"Santa Monica Airport will close at the end of 2028, and nothing about this process with JSX Air changes that fact."
City Manager Oliver Chi said that in a city press release last September, addressing questions about whether a new commercial carrier setting up at SMO meant the city was quietly walking back its decade-long push to shut the airport down. His answer was no. But two weeks from now, on September 14, 2026, that same airline adds its fourth destination out of Santa Monica, and the numbers on its growth chart tell a story that runs in the opposite direction from the one the city has been telling.
If you live near the airport, you've probably absorbed the headline version of this story: airport closes in 2028, becomes a park. What's harder to see from the sidewalk is that two separate projects are currently under construction at the same address, on the same 28-month clock, and they can't both be right.
What four acres already looks like
Start with what's real right now. Airport Park, the public green space tucked against the northeast corner of the airfield, is a four-acre plot with a synthetic turf sports field, a playground, picnic tables with barbecue grills, and an off-leash dog park split into large and small dog areas. It's been open for years, it's free, and it's the version of "airport becomes park" that already exists on the ground, not just in a planning document. If you've walked a dog there on a weekend morning, you've already stood in the only piece of this story that isn't still hypothetical.
Everything else, the 192 acres of active runway, hangars, and tie-down space around it, is still airport. That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should, because most of the public conversation this year has been about a park that doesn't exist yet, layered on top of an airport that's currently expanding its flight schedule.
The eight districts already have names
The planning side of this story moved fast in early 2026. After nearly two years of outreach, including 87 public meetings and more than 12,100 online survey responses, the city released a draft Framework Diagram in February 2026 that divides the airport site into eight named districts:
- Immersive Nature, a native-habitat zone on the calmer west side of the property
- Active Sports, a regional athletic hub on the more active east side
- Arts & Culture, built around food, performance, and creative space
- Urban Edge, which reuses existing structures to connect the park into the surrounding neighborhood
- The Stroll, the park's planned entry point near Clover Park
- The Lawn, described as the park's central gathering space
- The Meadow
- The Heart
The framework also folds in the adjacent 17 acres of Clover Park, and it's built on five guiding principles the City Council adopted unanimously in January 2025: Start with Nature, Inspire Wonder, Balance Economics, Amplify Versatility, and Celebrate Place. In March 2026, Los Angeles County kicked in a $499,149 grant to fund design work on the first 20 acres, a meaningful step, but worth sitting with as a fraction: 20 acres funded for design out of a 192-acre site. The framework is a real, detailed plan. It is also, by the city's own admission, still a diagram, not a construction schedule.
But the runway got busier while the park got designed
While that framework was being drafted, the airport itself was doing the opposite of winding down. JSX, a charter-model carrier, launched its first scheduled passenger flights out of SMO on December 19, 2025, with one daily flight to Las Vegas. Within seven weeks that had grown to three daily Vegas flights. A daily nonstop to Scottsdale started January 22, 2026. A seasonal route to Napa launched April 17, 2026. And on September 14, 2026, JSX adds nonstop service to Oakland, running up to three times a day.
That's four destinations added inside of nine months, on an airfield the city has spent a decade trying to close. JSX's lease at Santa Monica runs through November 30, 2028, one month before the airport's legal closure date under the city's 2017 consent decree with the FAA. That's not a coincidence of scheduling. It's a carrier structuring its commitment around the exact edge of the city's authority to say no.
None of this means the closure won't happen. The consent decree is a federal agreement, and the city has been fighting for this outcome since Douglas Aircraft left in 1975. But it does mean the airport isn't behaving like a facility on its way out. It's behaving like a business building ridership for the next two and a half years, and possibly angling to make the case that shutting it down means shutting down something people are actively using.
The loudest meeting of the year had no airport item on the agenda
On May 12, 2026, hundreds of residents packed Santa Monica City Hall for what organizers called one of the largest shows of support the airport has ever drawn, even though no airport item was formally on that night's agenda. More than 200 supporters filled the chambers, many wearing "Keep Santa Monica Airport Open" gear, and 834 letters had already been submitted to the council in the days beforehand.
"Last night, hundreds of Santa Monica residents made it impossible to ignore what we have been saying all along," Ben Marcus, chairman of the aviation advocacy group Spirit of Santa Monica, said afterward.
The Airport2Park Foundation and the Great Park Coalition, the two groups that have spent years pushing for the park outcome, called the pushback an attempt to disrupt a planning process that's already well underway. But the turnout numbers are hard to argue with. Nobody organized 834 letters in a week over a facility that's already settled.
A second disagreement, mostly resolved for now
There's a third layer to this that residents should know about even though it's mostly quiet at the moment. A group called Cloverfield Commons, with Ralph Mechur as one of its spokespeople, had been gathering signatures for a November 2026 ballot measure that would have reserved up to 25 percent of the site, roughly 3,000 units, for income-restricted housing while leaving the rest as parkland. That signature drive failed to gather enough names in time for this November's ballot and is reportedly being retargeted at 2028. Groups pushing for a park-only outcome have argued that housing at the site may not even be legal under Measure LC, the 2014 charter amendment that restricts the land to parks and open space unless voters approve otherwise. For now, the fight over the airport's future is airport versus park, not park versus housing, but that could change again before 2028.
What this actually means if you're walking the dog this fall
Nothing changes at Airport Park itself this year. The four acres, the dog runs, the turf field, all of it stays exactly as it is. What's worth paying attention to is what's happening in the air above and around it. More flights means more scheduled departures overhead than a year ago, not fewer, even as the city's own planning documents describe a 2028 future with no runway at all. The framework diagram you may have seen shared online, with its eight named districts and calming language about immersive nature and gathering lawns, describes a site that currently has an airline actively building out its route map inside it.
Both things are true right now. The park is closer to a real design than it's ever been. The airport is busier than it's been in years. Only one of those trajectories survives past 2028, and which one wins is still genuinely unresolved, not a formality waiting to be finalized.
If you're trying to understand what any of this means for property near the site, or you just want a neighbor who's actually tracking the paperwork instead of the headlines, that's the kind of on-the-ground read Vonsalé Realty Group keeps close watch on for Santa Monica clients. Reach out anytime you want the current state of play, not the two-years-old version of it.
