Flight activity over Mar Vista and East Venice has thrust Santa Monica Airport back into the center of a long-running political fight that stretches well beyond aircraft noise into larger questions about land use, housing, and the future of one of the Westside’s largest publicly controlled sites.

Residents beneath the airport’s flight paths have grown increasingly vocal about training loops from flight schools and rising aircraft activity over residential neighborhoods. Earlier this year, those complaints intensified enough that Councilmember Traci Park joined calls urging Santa Monica officials to evaluate the impacts on communities below. Now a second battle has opened alongside the noise fight. Measure LC Defense, a coalition opposing expanded aviation at the airport, has launched a legal and political campaign challenging the growth of passenger operations, particularly the expansion of JSX service, arguing that commercial aviation activity is expanding without adequate environmental review and that increased operations could complicate the airport’s planned closure.

Santa Monica Airport is scheduled to shut down at the end of 2028 under a settlement agreement between the City of Santa Monica and the Federal Aviation Administration. The planned closure is the product of decades of organizing, litigation, and political conflict. But what happens in the meantime is deeply contested. For airport closure advocates, the concern extends beyond day-to-day quality of life. More flights mean more stakeholders invested in preserving operations, and more commercial activity creates new constituencies resistant to transition.

Underlying all of it is a larger question that has defined Westside politics for years: what should replace the airport when it finally closes? Even among those who support closure, there is significant disagreement. Park advocates argue that one of the Westside’s largest publicly controlled parcels should become expansive green space accessible to future generations. Others contend the housing crisis is too urgent to ignore. Groups like Cloverfield Commons have advanced a vision pairing parkland with workforce housing, pointing to soaring rents and the growing difficulty for teachers, service workers, seniors, and working families to remain on the Westside.

Those disagreements increasingly shape debates about airport land today. One example is a recent fight over the relocation of the Santa Monica Trapeze School to airport-adjacent property near the Mar Vista border. What began as neighborhood concerns about noise, privacy, and parking quickly expanded into a proxy battle over who gets to shape the airport’s future and what uses belong on that land. The controversy also revealed how contested portions of the property already are, years before any redevelopment begins.

The land use debate has also produced unusual tensions within the closure movement itself. Some advocates who would ordinarily support affordable housing privately worry that emphasizing it publicly could fracture the coalition around closure, or give airport preservation advocates an easy opening to stoke fears about density and change. The result is that some housing supporters are staying quiet for now, betting it’s better to close the airport first and fight about what comes next later.