Robert Redford Hates Santa Monica: 'This Was A Beautiful City Once'

He grew up there and his office is there, but he hates the place. Robert Redford hates Santa Monica, Calif.

Why the disdain for the beautiful Southern California beachside town that most people would kill to live in?

"I get itchy — traffic, freeways, out-of-control development," he recently said to Esquire magazine. "There was never a land-use plan. This was a beautiful city once, and it isn't anymore."

"I'm never here more than two, three days at a crack," he said, as Esquire interviewed him from his Wildwood Enterprises office in SaMo.

Adding insult to injury, he said in an Esquire ad video, "I love New York City."

Santa Monica actually does have a land use plan. As Patch points out, "It's called the Land Use and Circulation Element, and it was adopted in the summer of 2010, and city officials are in the midst of adopting new planning guides specifically for the Bergamot Station Arts Center area and downtown."

"Since the plan was adopted, however, there have been a record number of development requests, mostly to build mixed-use residential and commercial projects in downtown, along Lincoln Boulevard and near the future Expo Light Rail line," Patch reports.

Redford, whose face is on Esquire's April 2013 cover, was born in Santa Monica and even used to be a newspaper delivery boy for the Santa Monica Independent. The legendary actor, who is also an environmentalist and blogger for HuffPost, told the magazine that he gets lost riding horses for hours a day on the ranch he now lives on in Utah.