The first I heard of the planned Healthy Living Campus in Redondo Beach was when my wife and I went to a hastily scheduled meeting by the Beach Cities Health District to showcase their project and get feedback from nearby residents in the city of Torrance. To the proponents and their consultants, the idea of building a massive 420-unit nursing home on a 30 foot tall bluff, towering over a neighborhood of single family homes and the 15 year construction plan it would require for building and funding sounded reasonable enough but to the 75 or more attendees, a mix of mostly senior citizens, parents and young couples, it sounded utterly absurd. Once the feeling of the inevitability of it all subsided a number of us began to share our frustrations and decided to organize to stop the fortress-like monolith from being built.
Today our fight is just beginning and we know we can’t match the money the opposition is willing to spend to succeed. Countless other communities and nearby neighborhoods find themselves in similar David versus Goliath battles. Their determination and steadfast resolve inspires us. We are organizing a grassroots effort to demand the failing BCHD immediately stop work on the proposed project.
On this website, we have outlined our concerns and are encouraging residents throughout Torrance and Redondo Beach and the South Bay to join together against the development. We will update it often with news and actions to take. It is critical that everyone who will be most affected by the project speak out and demand the Beach Cities Health District stop work on the project. We support responsible development that meets the needs of nearby residents and businesses but this project fails to do that. We also strongly urge the cities leaders of Torrance and Redondo Beach to DENY the BCHD the permits they need to go forward as proposed. The BCHD has no right to subject generations of young people going to school directly downwind of the demolition and construction to 15 years of suffocating dust, noise and other health and traffic risks. The BCHD has no authority to subject nearby residents to the toxic contaminants that the project will cause. This is a unnecessary and unsustainable project that will compromise public health, air quality, the environment, and traffic safety but working together we believe it can be stopped.
To learn more about the BCHD proposal, please read the Notice of Project (NOP) and Environmental Checklist.
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