This article was contributed by Joanne Leslie, Barrie Levy and Vivian Rothstein.
The City of Santa Monica has released the results from Survey 3B for the Santa Monica Airport Conversion Project. This Project is a planning effort to create a scenario and description to include in the Environmental Impact Report for future uses of the city-owned Airport land after it closes in 2028. It has obtained public input via community events and a series of on-line surveys. There will be another survey (#4) in Fall 2026.
The planning team (city staff) will now come up with a Preferred Scenario Framework Plan that illustrates how the future park could be organized. Staff will give presentations to four City Commissions and the City Council during the coming month.
The Cloverfield Commons Coalition team has reviewed the report and has found serious problems with the findings and with the survey itself.
The survey findings are not representative. The response rate was very low (only 1.7% of Santa Monica residents responded). The responses came from a biased sample of older people who have lived a long time in Santa Monica (58% lived in SM more than 7 years, and 2/3 for more than 20 years). Most were over 65 years old. Voices of younger people and newer arrivals to SM were underrepresented. More than half of the responses were incomplete, indicative of how difficult it was to fill out the survey.
The survey questions were difficult to interpret and significantly biased against including housing in planning for this city-owned land.
About ¼ of respondents opposed the general types of proposed uses, and perhaps they would prefer that an area be used for affordable housing. We don’t know because the survey didn’t ask or make room for any responses other than various aspects of a large park. One footnote indicated that there were 224 comments regarding housing, but these “were deleted.” No explanation for a very important issue.
A survey commissioned a year ago by UNITE HERE Local 11 found that when Santa Monica voters were asked directly if they preferred the airport land be used entirely for a park or for a combination of park and housing, 65% preferred some housing. So it seems reasonable to assume that had this survey reached a truly representative sample of Santa Monica voters and asked a similar question, it would also have found that at least half want to see the airport land used for both below-market-rate housing and parks and recreation. Furthermore, it seems reasonable to imagine that if there were a ballot measure to modify LC to allow housing on a portion of the airport land, it would have a good chance of passing.
It seems clear that the survey was narrowly focused to come up with predetermined features of a large park and recreation area, and that support for below-market-rate housing was dismissed without explanation.