by the Great Park Coalition Sustainability Working Group
The Great Park Coalition firmly believes that both park space and housing are essential for a sustainable city. All great cities, large and small, have great parks – including the vision for our beloved Great Park: the capstone of the Santa Monica park system. It is that park space that allows for denser housing while still maintaining the quality of life in the city for all residents. Santa Monica is very fortunate that it has both the opportunity to restore the Great Park at the Santa Monica Airport site and to support sustainable affordable housing at other more appropriate locations throughout the city.
The city’s Land Use and Circulation Element [PDF, 80mb] identifies the ideal locations for new housing along existing transit corridors (along major boulevards and adjacent to light rail stops) and in the downtown area. Building housing, certainly 3000 units, at the airport site that is far from transit corridors and lacks robust infrastructure will be more expensive to build and maintain (due to the need for new water, wastewater, and electrical infrastructure, as well as new roads, parking facilities, and city services).
Building housing at the airport site will generate more traffic and pollution because such housing would not be near existing public transit. That kind of development is not sustainable.
Putting housing and a smaller park at the site would leave the city with housing in a sub-optimal location, and the opportunity for a Great Park, with all of its benefits for this community, would be lost forever.
With only 1.4 acres of parkland and open space per 1000 residents [PDF, 7mb], Santa Monica has among the lowest park acreage offered to city dwellers across the nation. The City of Los Angeles has 8 acres. In fact, the average US city with a similar population to Santa Monica offers almost 11 acres of parks and open space per 1000 residents. Restoring the Great Park at the airport site is the only opportunity Santa Monica will have to approach the county, state, and national recommended park space minimums.
The Great Park is just as essential to achieving a healthy, livable, inclusive, equitable, desirable city as is building housing itself. Providing green, regenerative spaces for all people is critical to environmental justice. Large parks provide equitable access and greater opportunities for recreation and increase social services, education and economic benefits.
Large, contiguous great parks will offer greater benefits for biodiversity, heat island reduction, ecosystem function, and human well-being. Large Great Parks provide larger, uninterrupted habitats that support more species, allow for natural processes like seed dispersal and wildlife movement, and provide ecosystem services, including carbon sequestration and water harvesting/reclamation, as well as cleaning the air and water and mitigating and reducing the impact of climate change. (Those services also save money and could be the basis of creative revenue streams in a circular economy.) By contrast, small, fragmented parks can lead to increased edge effects offsetting benefits, reducing connectivity, and increasing potential loss of biodiversity. Measure LC approved by Santa Monica in 2014 affirms that the entire airport site be used for parks, open spaces and cultural uses.
The most sustainable, forward-thinking option for the Santa Monica Airport site is to create a regenerative Great Park that will provide human and ecosystem health, well-being, equity, and justice. A Great Park will enhance affordable housing that can be constructed more economically and sustainably in established transit corridors and near existing infrastructure; all of the new residents of the city living in that housing will be able to enjoy the benefits of the Great Park at the airport site for decades and generations to come.
Photo by Sathish J, used under Creative Commons license.