Most mornings in Sunset Park, a small plane still clears the fence line near the Santa Monica Airport Bike Path while someone below rides past on their way to Clover Park. That plane has less time left than most people think, but the green space everyone's been promised has more waiting to do than the headlines suggest.
Here's the piece that keeps getting flattened into a single sentence: "the airport closes in 2028 and becomes a park." That's true, and it's also two separate stories moving at two very different speeds. One of them is locked. The other one is barely out of the planning stage.
The date that nothing can move
Start with what's actually settled. Under a 2017 consent decree between the City of Santa Monica and the Federal Aviation Administration, the airport's operating days are numbered, and the number is fixed: December 31, 2028. Not a target, not a goal, a legal deadline the city negotiated its way into after decades of litigation.
That date has already survived a real test. When the charter carrier JSX Air explored operating out of Santa Monica, the city moved fast to shut down any idea that a new tenant might buy the airport more time. City Manager Oliver Chi put it plainly: "Santa Monica Airport will close at the end of 2028, and nothing about this process with JSX Air changes that fact." If a commercial operator with a business case couldn't budge the timeline, it's safe to treat the 2028 date as immovable.
What's less settled is what a Sunset Park resident should expect to see on the ground the morning of January 1, 2029.
What "closing" does not mean
The word "closing" tends to make people picture a ribbon-cutting, as if the runway goes quiet on New Year's Eve and a finished park opens the next morning. It also raises a question that comes up constantly in neighborhood conversations: won't a piece of land this size eventually get built out with housing or retail, the way most valuable Westside real estate does?
It won't, and that's worth understanding on its own. Voters settled that question back in 2014 with Measure LC, which prohibits any new development on the airport property except parks, public open space, and public recreational facilities. That single ballot measure is why the current planning process, whatever else changes, isn't a housing debate or a mixed-use debate. The Santa Monica City Council reaffirmed the park-only direction on July 8, 2025, voting to move forward with a plan built around Measure LC's restrictions rather than any alternative use. Whatever gets built here, it's parkland, full stop.
The first 20 acres, out of 192
So if the site is guaranteed to become park and nothing else, the real question is timing, and the timing is where most coverage gets vague.
As of the most recent public update, the conversion effort is sitting in what the Santa Monica Airport Conversion Project calls Phase 3B, meaning the city is still gathering community input and preparing for the formal environmental review required before any construction can start. Earlier this year, planners released a Draft Framework Diagram that divides the 192-acre site into eight interconnected districts. Four have been named publicly so far: Immersive Nature, focused on native habitat and biodiversity; Active Sports, for organized athletic fields; Arts and Culture, built around creative programming and food; and Urban Edge, an adaptive-reuse zone meant to stitch the park back into the surrounding neighborhoods.
Design work has real money behind it, but only for a slice of the property. The city secured a $499,149 grant from the LA County Regional Park and Open Space District, part of a larger $78 million funding round the district issued countywide, specifically to design and document the first 20 acres of the site. Twenty acres out of 192. The grant description covers accessible multi-modal trails, biking paths, fitness equipment, plantings, and interpretive features, which reads like a strong start and also like exactly what it is: the opening chapter of a much longer book.
Meanwhile, the Environmental Impact Report required under the California Environmental Quality Act is still underway, with no completion date attached to it yet. That review has to close before the city can move from drawings to construction. Translation for anyone living two blocks from the fence line: the airport closing on schedule and the park opening on any particular date are not the same promise, and only one of those two things has a date the city can't walk back.
What's already there, no waiting required
None of this means Sunset Park has to sit on its hands until the paperwork clears. Some of what the future park promises already exists in a smaller, working version today.
The Santa Monica Airport Bike Path runs along the edge of the property most residents already use for a low-traffic ride or jog, connecting toward Clover Park and the neighborhood's other pocket green space. It's not going anywhere during the transition, and if anything it's the closest preview available of what a car-free stretch through this part of the Westside can feel like.
A few blocks over in Venice, Penmar Golf Course has quietly become more than a place to work on a short game. The nine-hole course, which has operated since 1962, added a restaurant called The Penmar from chef Oscar Hermosillo, known locally for Cerveteca, Clutch, and Venice Beach Wines. It's a breakfast-through-dinner spot that doesn't require a scorecard, with a Friday evening series called Sunset Sessions bringing live music to the clubhouse lawn starting around 5:30 in the afternoon. It's the kind of low-key neighborhood fixture that tends to get overlooked until someone mentions it, and it sits close enough to make an easy stop on a bike path ride.
If you want to weigh in before the plan locks
Because the environmental review hasn't closed, the district framework isn't final either. The city has been taking the draft plan directly to the people who live closest to it, including a Sustainability and Virginia Avenue Park Board meeting and separate briefings to the Venice and Mar Vista neighborhood councils earlier this year. Public comment has continued through the city's Airport Conversion Project site, which is the most direct channel for residents who want their preferences reflected in how those eight districts actually get built, rather than reading about the outcome after it's locked in. The Santa Monica Great Park Coalition also tracks the planning milestones in more granular detail than the city's own updates, useful if you want to follow the review process without waiting for the next news cycle.
The two clocks, side by side
Put the two timelines next to each other and the shape of the next few years gets clearer. The legal clock stops on December 31, 2028, full stop, confirmed under pressure and unlikely to move again. The construction clock started later, is funded for a fraction of the site, and doesn't yet have an end date because the environmental review it depends on is still open. For a while after the last flight leaves Santa Monica Airport, the most likely scene next door isn't a finished park. It's a very large, very quiet fenced lot, with the transformation arriving acre by acre rather than all at once.
That's not a reason to tune the project out. It's a reason to watch the right calendar. The bike path, Clover Park, and a Friday night at The Penmar are already part of what makes this stretch of the Westside worth living in, long before the rest of the site catches up.
If you've got questions about what's happening in your corner of Santa Monica, or you're just trying to keep up with how this neighborhood keeps changing, Megan Whalen has spent over two decades paying attention to exactly this kind of detail. Let's Connect.
