Santa Monica’s beauty and vibrancy have long made it a desirable place to live. But behind the palm trees and beachside charm is a City Council that has quietly placed residents in harm’s way. How? By failing to comply with basic safety planning laws and by allowing unchecked development without first asking the most critical question: Can we safely evacuate?
If we can’t get out, we can’t survive.
Just months ago, chaos erupted in the Palisades as tens of thousands of residents scrambled to escape a fast-moving wildfire. Roads were gridlocked. Some fled on foot. Evacuation routes quickly became gridlocked, as they funneled onto Pacific Coast Highway. The routes simply lacked the capacity to move people to safety quickly enough. Cars were abandoned, emergency responders were blocked, and critical aid was delayed. Lives were put at risk.
And yet, despite this harrowing wake-up call just beyond our city’s border, Santa Monica has done nothing to evaluate whether we could safely evacuate our 90,000 residents under similar conditions. This, despite a legal requirement to do so.
Failing to Plan is Planning to Fail: Santa Monica’s Safety Plan Is Anything But Safe
In February 2025, the Santa Monica City Council adopted a revised “Safety Element.” This is a legally required safety plan intended to help guide emergency preparedness and public safety decisions. By law, this document must include an analysis of the city’s evacuation routes and their capacity under a variety of disaster scenarios.
Despite these legal requirements, Santa Monica’s Safety Element contains no such capacity analysis. Zero. Despite acknowledging in its own document that the law requires evacuation capacity to be assessed, the City simply ignored this critical obligation.
For nearly a year, I have repeatedly requested, in writing, to the City staff and each of our current City Councilmembers that they conduct the legally required emergency evacuation route capacity analysis. In addition to my submitted written requests, I’ve spoken during public comment, prepared a video, and raised the issue face-to-face at community events. And yet, despite all these efforts, there has been no progress. No action. No accountability. Just silence, while the risk to residents grows by the day.
RHNA Is Not a Suicide Pact
As the City continues to approve massive new developments, we still don’t know if the tens of thousands of Santa Monica residents, workers, and tourists can safely and timely evacuate in the event of a tsunami, fire, earthquake or other disaster. City Councilmembers are knowingly playing Russian Roulette with our safety.
Some City Councilmembers claim they’re powerless to slow the wave of rapid development because state housing mandates, known as the Regional Housing Needs Assessment (RHNA), require Santa Monica to build thousands of new units, leaving the City with no ability to push back. But that simply isn’t true.
State law codified in Government Code §65584.04(e)(2)(E) explicitly states that emergency evacuation route capacity can be used as a constraint to limit a city’s housing allocations, if the City provides the necessary data.
But Santa Monica has not even tried. It inexplicably prefers to expose its residents to increasing disaster risk while turning a blind eye to its legal requirement to assess the capacity of our emergency evacuation routes. Basic public safety questions are not being asked, let alone answered. With the recent proposal for an 8-story development at 2800 28th Street, one has to ask: are our fire trucks equipped to respond to a building of that height? According to the City’s website, Fire Station 1 has a single ladder truck capable of reaching up to seven stories, not eight.
Instead of making efforts to ensure the safety of its residents, the City Council has passively accepted housing allocations and development projects that could endanger lives. And, up until now, these allocations have excluded consideration of the airport parcels. If the City proceeds with plans to close the airport, they are inviting even more dense, high-rise development.
If the airport is closed, not only does Santa Monica lose a critical emergency response resource, we also forfeit the federal protections that currently safeguard the airport and surrounding areas. These protections include the height limitations outlined in the Airport’s Master Plan. So long as the airport remains operational, proposed developments within the airport’s conical protection zone must undergo an FAA review to assess not only height impacts, but also other potential hazards to aviation such as light reflections, radio frequency interference, disruption to ground-based navigation, and adverse effects on noise contours. The FAA review process is a federal requirement that cannot be bypassed by state housing mandates or City Council.
Closing the airport eliminates these federal oversight mechanisms, opening the floodgates to unchecked development and maximum buildout. The result? Even greater pressure on our already overburdened emergency evacuation routes, putting residents at serious risk when it matters most.
Other Cities Are Acting. Why Isn’t Ours?
Councilmember Traci Park filed a motion on July 30, 2025, instructing city departments to assess and report on evacuation route capacity in her district, the Palisades. She did so in the wake of a real evacuation that turned into a nightmare. Park’s motion calls for simulations, bottleneck mitigation, alternative routes, and funding plans: all the things Santa Monica has stubbornly refused to do.
We should be grateful no disaster has yet exposed our City’s unpreparedness, but relying on luck is not a substitute for responsible planning.
Enough Is Enough
Santa Monica cannot continue greenlighting large-scale development while ignoring its legal obligation to assess whether our evacuation routes have the capacity to timely evacuate residents, workers and visitors. City Council’s dereliction of its duty to prioritize public safety is not just irresponsible, it borders on criminal negligence. Their decisions are compounding public safety risks by approving more buildings and greater density, including along critical transit and evacuation routes, without first conducting the legally required evacuation capacity analysis. Basic and commonsense questions - like whether our fire trucks can reach the upper floors of proposed 8-story developments, don’t appear to be on their radar. The City has absolutely no idea how the population additions and the increasingly constricted transit capacity will hamper evacuation when disaster strikes.
And for those Councilmembers who relentlessly champion bike lanes while densifying the city and ignoring the fundamental reliance on automobility in Los Angeles, it’s time to acknowledge a hard truth: infringing on road capacity while increasing demand on its capacity, without assessing its impact on emergency vehicle access is a safety issue, not a mobility enhancement. We must protect lives, not just promote ideology. That means taking a hard, honest look at whether our streets, infrastructure, and our capacity to timely evacuate can sustain the scale of growth the Councilmembers have done nothing to stop.
This isn’t anti-housing. This is public safety first.
We all want a city that is inclusive, resilient, and thriving. But that vision means nothing if we are not here to see it.
It is time for Santa Monica’s leaders to stop playing politics with our safety. We demand the evacuation capacity analysis that the law requires. We demand real emergency planning. We demand to be protected, not sacrificed, for developer profit.
If you are a resident who shares these concerns, call your Councilmembers. Submit a public comment. Ask questions. Demand answers. Our lives may depend on it.
Eve Lopez
Santa Monica Resident