Santa Monica is a lovely place. Every time I visit, I’m impressed by its well-maintained parks, its excellent bike lanes, and, of course, this:

But Santa Monica is also kind of a policy failure. Everyone who moves to LA senses something is weird the first time they take the 10 freeway during morning rush hour and are surprised by the direction of the traffic jam. Why are so many people commuting toward the beach and not toward downtown like every other city?

Over the last 50 years, Santa Monica has evolved from a beachy bedroom community to a center for tech and creative jobs. The city’s top ten employers include Amazon, Snap, Hulu, and Activision (in contrast, the top ten employers in all of LA County are almost all branches of government). There are also tons of working-class jobs in the city’s two large hospitals and big tourist industry. But population growth hasn’t kept up with jobs growth. In 1970, the city’s population was 88,300. Today: 89,900. Even slow-growing LA has added a million people since then.

The result is that Santa Monica has become like the downtown of a medium-sized American city - a place with lots of workers who commute from somewhere else. 92% of Santa Monica’s workers live outside the city, a majority of those commuting from over 10 miles away (all jobs data from the Census Bureau’s amazing OnTheMap tool). Its population nearly doubles during the day, and then everyone goes home to another city at night.

The jobs/population imbalance stems from Santa Monica’s slow-growth movement, which has dominated the housing policy debate for decades. The city has built very little housing in the last few decades - 85% of its homes were built before 1990 - leading many workers to get priced out. The result: a stagnating population, a crushing housing crisis, and a traffic jam on the 10 that goes the wrong direction.

Closing the airport

An amazing opportunity to address Santa Monica’s housing shortage is coming at the end of 2028, when its airport is scheduled to close. The airport sits on 192 acres at the city’s eastern border with LA. 192 acres is the size of a small neighborhood - it’s more than twice the size of Disneyland. You could build a lot of housing there. Unfortunately, Measure LC, the ballot measure the city’s voters passed in 2014 to authorize closing the airport, calls for transforming it into a park. Only a park.

Santa Monica is not a park-poor city. 82% of residents live within a 10-minute walk of its 31 neighborhood parks (in the City of LA, only 62% do). Plus of course it has a beautiful beach and is next door to the Santa Monica Mountains. The neighborhood around the airport is already served by the biggest park in the city - the 19-acre Clover Park. The 192 acres of airport land is more than all of Santa Monica’s other parks combined.

Well, if we are building an enormous park, at least is it in a dense neighborhood full of people who would use it? Nope. Here’s what the streets look like on three sides of the airport: (The fourth side is an office park.)

Hmm…a big empty space in a part of town where few people live…what could possibly go wrong? At a City Council meeting in January, Councilman Jesse Zwick just came out and said it:

One last point about this location. I’m going to become a bit of a broken record on this blog when I say that this is one of the best places to live in the world. But beyond all the advantages of living in the LA Basin, beyond the beach and the mountains, the airport has the distinction of being on the edge of one of the biggest job centers in California.

There are around 400,000 jobs within 3 miles of Santa Monica Airport - more than in Downtown LA. That means people who live here tend to have shorter commutes - less than 15 minutes for almost a quarter of Santa Monica’s commuters. So even though the airport isn’t close to great transit, the people who might live in this neighborhood would likely drive way less than wherever they moved from. That means less traffic and greenhouse gas emissions in the city. And: they get to live in Santa Monica! With amazing weather! And great schools! And the beach!

Luckily, the idea that at least some housing should be built at the airport has been percolating in the 11 years since Measure LC passed, and recently momentum has been building. Last fall, years of organizing by pro-housing groups led to the election of a City Council that is much more interested in getting housing built in the city. Tenant rights advocates and the hotel workers’ union are also getting involved, holding rallies in support of building housing at the airport. These groups are supporting Cloverfield Commons, a proposal to build 3,000 affordable homes on half the airport land.

Another factor pushing the city to take a closer look at housing is the cost of building and maintaining a huge park. The city’s finances are in terrible shape, and there is little chance it will be able to fund much construction of anything, let alone the maintenance of a space that is bigger than all the other parks in the city combined. The current commercial leases at the airport only generate $6-7 million in annual profit, much less than needed. Selling or leasing some of the airport land to developers could generate enough income to bridge the gap.

There’s one more twist in the housing story - state housing mandates. Santa Monica has to submit its next housing plan to the state in 2029, right after the airport closes. In the previous plan, the city upzoned a bunch of existing parts of the city. In the next round, Santa Monica will suddenly own 192 acres of developable land, and it would look strange for the city to just build a park there and once again upzone existing neighborhoods. Instead, the state may force the city to include the former airport in its plan as a site for new homes.

The dual needs for housing and revenue have fostered conversations about a new referendum to amend Measure LC and allow more than just a park at the airport. In January, the newly seated pro-housing City Council instructed the Planning Dept. to come up with three potential design scenarios for the park, only one of which would not require a new referendum. In other words, two of the three scenarios should include uses beyond just a park. Several of the councilmembers specifically called for housing to be included in the scenarios.

The scenarios

The three scenarios were released last month. Before we dive into them, let’s take a look at previous images of the future park that Santa Monicans have seen in the 11 years since Measure LC passed. How has the park loomed in people’s imaginations up to this point? Much as you’d expect - as 192 acres of beautiful nature. Behold:

Now here’s Scenario 1, the “park-only”, Measure LC-compliant one of the three:

Where did all the nature go? While this scenario includes 47 acres of green space (25% of the park), it also features a rec center, tons of sports fields, an amphitheater, six parking lots, and a big reservoir in the center where the runway was. It also keeps the buildings currently at the airport. These elements are there because they would either generate revenue or be paid for (and used) by someone else:

• The reservoir would hold drinking water and would be built by the city’s Water Resources dept. The public would only be allowed to look at it.

• The rec center and sports facilities would be privately built and members-only.

• The amphitheater would be leased for private events and concerts.

• The existing buildings at the airport would be leased to commercial tenants.

• The park would feature 13 acres of paid parking lots to generate revenue.

It’s clear the city’s financial concerns are driving this design. Santa Monica can’t afford to build a nature park. The park needs to include features that are either revenue generating (parking lots) or privatized (rec center). Here’s how Amber Richane from the Planning Dept. described the reservoir at a recent presentation:

The all-nature rendering has turned out to be a fantasy. Most of the park features will have to be non-green and revenue-generating. The question is simply whether those features are going to be housing or something else. The next two scenarios make it clear that housing generates the most revenue by far, which gets us a better park.

Scenario 2 adds some housing and more nature (61 acres). This scenario is the closest we get to a nature park, including “dramatic topographic carving of the site, with multiple hills, valleys, meadows, and a dominant large hill and overlook”. To pay for all this, Scenario 2 includes revenue-generating uses beyond housing, including a 20,000-seat outdoor concert venue. There is still a (smaller) reservoir. Half of the sports fields are private. There is a hotel and a bunch of restaurants. Here the city seems to be saying: you can have more nature, but if you don’t want a ton of housing, the rest of the park has to be commercialized.

Scenario 3 has 50% more housing than Scenario 2, and now we get the full benefits of all that revenue. The rec center and all the sports fields are fully public. So is the 2,000-seat amphitheater. Instead of a reservoir, we get a lake for kayaking and other recreation. And there are still 41 acres of green space. In a sense, Scenario 3 is the simplest. Generate enough revenue from housing, and we don’t need to privatize the park to make it feasible to build. We just get a public park. And of course, that public park gets a bunch of very lucky new neighbors.

Building housing at the airport doesn’t just get us a better and more public park, it gets us a park faster. Because Scenario 1 would generate the least revenue, it would rely heavily on outside sources such as philanthropy or federal grants (salmon in the graph below). That doesn’t include funding Santa Monica could provide through voter-passed bonds (green). Confusingly, the blue in the graph represents free money - the revenue the park would generate - and the graph would make a lot more sense if it was left out.

Scenario 1’s reliance on outside funding would also mean it would take the longest to build in the city’s estimation.

To recap, replacing the Santa Monica airport with both a park and housing gets us:

• A more public park

• A faster-built park

• A better-used park with more eyes on it

• The best chance of getting a park at all

But the best argument for including housing at the airport isn’t that it would make a better park. It would make a better city. A place where the people who work in the hotels at the beach could live without commuting from hours away. A place where school enrollment might stop decreasing. Where the traffic jam on the 10 could lighten up. And where thousands more people would get the chance to live in Santa Monica, paradise on Earth.

Read on for Part 2: a look at the hilarious lengths to which some NIMBYs will go to block housing at the airport.