and affordable-housing fights VERIFIED FACT (Shearer 1982). California’s Coastal Commission, created by statewide referendum in 1972, became a tool Ocean Park activists used to fight high-rise beach development, and in 1973 the same network won a “Save the Pier” referendum against a city plan to build condominium towers on the municipal pier VERIFIED FACT (Shearer 1982). In 1976, Santa Monica served as the statewide headquarters for Tom Hayden’s unsuccessful Democratic-primary U.S. Senate challenge against incumbent John Tunney; many campaign workers stayed in the area afterward, seeding the activist cadre that later built SMRR VERIFIED FACT (Shearer 1982; LA Times, Dec. 1994). The following year, the same veterans fought a hard state-assembly race for the Santa Monica/Venice/West LA seat behind consumer advocate Ruth Yannatta Goldway, who narrowly lost the Democratic primary to a party-establishment lawyer; during that campaign, activists learned modern electoral technology (computer-aided voter targeting, direct mail, professional fundraising) that they later fused with Alinsky-style community organizing VERIFIED FACT (Shearer 1982). [OPEN QUESTION — date discrepancy]: Shearer’s contemporaneous account dates Goldway’s assembly run to the 1977 cycle, while the SMRR co-founders’ 2022 memoir describes it as her “nearly successful campaign for the California State Assembly in 1978”; both accounts are preserved here rather than reconciled.

The condominium-conversion boom and the failed 1978 ballot attempt

Between 1977 and 1979, over 2,000 units of rental housing in Santa Monica were demolished or converted to condominiums VERIFIED FACT (Shearer 1982; Santa Monica Lookout, “The Birth of a Movement,” 2004). The Lookout’s retrospective describes typical rent increases of $50, $75, and $150, opponents who “spied with binoculars, popped campaign balloons with BB guns, [and] ripped down posters,” and a rough, ward-style political atmosphere VERIFIED FACT (Lookout 2004).

In 1977, activist seniors — mostly women in their 70s and 80s — began complaining to the Santa Monica Housing Commission about rising rents, catching the attention of Commissioner Syd Rose, a labor attorney and union activist, who initiated discussions with Legal Aid attorney Robert M. Myers, who then drafted a Rent Control Charter Amendment [Organization’s own claim / SUPPORTED INTERPRETATION] (Tarbet & Zane 2022). The seniors’ group, the Santa Monica Committee for Fair Rents, was chaired by Rose and staffed by a core team of activists — Tima Tomash (a blacklisted former teacher and union member), Ida Singer, Rose Boin, Lillian Storik and Al Storik, and Sylvia Hill — who organized the signature drive that qualified the first rent-control measure for the June 1978 ballot [VERIFIED FACT / Organization’s own claim] (Tarbet & Zane 2022; Santa Monica Mirror, 2013). After the measure qualified, the seniors approached the Santa Monica–Venice chapter of the Campaign for Economic Democracy; two CED members, Denny Zane and Parke Skelton, took up the effort even though statewide CED was pivoting toward a solar-energy campaign with Governor Jerry Brown [Organization’s own claim / VERIFIED FACT] (Tarbet & Zane 2022). Accounts diverge on Tom Hayden’s own stance toward the rent-control push: the SMRR memoir frames statewide CED as simply lacking capacity for two campaigns at once, while the Lookout and a 1994 LA Times retrospective report that Hayden actively viewed rent control as a distracting drain on solar-energy organizing resources COMPETING EXPLANATION (Tarbet & Zane 2022; Lookout 2004; LA Times, Dec. 1994).

The first rent-control measure was defeated on the June 1978 ballot — the same election that passed Howard Jarvis’s statewide Proposition 13 VERIFIED FACT (Shearer 1982). Sources disagree on the exact margin: SMRR’s own materials cite 46%–54%, while the Lookout reports 44%–56% [COMPETING EXPLANATION — vote margin] (Tarbet & Zane 2022; SMRR, 2019; Lookout 2004). Sources also disagree on the spending gap: SMRR’s memoir cites $250,000 to $10,000, while Shearer’s academic essay cites $250,000 to $25,000 [COMPETING EXPLANATION — spending gap] (Tarbet & Zane 2022; Shearer 1982). Contemporary and retrospective accounts attribute the loss to (a) landlords’ promise that rents would fall once Proposition 13 cut property taxes, and (b) homeowners siding with small “mom-and-pop” landlords because the first measure would have covered owners of one-to-three-unit buildings; anti-rent-control mailers claimed rent control would turn Santa Monica into “another South Bronx” SUPPORTED INTERPRETATION (Tarbet & Zane 2022; Shearer 1982). Proposition 13 passed statewide, but rents in Santa Monica kept rising and landlords’ promised tax-cut savings did not materialize for tenants — a “broken promise” that fueled the renewed tenant movement VERIFIED FACT (Tarbet & Zane 2022; Lookout 2004).

Formation of SMRR and Proposition A (fall 1978 – April 1979)

After the June 1978 defeat, Zane and Skelton convened meetings — first at Rev. Jim Conn’s home (whose Church in Ocean Park was an activist center), then at Linda Garrett’s bookshop in Ocean Park — where activists agreed to try again Organization’s own claim (Tarbet & Zane 2022). Out of these meetings, Santa Monicans for Renters’ Rights was born in the fall of 1978 as an electoral coalition of the Santa Monica Democratic Club (tied to the liberal wing of the state party via the California Democratic Council), the Santa Monica chapter of CED, and the Santa Monica Fair Housing Alliance, together providing a core of 45–100 activists, later joined by the Committee for Fair Rents, the Santa Monica Tenants Union, and the Ocean Park Electoral Network (OPEN) VERIFIED FACT (Shearer 1982; Cornell eCommons, “Principles of Unity,” 1981; Tarbet & Zane 2022).

Zane and field coordinator Michael Tarbet worked with Myers to revise the measure so that owner-occupied buildings of two-to-three units (sources disagree: SMRR’s 2022 memoir says two-to-three units, while its own 2019 essay says one-to-three units OPEN QUESTION) would be exempt, undercutting the “mom-and-pop” attack that had helped sink the 1978 vote. SMRR raised more than roughly $50,000 for the 1979 rematch — up from roughly $10,000 in 1978 — largely through the “Boogie Strategy” of fundraising dances at the Church in Ocean Park [Organization’s own claim, corroborated] (Tarbet & Zane 2022; SMDP, “Rent control 30 years later”). Key campaign roles: Parke Skelton designed the direct-mail program; Roger Thornton, with programmer Michael Adams, built the campaign’s computer-based data-management and direct-mail operation; Ralph Brave coordinated press; and Cheryl Rhoden and Pam Baker ran get-out-the-vote efforts. The Retail Clerks Union Local 1492 and its president Michael Straeter backed the campaign and lent their union hall for events Organization’s own claim (Tarbet & Zane 2022). SMRR ran two council candidates alongside the ballot initiative — Ruth Yannatta Goldway and Bill Jennings — while Democratic Club leader Ken Edwards persuaded the coalition not to run a third candidate against moderate Republican incumbent Christine Reed VERIFIED FACT (Tarbet & Zane 2022; Shearer 1982). Real-estate and financial interests spent over $250,000 against the initiative, and right-wing anti-rent-control council candidates spent roughly $50,000 more; opposition ads invoked Jane Fonda and warned of “a Stalinist concentration camp” VERIFIED FACT (Shearer 1982).

On April 10, 1979, Santa Monica voters amended the City Charter (Article XVIII, §§1800–1812) by initiative, creating a comprehensive residential rent-control system administered by a permanent, popularly elected five-member Rent Control Board with power to regulate maximum rents and issue removal permits VERIFIED FACT (Creighton v. City of Santa Monica (1984); Santa Monica Pines, Ltd. v. Rent Control Board (1984)). The measure passed 54.3% to 45.6%, and both SMRR council candidates — Goldway and Jennings — won; Christine Reed was re-elected running as an independent who neither opposed nor supported rent control VERIFIED FACT (Shearer 1982).

Founders, organizers, and allied organizations (summary)

The founding period is best understood as a coalition of coalitions, and SMRR’s own co-founders explicitly state that “every single person who gathered signatures… walked a precinct or passed out flyers… were SMRR founders” Organization’s own claim (Tarbet & Zane 2022). Documented founding-era figures and organizations include: senior organizers Tima Tomash, Syd Rose, Ida Singer, Rose Boin, Lillian and Al Storik, and Sylvia Hill (Committee for Fair Rents); younger organizers Dennis Zane, Parke Skelton, Cheryl Rhoden, Michael Tarbet, Roger Thornton, Moe Stavnezer, Lynda Vitale, Dora Ashford, Susan Morrow, Ralph Brave, Pam Baker, Michael Adams, and Don Girard; legal architect Robert M. Myers; Rev. James Conn and Linda Garrett as key hosts/venues; the Retail Clerks Union Local 1492 and the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor as institutional labor backers; and coalition partners the Santa Monica Democratic Club, the Campaign for Economic Democracy, the Santa Monica Fair Housing Alliance, the Committee for Fair Rents, the Ocean Park Electoral Network, and the Santa Monica Tenants Union. National figures Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda (CED’s founders), media consultant Bill Zimmerman, and 1981 fundraiser guests Ralph Nader, Bill Clinton (then a DNC official), and Ed Asner are also documented in connection with the founding-era campaigns [VERIFIED FACT, various sources as cited above]. A full accounting of individual biographies appears in Section 13 (Key Individuals Profiles).

[OPEN QUESTION — major early donors.] The sources document SMRR’s small-dollar, dance/direct-mail/door-to-door fundraising model and union institutional support, and separately document the opposition’s big-money donors (real estate, banking, downtown business), but no roster of large individual SMRR donors from 1978–1981 was located in the underlying research. [OPEN QUESTION — formal recall attempts.] The sources document lawsuits and landlord-sponsored repeal initiatives (the 1979 “Fair Rent” ordinance, the 1980 statewide “Fair Rent” initiative) rather than any formal recall campaign against Rent Control Board members; no such recall campaign was found.