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CITY COUNCIL CANDIDATE - Out of personal tragedy, Derrick Townsend’s candidacy for Santa Monica City Council was born.
About ten years ago, Townsend’s brother died from a fentanyl overdose. The loss left him with a mission: prevent other families from suffering the same outcome. Over time, that private mission collided with what he saw on Santa Monica’s streets: people suffering from severe mental illness and drug addiction wandering without direction, treatment, or meaningful intervention.
Townsend concluded that Santa Monica (SM) was not saving these people. It was allowing them to deteriorate in public while calling the result compassion, because no coercion is involved. He says one or two people die on the city’s streets in an average week, even as taxpayers pour money into homelessness programs and nonprofit organizations.
The consequences reach far beyond homelessness. Untreated addiction and mental illness affect crime, sanitation, tourism, commerce and daily life. For instance, the area around the SM pier ranked second on the list of the most polluted beaches in California due to bacteria and fecal matter.
Townsend began following the public money and asking: What are taxpayers receiving in return? When does freedom to run wild on the streets like a feral animal because of progressive policies impinge on our safety, our ability to financially support ourselves?
“Someone at least has to bring it to the surface,” he said. “Someone at least has to speak out for the city, families, shopkeepers and commuters as well as these people who can’t really speak out for themselves.”
Townsend is still largely unknown. He lacks the institutional support and political pedigree of a conventional City Council candidate. What he does have is a willingness to say openly what many residents may only say privately: Santa Monica’s progressive experiment is failing.
For decades, SM has been known as home of the homeless and derisively called the “People’s Republic of Santa Monica.” This is no longer a joke. Townsend sees a city where property rights are weakened, small businesses face mounting fees and regulations, taxes rise, and officials proclaim success without producing measurable improvement.
He calls it a “never-ending money grab without having reasonable outcomes.”
Townsend believes SM has adopted elements of DSA governance without acknowledging it. He points to proposals affecting rent-controlled property, burdens placed on landlords and an atmosphere in which private ownership is treated less as a right than as a resource government may continually regulate, redirect or tax.
The result, he argues, is predictable: investors hesitate, entrepreneurs go elsewhere and locally owned businesses disappear.
City officials may celebrate the arrival of a Taco Bell or Raising Cane’s, but Townsend asks what happened to the independent restaurants, shops and neighborhood institutions that gave Santa Monica its character. He accuses City Hall of relying on higher parking charges, taxes, fees and reserve funds, temporary fixes that suppress economic activity while allowing politicians to claim they balanced the budget
“You ravaged it and killed it,” Townsend said. “Come back in three or four years and show me what happened to it.” You have made it more economically hostile to come to shop in Santa Monica.
The Third Street Promenade has become the most visible monument to that failure. Its natural advantages remain beautiful weather, proximity to the beach, an affluent community and the bones of a once-premier shopping and dining destination.
What disappeared was law and order and a business environment in which independent stores could survive.
Townsend says permitting delays, public disorder, expensive parking, higher taxes and uncertainty about future mandates make SM unnecessarily difficult for businesses. Large corporations can hire lawyers and consultants to navigate the bureaucracy. A family-owned restaurant often cannot.
He recounts the case of a prospective restaurant operator on the Santa Monica Pier who spent months navigating leases and permits before facing a union-backed demand that the new operation retain more than 20 workers from the previous restaurant without normal interviews or screening. When the owner resisted, the agreement collapsed.
Townsend belongs to a healthcare union and is not anti-union. But he rejects a system in which political influence prevents new jobs from being created. Unions should protect workers, he argues—not make it impossible for businesses to open.
His economic program is basic: streamline permits, reduce unnecessary fees, restore public order, stop treating entrepreneurs as adversaries, and give investors’ confidence that the rules will not change after they commit their money.
His sharpest break with Santa Monica’s establishment concerns homelessness.
Townsend rejects the premise that leaving severely addicted or mentally ill people on the street is compassionate. He supports mandated care for people incapable of caring for themselves or presenting a danger to others. He favors using Proposition 36, CARE Court and other programs to move people into recovery, psychiatric treatment or, when crimes are repeatedly committed, custody.
He distinguishes between people temporarily living in vehicles because of economic hardship and those incapacitated by addiction or psychosis. Someone living responsibly in a van while trying to regain stability is not the same problem as someone openly using fentanyl, threatening pedestrians or repeatedly cycling through emergency rooms and jail.
The political system, Townsend argues, resists such distinctions because they require judgment, enforcement and consequences.
He is equally blunt about Housing First. He calls it a failure.
Townsend believes Santa Monica’s official homeless count understates the number of people living on or passing through its streets. He points to the arrival of people at the western end of the Metro line, movement between Santa Monica and Venice, and the difficulty of capturing a transient population in a one-night count.
His strategy begins with treating the people already here while reducing the continuing inflow. That means stronger security and fare enforcement on Metro, investigating treatment centers and paid recruiters that allegedly transport insured addicts into Southern California in exchange for referral fees, and ending policies that make SM a destination for street living.
“You’re never going to get a handle on it, regardless of how many people you take off, if there’s people continuing to come,” he said.
Townsend supports the Santa Monica Police Department and believes officers are constrained by laws, policies and political assumptions imposed upon them. Homelessness, in his analysis, is not an isolated social-services problem. It consumes police time, undermines sanitation, discourages shoppers, damages tourism, frightens residents and stresses first responders.
Getting it under control would improve almost every part of city life. But doing so would require Santa Monica to move beyond what Townsend calls “suicidal empathy”, performative compassion that permits people to remain sick, addicted, victimized and dangerous because intervention might appear insufficiently progressive.
The city’s establishment defines compassion through inputs: housing units, nonprofit contracts, harm-reduction (crack-pipes/Narcan) supplies, outreach programs, and public expenditures. Townsend defines it by outcomes. Derrick points out that Santa Monica’s outcome is hellacious, allowing street addicts and the mentally ill to die in public; on average, 1 to 2 street addicts die each week in Santa Monica.
Did the person stop using drugs? Did the mentally ill individual receive treatment? Did the encampment disappear? Did the street become safer? Did the business remain open? Did residents receive value for their taxes?
Townsend’s third defining issue is Santa Monica Airport.
While other candidates support closing it, Townsend sees the airport as a potential center for aerospace technology, electric aviation, drones, clean propulsion and technical education. He wants partnerships with Santa Monica College and Santa Monica High School that could introduce students to trades, engineering and aviation careers.
The airport debate is usually framed as a choice between conventional aviation and eliminating noise. Townsend offers a different vision: retain the airport but transform its purpose.
Southern California’s aerospace sector is expanding, particularly in El Segundo and the South Bay. Santa Monica, he argues, should participate in that future rather than destroy an irreplaceable economic asset.
He acknowledges legitimate concerns about noise but believes quieter electric aircraft, technological advances and reasonable restrictions can reduce the conflict. The airport could become a laboratory for cleaner aviation rather than a relic of propeller-driven flight.
“How great would it be if that new thing came out of Santa Monica?” he asked.
Townsend is realistic about what one councilmember can accomplish. Even if elected, he may be isolated on a council dominated by progressive interests. He does not promise to reverse decades of policy in one term. His theory of change is closer to a ten-year insurgency than a conventional campaign platform.
First, get elected. Then expose what happens inside City Hall. Give residents information they are not receiving. Demonstrate that criticizing the prevailing orthodoxy is possible. Encourage others to speak, organize and run.
Townsend believes many residents are politically “closeted”—afraid that expressing concerns about crime, homelessness, taxation or progressive governance could cost them friendships, customers or social standing. His candidacy is intended to give those residents permission to reenter the debate.
Santa Monica has seven at-large council seats, with three in contention. Townsend says he must finish in the top three among approximately a dozen candidates. He estimates that a successful candidate may need 12,000 to 15,000 votes.
That is formidable for an unknown reformer, but not impossible in a city where tens of thousands of registered voters skip municipal elections.
His natural constituency may be the politically homeless middle: residents who consider themselves compassionate but no longer believe disorder is compassion; who support workers but want businesses to survive; who value environmental protection but question destroying the airport; and who wonder whether ideology has become more important than maintaining a safe, clean and prosperous city.
Townsend is not promising a miracle. He says restoring SM will take five to ten years. The city’s problems were not created overnight, and they will not be corrected by another slogan, tax, nonprofit contract or politician using Santa Monica as a platform for higher office.
Derrick Townsend is running to begin the correction. He may be outspent, but he should not be ignored or dismissed. He may enter City Hall alone. But entrenched political establishments begin to wobble when one person stands up, describes the failure plainly and discovers how many supposedly apathetic citizens were waiting for someone else to speak first.
(Eliot Cohen is a longtime civic advocate who has served on the Neighborhood Council, the Van Nuys Airport Citizens Advisory Council, and the Board of Homeowners of Encino, where he was president of HOME for over seven years. A retired Wall Street executive with a 35-year career, Eliot brings a sharp eye to local governance. He critiques the bureaucratic missteps of City, County, and State officials. Eliot and his wife split their time between Los Angeles and Baja Norte, Mexico.)
