Walk the loop around Clover Park on any weekday evening and you'll see the same scene that's played out for decades. Someone's dog runs loose in the open field locals call the pit. A Little League team takes infield practice. And every few minutes, a small plane lifts off the runway just past the fence line, banks west, and disappears over the Pacific. For most of the people watching, that plane is background noise, the kind you stop hearing after a few years in Ocean Park or Sunset Park. But 2026 is the year that background noise finally got a shape, a name, and a district map.
The Santa Monica Airport Conversion Project, or SMACP, released its first real Framework Diagram this year, organizing the roughly 192-acre site into eight named districts. That's the biggest concrete step this project has taken since the city's 2017 consent decree with the FAA locked in a closure date of December 31, 2028. The plan is still years from a shovel in the ground. But for the first time, residents aren't voting on a concept. They're looking at an actual diagram of what goes where.
Eight Districts, Two Very Different Moods
City planners describe a clear split in the diagram: a calmer, quieter character on the west side of the site and a more active, regional character on the east, a distinction that shapes every district that follows.
Here's how the framework breaks down, in plain terms:
| District | What it's for |
|---|---|
| Immersive Nature | Native habitat and biodiversity on the west side, the quietest corner of the plan |
| Active Sports | Fields, courts, an aquatics center, and skate facilities on the east side |
| Arts & Culture | Galleries, a food hall, artist studios, and event space |
| Urban Edge | Adaptive reuse of existing structures along the north edge, tying the park into surrounding streets |
| The Stroll | A green gateway into the park from the Clover Park side |
| The Lawn | A flexible central lawn for movies, markets, and gatherings |
| The Meadow | A smaller, neighborhood-scale space with adventure play |
| The Heart | A civic core with a recreation center, a food hall, and a non-aviation transit hub |
The consultant leading the design work is Sasaki, a planning and design firm the city brought on to run the process. Neil Carrey, president of the Santa Monica Airport2Park Foundation, called the result "eight parks in one," which is a fair way to describe a plan that tries to give both a nature-focused west end and a program-heavy east end without either side crowding the other out.
None of this is final. City materials are explicit that the Framework Diagram is meant to build agreement on what belongs where before the next phase gets into real design and cost numbers. And one of those eight districts, Urban Edge, is about to become the most argued-over line on the entire map.
What Actually Happened This Year
If you've only half-followed this project, here's the run of events that got the diagram to your inbox or your neighborhood council agenda:
- January 2026 — Three residents, including Ralph Mechur of the Santa Monica for Renters' Rights Housing Committee, filed language for a November ballot measure that would carve housing into the airport site.
- February 2026 — City boards, including the Arts Commission and the Airport Commission, began reviewing the draft Framework Diagram in public meetings.
- March 2026 — The city formally released the diagram to residents, building on nearly two years of outreach that included 87 public meetings, 20 small group sessions with more than 370 participants, and over 12,100 survey responses.
- April 2026 — Neighborhood councils, including Venice and Mar Vista, took up the framework at their regular meetings, the online survey window closed on the 26th, and SMRR sent a letter to the council on the 22nd naming a specific target for housing inside the plan.
- May 2026 — Aviation advocates packed a City Council meeting on the 12th with an overflow crowd and 834 letters, pushing the opposite direction: keep the airport open.
- June 2026 — The state awarded the project a $10 million Proposition 4 Climate Bond grant, announced by Senator Ben Allen's office and confirmed by the city, money that's meant to fund feasibility work and environmental review rather than construction.
Mayor Caroline Torosis called the grant a meaningful step toward what the city has envisioned for the land for years. That's true, and also a useful reminder of scale: $10 million on a 192-acre site buys planning and paperwork, not park benches. The bigger financing question, how a project this size actually gets built, is still open.
The Fight Over the Quietest District on the Map
Here's the part the district names don't tell you. Every use in that eight-district plan, from the aquatics center to the food hall, has to fit inside Measure LC, the 2014 measure that bars new development on the closed airport land unless voters approve otherwise. The City Council's direction from July 2025 was explicit: no use that would require a new vote gets considered in this framework. That's why housing is nowhere on the diagram, even though it is very much on the ballot.
The measure filed that January would let voters override the restriction directly. As written, it would keep 75 percent of the airport site as park and set aside the remaining 25 percent, up to 3,000 units, for housing priced for lower and moderate incomes. Santa Monica is currently required to plan for about 6,100 units of affordable housing by 2029 under the state's housing mandate, and Mechur has argued the airport site is one of the only places in the city with room to make a dent in that number, telling LAist, "here's an opportunity to build up to 3,000 units in one time period."
By April, the campaign got specific about location. In an April 22 letter to the council, SMRR co-chairs Denny Zane and Mike Soloff pointed straight at Urban Edge, the roughly 30-acre district along the north side of the site that the Framework Diagram had already earmarked for a library, a senior center, and adaptive reuse of existing buildings. Their argument was that Urban Edge sits closest to the 385-unit market-rate project Boston Properties has planned nearby at 28th Street and Ocean Park Boulevard, making it the natural spot for housing that would otherwise be priced out of the neighborhood. The Santa Monica Airport2Park Foundation and Great Park Coalition pushed back hard, calling the request premature and arguing housing there may not survive a legal challenge under Measure LC.
A third faction wants none of this. Spirit of Santa Monica, an aviation advocacy group, packed a City Council meeting on May 12 with what organizers called the largest show of support for keeping the airport open to date, backed by 834 letters submitted in the days before. Chairman Ben Marcus told the crowd, "once you remove Santa Monica Airport, you can't get it back." The group points to a fall 2025 poll showing 67 percent of surveyed voters wanted to keep the airport running, not converted at all.
So the framework you're reading has already picked a side on housing (leave it out) while three separate constituencies argue that decision isn't final. If the SMRR-backed measure gathers enough signatures, Santa Monica voters could decide the fate of the Urban Edge district on the same November ballot where they're voting for everything else this year.
What's Already There While the Clock Runs
None of this changes daily life on the ground yet. The airport keeps operating under the terms of the 2017 consent decree, and that includes real, current noise rules. Arrivals are allowed around the clock, but pilots are asked to avoid operations between 11 p.m. and 7 a.m. on weekdays, and until 8 a.m. on weekends, a detail that matters if you live close enough to hear the difference.
That current-use question got tested last fall when JSX Air, a charter operator, applied for a limited-term permit to operate out of the airport. The Airport Commission recommended the city study the proposal further before signing off. City Manager Oliver Chi reaffirmed in September 2025 that the 2028 closure date isn't up for renegotiation no matter how the JSX lease shakes out. If approved, that lease would run out in November 2028, a month ahead of the airport's own closure.
In the meantime, the park-adjacent life that already exists keeps functioning normally. Clover Park's 17.9 acres at 2600 Ocean Park Blvd still host soccer, tennis, and BBQ pits on weekends. Airport Park's 8.3 acres on the southeast corner still give dogs an off-leash spot with a synthetic turf field. And Barker Hangar, the 35,000-square-foot events space on the property, still books its calendar independent of what happens to the runway around it.
The Honest Read
The map is real now, and it's more detailed than anything this project has produced in its two-year public process. But a framework that leaves out housing, faces a ballot measure to add it back in, and still has an aviation lobby arguing to keep the runway open at all isn't a finished plan. It's the current snapshot of an argument still being had in public. The eight districts tell you what the city and the people who showed up to its meetings want this land to feel like. They don't tell you what a November ballot measure could undo, what it will cost to build any of it, or whether the 2028 closure holds if enough voters decide otherwise. For now, the honest answer to "what's happening at the airport" is: a genuinely detailed plan, a housing measure aimed at one specific district inside it, and a pilot lobby that would rather none of it happen at all.
If you're the kind of resident who tracks this stuff because the noise, the traffic patterns, or the future of that land actually affects your block, Team Sorrentino keeps an eye on how projects like this tend to move through City Hall and what they mean for the neighborhoods around them. If you want a longer conversation about what any of this could mean for your part of Santa Monica down the line, book an appointment and we'll walk through it.
