By now we have all read the headline that the heirs to waterfront property in Manhattan Beach have exercised the option requiring them to sell their family land back to the County of Los Angeles.
The property known as Bruce’s Beach was illegally taken from Charles and Willa Bruce in the early 1900’s by the city of Manhattan Beach under eminent domain. The current members of the city council have all but refused to publicly apologize for the pain and suffering caused by the action and have also removed a plaque that tells the story of what happened.
The council took action last March to “update” it which was supposed to be ready in time for Juneteenth which didn’t happen. The city of Manhattan Beach reached out to this author to “correct” me about what’s going on with the plaque. It is supposedly ready and sitting in a warehouse.
I opined that the removal was to erase the history since the family was in the process of giving the land back in exchange for $20 million per the executed lease agreement approved by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors last year.
In the interim, the City voted to not allow event permits to be issued at the park where the marker stood.
Radio host Tavis Smiley invited the family’s attorney to appear on his talk show Jan. 3 where he disputed the reported value of the land which was pegged at $75 million.
The figure was cited on Sen. Steve Bradford’s official website and an online article on Inside Edition’s website.
Smiley interviewed Bradford on Jan. 4 and provided clarity on where the $75 million figure came from.
“I did some research and the first mention of the value came from Supervisor Janice Hahn,” said Smiley.
Smiley opined that he believed that once Hahn made public the TRUE value of the property she was pulled aside and told she was working against the interests of the County who were prepared to offer much less because of zoning issues.
“I’ve never seen white folks so eager to cut a check to knee-grows,” said Smiley.
The property is currently zoned as government land and therefore it would take the Manhattan Beach city council and planning commission (who are appointed by the council) to make decisions on rezoning.
Going back to the lease agreement, the language is clear and specific. It dictated that the Bruce’s could only do business with the County. They wouldn’t be able to put the land on the open market to get a more lucrative offer. The lawyer explained the family didn’t want to go through the hassle that their great-grandparents experienced and in their best interest they decided to sell.
The County had the option to end their lease agreement which came with nearly $500,000 in revenue per year but if it went away, how would the heirs be able to keep up the annual property tax bill?
Who knows the true value of the land? A real estate developer.
A deep-pocketed developer would not only have given the heirs a more robust figure on the sale but they would have the means to pay the annual property bill and would have gone a step further and dropped millions into local elections to remove members from the council who would stand in the way of making the zoning changes. At one time I believed this was going on with a cemetery in Compton.
We’ve seen developers do this in Inglewood.
Developers with the Hollywood Park Land Co. spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to install a city council that bypassed Inglewood voters to drop a multi-billion dollar NFL stadium in our backyard.
Inglewood Mayor James Butts is consistently on the record talking about “controlling our own destiny”.
Why weren’t the Bruce’s given the same courtesy?
1 Comment
Actually, Manhattan Beach was NEVER racist. Some people in the city were racist.
But you are judging past events using present attitudes (presentism).
In my opinion, this whole episode was optimally timed to coincide with the woke movement post George Floyd and that it was virtue signaling by Commission Janice Hahn that led to this. It took “an act of Congress” (CA Assembly) to break CA law by giving public property to individuals.
Moreover, the Bruce family had been paid for the land (it wasn’t literally “taken”), though they didn’t want to sell and disputed the value. The press is complicit by implying the Bruce family owned all 30 lots, when they only owned 2 (I thought it was 4, so this is worse unfairness to all other California families who had their land taken by eminent domain.). Every video shows the top of the park, which was never Bruce property.
Yes, zoning is a real thing. The current residents of MB deserve to have a park if it is zoned that way.
Also, regarding the intergenerational wealth, it is highly unlikely the “resort” on two 33×100 foot lots would ever have survived world war II, when everything there had to close and had blackout curtains…people bought Strand properties in the late 1940s for $12,000 to $21,000, including a house…and that was 20 years AFTER Mr. Bruce had passed away.
This is not a fair outcome. The Bruce survivors won the lottery.