Saturday evening, the Dell Avenue bridge over Linnie Canal fills with folding chairs before the screen even goes up. Someone paddles a kayak into place near the water's edge, a family floats by on inflatable rafts they'll use as seating once the movie starts, and a woman in a lawn chair balances a paper plate on her knee while she waits for dusk. Nobody is checking a permit number. Nobody asked the city for a variance. The Venice Canals Association picked three Saturdays this summer, strung a screen on the bridge, and told the neighborhood to row in, float by, or bring a chair, and that's exactly what happened.
A short walk away, under a completely different kind of authority, the Venice Neighborhood Council spent the same stretch of summer trying to agree on how to run a meeting.
That contrast is the actual story of Venice this season. The neighborhood's elected civic body has spent 2026 relearning its own procedures in public, while the informal machinery that actually makes Venice feel like Venice, the canal traditions, the new restaurants, the merchant associations, has kept moving without waiting for anyone's permission. If you live here, both halves of that story are worth knowing, because only one of them tells you anything about your actual Saturday night.
The Board That Can't Agree on Its Own Minutes
David Feige was elected president of the Venice Neighborhood Council in February 2026, taking over an unexpired term on the 21-member, all-volunteer, directly elected board after his predecessor resigned amid infighting. Five months later, Feige finally sent residents a public update, and his own words set the tone: “we have too often let arguments about process obstruct our progress,” he wrote, explaining why he'd waited five months to reach out at all.
The reforms he listed sound almost quaint for a body that governs a neighborhood of this size: a new numbering system for motions, a promise to post approved items to a webpage, an acknowledgment that until recently there was no way to even track what the council had voted on. In the same message, Feige noted the board has passed more than 80 motions since February, which is either a sign of productivity or a sign of how much backlog had built up before anyone started counting.
The dysfunction hasn't been limited to bookkeeping. An Administrative Committee meeting held July 16 got contentious enough that the entire Land Use and Planning Committee agenda nearly failed to clear committee approval, a delay that would have pushed a backlog of land use cases into August. And the participation numbers tell their own story: 1,925 stakeholders voted in the four-way 2021 presidential race, that number dropped to 883 in 2023, then to 385 in 2025, a roughly 80 percent decline over four years. One board seat was won unopposed with seven votes.
None of this is a scandal. It's a volunteer board doing what volunteer boards do when turnout collapses and process disputes eat the calendar. But it matters for a simple reason: this is the same council whose February agenda included a motion recognizing Venice Beach as a "global-destination neighborhood" bracing for the 2026 FIFA World Cup and 2028 Olympics, and whose board has separately pushed to require that future major boardwalk event permits come to the council for public comment first. The council that wants a bigger say in how the boardwalk runs during two of the largest global events in a generation is the same one that spent June relitigating whether a board member's vote on a Rose Avenue project could be switched after the tally had already been announced.
The Boulevard Filled In Without Waiting for a Quorum
While the council debated its own rulebook, the businesses that actually define daily life on and around Abbot Kinney kept opening on their own schedule.
| Opening | What it is | Where |
|---|---|---|
| BADMAASH | Third Los Angeles location of the Indian restaurant group founded in 2013, its first with a full cocktail program | 1616 Abbot Kinney Blvd |
| ¡Salud! | Coffee and Latin breakfast by day, mezcal cocktails and tapas after dark | 417 Washington Blvd |
| Monarch Nursery | A wholesale nursery on Lincoln Boulevard relaunched by two new owners into a retail plant shop | Lincoln Blvd |
BADMAASH opened on a Friday in late March, adding steak frites with Indian spices and laal maas-style lamb chops to a menu that already includes butter chicken, and it now runs Wednesday through Sunday. ¡Salud! held its ribbon-cutting with the Venice Chamber of Commerce on January 24 and quickly became a fixture on the Chamber's mixer circuit, a fast read on how quickly a new concept can become part of the neighborhood's actual rotation rather than just another storefront. Belles Beach House, the longtime tiki bar, has plans in the works to add a second story and a rooftop deck while making its outdoor dining area permanent.
Further down the boulevard, RVR, chef Travis Lett's izakaya that opened in October 2024 after his years running the Gjelina kitchen nearby, has become reservations-only weeks out and was named among LA Magazine's best new restaurants for 2026. The restaurant runs dinner seven nights a week at 1305 Abbot Kinney Blvd, with weekend lunch service added Friday through Sunday. Truly Pizza, the Orange County chain known for its three-day fermented dough, has committed to a third location at 1239 Abbot Kinney Blvd, a 4,655-square-foot space seating around 130 guests that is slated for a late 2026 debut. The boulevard also got new streetlights this year, a small, unglamorous upgrade that nonetheless describes a street being maintained by people who intend to stay rather than one waiting on a bigger fix.
None of these openings required the neighborhood council's blessing. They required a lease, a landlord, and in ¡Salud!'s case, a Chamber of Commerce willing to throw a ribbon-cutting.
The Real Calendar Runs on Canal Time
The most telling detail in all of this might be the Venice Canals Association's own event calendar, which reads nothing like a government body's agenda and everything like a group of neighbors who've done this before. Row-In Movie Nights happen on three Saturday evenings each summer, screen strung on the Dell Avenue bridge at Linnie Canal, no application required beyond showing up with a lawn chair or a kayak. The annual Fourth of July fundraiser gathers at Sherman and Grand Canal. A duck race regatta runs a presale window in late June, and the association notes plainly that it sold out the year before, so residents should get their tickets early. Music on the Canals brings out neighbors who play instruments, a few times a year, for an audience of people who live within walking distance.
This is what a neighborhood's actual social infrastructure looks like when it isn't filtered through a dais. It doesn't need a motion number. It needs a bridge, a screen, and enough goodwill among neighbors to keep doing it every summer.
September Is the Actual Test
Two dates on the calendar ahead will say more about Venice's real condition than anything on a council agenda. The World Cumbia Festival lands on Venice Beach on September 13. And on September 27, the Abbot Kinney Festival returns after being canceled two years running, a 40-year Venice institution whose absence had been felt as a genuine break in the neighborhood's rhythm, not just a loss of foot traffic. Its return is organized by community volunteers, not the city, which means its comeback says less about any official body's health and more about whether the people who run it still believe in the street enough to commit their time to it again.
That's the pattern worth carrying into the fall. The council that wants oversight of major boardwalk permits ahead of the World Cup and Olympics is still sorting out how to record its own votes correctly. Meanwhile the festival that actually defines the neighborhood's late-September identity is coming back because volunteers decided it should, on their own timeline, without waiting for a committee to clear it.
If you live in Venice, the useful move isn't tracking City Hall's version of the neighborhood. It's checking the Venice Canals Association's calendar, following the Chamber of Commerce's ribbon-cuttings, and noticing which storefronts on Abbot Kinney have new signage this month. That's where the neighborhood is actually deciding what it wants to be.
If you ever want a longer conversation about what's changing on the Westside, from the small stuff to the market questions underneath it, Smith & Berg Property Group is always glad to talk. Contact us.