For thirty years, California planners have sold density as the fix for the state’s housing shortage. In many cities, that sale reflects reality: compact development shortens commutes, supports transit, and takes pressure off infrastructure before a street must be dug up again. Santa Monica is not one of those cities. Not anymore.
The city has been asked the wrong question for a decade. The question has been how many new housing units Santa Monica can approve. It should be: what can our 8.3 square miles reasonably support? Answering that question honestly means looking at housing, livability, the environment, and infrastructure together — not counting units and calling it planning.
The numbers make the case. Santa Monica houses its residents, but it also absorbs a daytime workforce many times that size, a beach that draws millions of visitors a year, a hospital district, a transit hub, and two of the busiest commercial corridors in the county. Within a few square miles, the city supports tens of thousands of jobs alongside hotels, restaurants, entertainment venues, medical facilities, and schools. On any given day, its streets, parks, and public spaces serve far more people than those who live here. This is, in effect, already the work of a much larger city.
Yet Sacramento’s allocation formula (RHNA) counts our jobs, our transit, and our opportunity — and treats each one as a reason to assign us more housing. What the formula never asks is whether a city has any room left to receive it. Proximity to opportunity is measured; physical buildout, water supply, park space, and emergency response capacity are not. Santa Monica already holds more than eleven thousand residents in every square mile — among the densest cities of its size in California — before counting the daily surge of workers and visitors. City leaders across the political spectrum have acknowledged for years that Santa Monica is essentially built out. For confirmation, Mayor Gleam Davis said from the dais a few years ago, “Santa Monica is built out!” Yet unlike communities that pushed back on the state’s mandates, Santa Monica never made that case with a united voice within the City Council chambers when it needed to.
We must speak out as a united community against further density when Sacramento starts to assign the next RHNA allotments in 2028–2029.
Look south for what happens when growth is mandated but never provisioned: Huntington Park, Bell Gardens, Lynwood, Maywood, and Cudahy. None of these communities set out to become overcrowded, and density itself did not fail them. They were failed by the same pattern we are warning against — growth that outran the parks, infrastructure, and services that were supposed to follow it, because nobody ever funded what density requires to work. The result has been decades of strain: overcrowded housing, scarce park space, aging systems, congested streets. Those communities deserved better before. Santa Monica deserves better now.
We do not want that future for Santa Monica, and this is not an argument against housing — least of all the affordable housing California genuinely lacks. Our state needs more homes people can afford, and Santa Monica should build its share. But “share” must mean something more precise than a state quota stamped onto a coastal city with no open ground left to place needed infrastructure. Cities with surface parking lots and half-empty strip malls still have room to grow. Santa Monica does not.
It isn’t radical to say a built-out city should carry a different burden than one still mostly vacant. Many Southern California communities remain far less densely populated, with large areas of underused commercial property, aging shopping centers, oversized parking lots, or vacant land that could absorb new housing with far fewer impacts on existing neighborhoods. In fact, Santa Monica is already one of the densest cities in the state among cities with under 100,000 in population, notwithstanding our stratospheric daily population explosion. Directing more growth toward those places would spread both the benefits and the responsibilities of housing more evenly across the region, rather than concentrating additional growth in cities that are already full.
We propose changing how the city and state measure success. Instead of counting permits issued, the city should track what residents actually experience day to day: whether park acreage and a neighborhood’s real access to it are keeping pace with population or shrinking per capita; whether a family can still find parking within two blocks of home; whether reservoirs and groundwater basins are built to survive the next five-year drought and not just the last one; whether fire, paramedic, and police response times are holding steady; whether streets are becoming safer or more congested; whether trees and open space are increasing or disappearing; and whether a kid can bike to school without fighting worsening traffic. Those are the metrics that reveal whether a city is actually working. A unit count only tells you whether Sacramento is satisfied, which is a different question entirely.
The right approach ties approvals directly to capacity. If the water system needs an upgrade before a project breaks ground, the upgrade gets funded first, not added as an afterthought once problems appear. If a neighborhood’s park space is already thin, density that thins it further wouldn’t be approved without a concrete plan to add space nearby. More broadly, future development would need to be tied to measurable infrastructure and public services. If growth requires larger water mains, new parks, better transit, safer intersections, or expanded emergency services, those improvements should arrive prior to development approval, not years afterward. Development follows infrastructure — that is the principle we believe the city and state abandoned, and the order that must be restored to achieve a responsible tomorrow. We are candid that state law currently ties a council’s hands here — the Housing Accountability Act and its companions forbid much of this common sense at the local level. That is precisely why this fight belongs in Sacramento as well as at City Hall: the law should be changed so that capacity counts.
None of this is an argument against development in general, which has an important place throughout California. It is a rejection of the assumption that every city should absorb the same level of growth regardless of its existing conditions. And Santa Monica’s condition is unique: we are more than a community of and for our residents. We are an environmental relief station for the whole region — for the people who come to the beach seeking relief from the heat of the Valley, the Eastside, and central LA. They do not visit to gawk at dense multi-story towers; they come to put their feet in the cool waters of the Pacific and to feel our unique cultural position in Southern California. The people who built our town understood how much a street could hold before it stopped functioning as a living space our residents needed. Those choices weren’t mistakes waiting to be corrected, but solid planning decisions.
The next council doesn’t have to choose between housing and livability — but it does have to stop treating every proposed development as progress by definition. Progress means growth the city can absorb without overwhelming the community, on a timeline its infrastructure can match. Success shouldn’t be measured by how many more people can fit within the city limits, but by whether future generations inherit a city and its assets as enjoyable, functional, and livable as the one our residents, and the region, have treasured for over a century and a half.
We want smart, balanced, regional growth directed toward the communities with the greatest capacity to accommodate it, while preserving the qualities that make Santa Monica special in the first place.
Phil Brock, Santa Monica Mayor (ret.) for Santa Monica Architects for a Responsible Tomorrow/
Dan Jansenson, Architect (former Building & Fire-Life Safety Commissioner); Robert H. Taylor, Architect AIA; Mario Fonda-Bonardi, Architect AIA (former Planning Commissioner); Sam Tolkin, Architect (former Planning Commissioner); Michael Jolly ARE-CRE; Jack Hillbrand AIA, Architect; Phil Brock (SM Mayor, ret.); Matt Hoefler, Architect NCARB; Charles Andrews, columnist, journalist; Bruce Leddy, Human Services Commissioner & NOMA Co-Chair.
