By Michael Feinstein
It’s extremely rare that any community ever has a legacy opportunity on the scale that Santa Monica does today.
With 190 acres of public land returning to local control after almost 90 years — once Santa Monica Airport (SMO) officially closes on January 1, 2029 — an incredible Great Park can be created there to address our community’s open space and recreation needs — for today and for generations to come.
Santa Monica has long suffered a significant shortage of parks and open space, according to all county, state, and national standards. This is directly experienced by the local sports community, which cannot get sufficient field space; and by the many families who vie for weekend picnic tables and barbecue grills. Fortunately, the large and contiguous SMO parcel would allow Santa Monica to meaningfully address this livability shortage, in a comprehensive, one-time historic manner, and simultaneously enable exceptional park functionality and design.
Indeed, a Great Park on the entire SMO parcel offers the best opportunity to maximize a range of needed community recreational and open spaces. By contrast, reducing the amount of space dedicated to a Great Park would pit such open space uses against each other; and limit our ability to add ecologically-oriented and climate change-responsive elements to our urban environment.
Threat to a Great Park?
In 2014 Santa Monica voters passed Measure LC with 60.45%, placing into the City Charter language to “prohibit new development on Airport land, except for parks, public open spaces and public recreational facilities” unless/until there was a future ballot measure otherwise. After LC passed, most Great Park proponents thought the next challenge would be from a 2026 or 2028 ballot measure, sponsored by the aviation industry, to keep SMO from closing in 2029. Such a measure would play upon fears in the community that the SMO land would be used for new development, instead of a park.
Today, some people advocate paving over and developing half the land. They want to build a large housing project, effectively extending Sunset Park into SMO. Paving over much of SMO would irrevocably and exponentially degrade what the remaining park could accomplish. And, according to Santa Monica’s most basic urban infill planning principles, embraced for decades, SMO is also exactly the wrong place to add major new density.
For a range of social and environmental reasons, Santa Monica has long prioritized adding new housing along our public transit corridors, and in our downtown and former industrial areas.
By contrast, most of SMO is far from public transit, and from pedestrian-oriented neighborhood markets and community-serving retail — making any new housing development there automobile-dependent. The high cost of new streets, utilities, and water and sewer lines would also need to be added to the already high cost of building new housing, including affordable. This compares poorly to the synergies that new infill housing would realize, where such land use and public transit infrastructure already exists.
Planning for today and future generations
Not only are the full 190 SMO acres needed to address today’s acute open space shortage, but also to balance future population growth.
Santa Monica is already adding new housing density — and will continue to do so for decades. Adding more people will mean the need for even more parks - from more playing fields and recreational facilities, to more barbecues and picnic tables, walking and bike paths, trees, community gardens, contemplative open spaces, and cultural facilities.
Ironically, adding density in the wrong place today would shortchange our ability tomorrow, to provide the needed park space to accommodate current density and future population growth. This is especially the case for the 2/3 of Santa Monicans who are apartment dwellers without private open space.
This will be a core social justice and livability issue for generations.
While housing can be built in many places in Santa Monica - and will be over the next hundred years - it will be virtually impossible for another open space of this size to ever be assembled again in Santa Monica (and probably on the whole Westside). That makes this a once-in-centuries opportunity for Santa Monica to achieve a healthy balance between its open space and housing density.
When the City Council next takes up the matter on July 8, the responsible path is to fully evaluate this open space potential, by making an LC-compliant Great Park the preferred option in the City’s Environmental Review process. That way it can be more fully fine-tuned and understood. If later, we want to take from it and do less, we’ll know what we would be giving up. But if we don't do our due diligence to fully study it now, we’ll be choosing to be ignorant of possibilities.
But there is more.
If the Council doesn’t go down an LC-compliant path, we could also lose local control of the land entirely. Read about that real risk next in Part II: “The biggest threat to Santa Monica’s Great Park - saying the quiet part out loud”
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Michael Feinstein is a former Santa Monica Mayor (2000-2002) and City Councilmember (1996-2004). He can be reached via X/Twitter @mikefeinstein.