Whistling In The Dark.

IT wasn't too many years ago that the city of Santa Monica actually seemed interested in becoming friendlier towards business. Not a hard act to follow, given the city's traditional left-leaning tendencies, but heartening nonetheless. As part of the thaw, a few hotels were allowed to go up, and thanks to the addition of multiplexes, cafes and boutiques, onceforgotten Third Street was turned into a regional retail destination. Add the cool ocean breezes and Santa Monica had a commercial hit.

But 60's-style radicalism dies hard. As the Business Journal first reported in 1999 under the headline "Santa Monica's Left Turn," city officials have chosen community activists over business interests -- even at the risk of turning Third Street Promenade into a local joke.

The latest plot line centers on the Living Wage law, which would require a select number of large employers to shell out $10.50 an hour, plus benefits -- a couple of dollars more than the going rate. The city's business interests are trying to collect 6,000 signatures that would allow voters to determine whether the ordinance should take effect next summer, as planned. It's proving to be a real chore to get the names because pro-living wagers are scaring off would-be signers.

The business folks might as well save their paper. Even if they manage to gather the necessary names, there's no way that Santa Monica voters will turn down a measure to raise wages -- just as there's no way this half-baked effort will be replicated in other parts of the county, where profit-and-loss statements are taken a lot more seriously. Which leaves Santa Monica with an ordinance that will help only a few low-income earners and put the brakes on any further development.

Even without the living wage, any number of local business owners have been forced off Third Street to other, less-lucrative areas because they could not afford skyrocketing rents. They have been replaced by the same parade of national retailers you would find at a mall in Wichita. To these absentee merchants, Santa Monica is just another dot on the map; they haven't the opportunity or the interest to monitor the ebb and flow of the shopping district the way a homegrown Santa Monica merchant can.

That's too bad because the Promenade is not a very inviting place these days. It has become ground zero for derelicts and runaways who essentially have taken over the sitting areas while unsuspecting tourists wonder what a Banana Republic store is doing a few feet from a homeless encampment.

The police do little to move out the vagrants because of the city's longstanding live-and-let-live policy -- one reason the homeless inhabit so much of the other Promenade along Ocean Avenue.

For the moment, city officials shrug off the gripes of some local merchants in and around Third Street. They point out that the place is crowded, that folks are spending, that retail space is at a premium -- in short, just the kind of problems many communities would love to have.

It's also a great example of whistling in the dark. Combine the misguided living wage with increased congestion and a chronic homeless problem that's bound to get worse as the economy keeps faltering, and it's just a matter of time before those national retailers finally figure out that Santa Monica is more trouble than it's worth.