August 13, 2026
Drive down Airport Avenue on any weekday afternoon and you will likely hear a single-engine Cessna on approach before you see it. Head toward Bundy Drive and the chain-link fence line still runs for blocks, the same fence that has separated most residents from those 192 acres for as long as anyone can remember. The assumption most people carry is simple: nothing happens here until the airport closes at the end of 2028, and then, eventually, a park appears.
That assumption is off by about a decade. A piece of this land has already been open to the public since 2017, years before anyone drew a single district line for the park everyone talks about. Meanwhile, the more ambitious version of the plan, an eight-district framework backed by a fresh $10 million state grant, is being drawn in remarkable detail for the rest of a site the city still cannot legally touch. Knowing which is which changes how you use this corner of Santa Monica right now.
The most overlooked fact about this site is that the city already handed a piece of it back to residents, more than a decade before any closure date existed on paper. A 1984 agreement with the FAA expired in 2015, returning a 12-acre parcel to city control, and in September 2017 the Airport2Park Foundation announced that six acres of that land, a former aircraft parking lot, had opened as an Interim Open Space, available from sunrise to sunset for walking, jogging, biking, and informal recreation. Under Measure LC, the 2014 measure that passed with more than 60 percent voter support, that land can only be used for parks and open space going forward.
A fuller 12-acre buildout next to that interim space, designed by the firm RCH Studios (now operating as RIOS) with new sports fields, a jogging track, a community garden, and an elevated berm for watching takeoffs and landings, was still working its way through city review as recently as 2020. Whatever its current construction status, the six-acre interim space next door has already been usable for most of a decade, a fact that tends to get lost in coverage focused on the still-unbuilt Great Park.
That is not the only thing already running on airport land.
None of this requires a ballot measure or a 2028 deadline. It is already part of daily life for anyone who bothers to look past the fence.
The contrast is what makes this interesting. While the small stuff has been operating for years, the ambitious version of the Great Park is being engineered down to individual district names for land that will not be legally available until midnight on December 31, 2028, the closure date set by a 2017 consent decree between the city and the Federal Aviation Administration.
The city's planning consultant, Sasaki Associates, released a draft Framework Diagram in February and March 2026 that organizes the roughly 192-acre site into eight interconnected districts. At least seven have working names: Active Sports, Arts & Culture, Urban Edge, Immersive Nature, The Meadow, The Lawn, and The Heart. Active Sports is pegged for multi-use fields, aquatics, and pickleball courts. Arts & Culture is built around galleries, community theater, and a small-business incubator concept. The Lawn is described in city materials as Santa Monica's shared living room, meant for flexible plazas, outdoor movie screenings, and sculpture walk elements.
This framework did not appear out of nowhere. On July 8, 2025, the City Council voted to pursue a park-only plan consistent with Measure LC, setting aside earlier scenarios that had floated housing or commercial development on part of the site. That vote is the reason the current Framework Diagram has no housing district drawn into it at all.
You will also see the site's size cited inconsistently depending on the source. The city's own project pages and the recent state grant announcement put it at 192 acres. National coverage has cited 227. Even the people running this process haven't fully agreed on where the exact edges fall, which tells you something about how early-stage this still is.
Phase 4 of the planning process, which develops the Framework Diagram into a fuller Framework Plan with phasing and rough cost estimates, was expected to run through summer 2026, which means that work is happening right now as you read this. The project also picked up momentum in June, when the Santa Monica Airport Conversion Project won a $10 million Proposition 4 Climate Bond grant from the state, with Mayor Caroline Torosis calling the conversion "a once-in-a-generation opportunity to create something lasting."
Here is the part the polished district diagrams don't show: a council vote in 2025 did not end the argument over what happens on that land in 2029.
On May 12, 2026, hundreds of residents packed Santa Monica City Hall in what organizers called one of the largest shows of support yet for keeping the airport at least partially operational past 2028. Roughly 200 supporters wearing "Keep Santa Monica Airport Open" caps filled the chambers, backed by 834 written letters urging the council to reconsider. Speakers cited FM3 Research polling showing that 67 percent of voters favored keeping part of the airport open with added community benefits, versus 25 percent who backed full closure, a nearly identical split to a separate poll commissioned by Spirit of Santa Monica around the same time.
Housing advocates have their own version of this fight. Under current state-mandated goals, Santa Monica must plan for about 6,100 units of affordable housing by 2029, and a campaign pushed to place a measure on the November 2026 ballot that would carve out part of the airport land for housing. According to LAist's reporting, that campaign fell short of the 7,038 signatures needed and is now aiming for the 2028 ballot instead, timing the housing question to land in the same window as the airport's actual closure.
Meanwhile the Santa Monica Great Park Coalition, the advocacy group pushing to keep the entire site as parkland under Measure LC, added the Sierra Club to its ranks in June, bringing its alliance to more than 85 groups and 1,100 individual supporters. Coalition president John Fairweather has described the milestone as underscoring the importance of preserving the full 192 acres for park use.
The takeaway isn't that the Great Park is a mirage. It's that the timeline has two speeds running at once. The design and advocacy work is moving fast, with new funding, new coalition partners, and increasingly specific district plans arriving almost monthly. The legal and political reality underneath it is moving on a much slower, more contested clock, one that won't fully resolve until the closure date itself arrives and the housing question comes back for another vote.
If you live in the neighborhood, that means two different things to pay attention to. Short term, there's a real, current reason to walk the interim open space and existing Airport Park, check the studio schedule at the Airport Arts Center, or see what's booked at Barker Hangar this season. Longer term, the shape of the actual Great Park, and whether any of that 192 acres ends up zoned for housing instead, is still being negotiated in city council chambers and at the ballot box, not finalized in a rendering.
We track land-use stories like this one closely because they shape what living in Santa Monica looks like a decade out, not just what a listing photo looks like today. If you're weighing a move in this neighborhood, or wondering how a project like the airport conversion might affect a property you already own, Team Pinckert can walk you through what we're watching and what it might mean for you.
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